MISSED YOU SO

So often on that phone line trying to touch fingers through the glass. There is that bitter-sweetness that we inspire in the other. One of them said to me, “you don’t think about burgers in the trenches” there is no room for that desire. Somehow, it seems more people than not, are in the trenches more often than not.  This intimacy I request - a luxury sensation.  It’s almost better to avoid it altogether.

But, this morning I message you to ask if you want to Facetime. And you tease me to not judge you, that you are still in bed with morning face.  And the window of the screen opens and you are there and there is your chest and a tattoo, a single line written.  I ask what it is and you say you’ll show me should we ever meet, both knowing that is not even a question.

I notice your sheets, a taupe linen, and the white walls, and your skin black with the curls of hair on your chest, and the way that you keep rubbing your shoulder or your chest. The way the hand unconsciously goes to soothe a muscle that has been worked.  And there is light and warmth against a backdrop of Brooklyn February rain.

(I will speak beyond the wall of appropriateness and say to you that it sounds strange but “I don’t even know you but I feel like I’ve missed you” and you will say “that does not sound strange at all”)

I, in my house, whites and creams everywhere and the same rain outside my window pushing me deeper into my bed.  Deeper, each of us, into our respective beds.  Like we’ve run under the same emotional awning at the same time, glimpsed the other with the momentary warmth of two strangers in the cold. At first, not expecting this moment to be any different. Not expecting the other to be any different. Not expecting that under here with the just anybody of everyday, to have the everyday lifted. Her in her Ann Taylor skirt that can be worn in four different ways from day to evening. He with everything about him, including the stiff low maintenance shirt, suggesting a man just getting through. But something about you breaks through, like a waylaid a dream or something that shatters the "anybody of everyday" veneer. 

Then, us talking about the Tim McGraw and Nelly song, “round and round" and you say that there is something great about people from totally different worlds meeting together to describe the universal, the heartbreak that runs through each of us. 

And we talk about love, theoretically of course, and how the key is always to love again.  How you wish that you were like the other guys who could dispose of their feelings, that it didn’t cut so deep.  But, you’re not, so you have no choice.  But, to love again.

And that tractor beam begins to form between us, the one that locks onto each of us. And that sense of bouncing around in a separate world dispels.  We are each steadied.  And from it this presence that unites puts us into a place that is here and now beyond the thirty-seven-minute subway ride.  Distance does not exist. This is only us, and only this.  We watch the other come into focus. We share in the awe that it is here.  We go quiet even in our bones, until the grip of life releases us, and we are dropped in from the hyperconnected - into the connected, that occurs in bodies we otherwise hover over.

We become the other’s ballast.

It’s not a shyness that comes off our faces, but a newness.  An awkwardness of operating these mouths and foreheads from inside.  Until your mouth moves, and you ask if you could come and sit with me, “in flesh” is implied.

Yes - given.  Address - texted.

Until you are here. In flesh. In camel cashmere winter coat, black hat and a height that is worn to my internal softness like an officer’s badge, promising to protect. Not a word, and I am in your arms. Chest to chest, belly to belly, groin to groin.  Holding steady, allowing the synch up that will steady each, to occur.  You are no longer coming in from the outside, and I am no longer dispersed wide in the warmth.  This has found itself.

My Jewish scholar taught me the word Hineni which means “Here I am” When god called out to Moses from the burning bush, Moses replied “Hineni”.  And was given an assignment unimaginable.  It is the promise that you are prepared to give yourself over entirely. Beyond rational thought. Beyond self-preservation.   But it is also both heard and spoken beyond the rational, it cannot be manufactured.

This is what our bodies say in that moment.

Until I am on my back and you are looking to remove the articles I’ve worn, to appease the man who lives in the world of appearances. So that when they lose track of the feeling (and “they always do,” says the mind that forgets to love again) he will have a visual guide back to where his attention is supposed to be.  I’ve learned to hack the biology of a man, to offer the props that would help him to stay here, with me.

But you are, at best, irritated by anything that would come between us. That, because you can see, this “visual aid” occurs as an impediment.

“How do you get these things off?”  the urgency comes from your mouth, and breaks through a persona oft worn into these rooms. Until I am pulling them down and off for you, and a relief washes over your face as your hands begin to brush over my skin. Until you reach for my bra and remove it.  Until, as you remove all of it, I am there in a naked that has little to do with the body.  But then a pinch of a self-conscious moment that returns me to the consensus world - where judgement and shame hold the two poles of existence. The thoughts that circulate between the poles rushes forward. The curve of my belly, the red scar beneath my breast, the lines beneath my eyes. All attention magnetized to those spots, until there is only this constriction. And the beating of an attention. Now, locked in against closed doors. A panic sets in.

Your eyes, neither warm nor cold, break in. Cut the lines, the grooves between my attention and what is has judged. Until, like a flap of wings it liberates and again flies at once into the room.  You don’t try to fix or soothe it, or recoil; that you merely continue, because we are headed far beyond this, no need to stop here for long. Long enough to open that cage, and continue.

And with that, words, and thoughts, and feelings also locked in that cage liberate.  I can hear the thousands of unspoken I love you’s, and I need you’s, and I want you’s, that had been magnetized to this fear.

The artifice I have learned to wear, the “not too much,” “the unsoaring,” or “a heart break’s loose.”  No longer measuring like a chemist the precise amount that he can take, without the love I give turning to resentment or hatred.  No longer calculating the precise words that can convey a heart-in-a-perpetual-flood-state to a world that fears water.  These gates open.  Not for you per se.  That would imply that it could be controlled. But this that is always determining “what” and “how much” and “for how long” the other can take it has been informed that “there is no limit here.” “Let it flow” the internal security guard yells down into the factory. All of the workers look around at each other in disbelief, but… do as they are told.

(You will later text me to say “…and you have such power”.  I will want to respond that is because you could allow it.)

So beautiful the scene, white and white and white, bed and primitive bench and table. My body naked, and your hands black floating across it as you stand on your knees. With nag champa filling my senses and these emotions flying through the room like doves. And everything is marked by this flight, this freedom, this space for all things to move as they would in their natural habitat, outside of the confines of the mind.

We will be a certain nakedness, on a large bed in seamless motion.  And I will say those things to you. And they will take flight from my mouth without looking back to see how they landed.  They do not need that.  I will be telling you that I want you and that will mean something very specific and taboo. It will mean that I am abandoning a self-sufficiency, a cactus like existence that has agreed to survive on very little. I will ask you to use my mouth, to use all of me for your pleasure, whenever and however the impulse should strike.  I will be asking to become a receptacle for your pleasures.

And this will mean that I am asking to be restored to my rightful position as woman, that I am now wealthy enough in self that I can afford to let go of the outward proving, my feminist no, my good girl no, my fear of being used, my heartbroken no, all flushed down and away until there is what I am as a woman. Space and reception that wants only to be filled with you.

And yes, with this you are above me. In my mouth. My tongue and mouth are creatures of the ocean, wet and spongy, and licking, and moving across, and taking all of what I can from the texture of your balls, crepey then ridged to your undercock that moves from your genitals to your asshole like a line from your manhood to your soul. I have no bones, no teeth. Nothing but this wet sloppy softness with nothing to resist you.  Taking in and drawing in. A Sunday church revival in my heart, and the things that you go to church to be forgiven for in my pussy.

Until now you, still on your knees have placed me on my back in front of you, my legs on either side, and you are simply brushing my legs. The lighting is shifting to become an old Kodak negative or the silver of the old duguerreotypes.  Everything in outlines with light, and your fingers are feathers, huge seagull white feathers brushing the light over my legs until it is too much, until the dense matter of this world can no longer withstand and my body shudders a breath and it is now convulsing.  It shivers and convulses with each brush as you begin now to move over my belly and chest, watching my eyes. Watching my eyes that are a neon sign of yes. 

And suddenly I feel like this is the one that I know and my diaphragm drops at how deeply I have missed you. I reach for and hold your leg.  My hand feels tiny as I grip and release and grip and release with each convulsion, until the rest of my body is a flag in the wind.  Until everything that has been locked in that missing, the missing that is like the thought of a “burger in the trenches”, the missing that cannot be admitted because the possibility is real that you will never make it back, comes through.

And this is that.  This is the video of the soldier coming home, and the dog nearly knocking him over with the force of love and anticipation.  The child momentarily lost, glimpsing her mother knelt down arms open and the rush for her. This is the woman on the platform seeing her man exit the doors and with no concern for her heels, the running that happens of its own accord.

This is everything flooding and rushing forward.

This is the key turning on the door of remembering to love again.

This is that first bite after so long deliberately ignoring the hunger for it.

Until you are lying on your back, and I am lying on that chest I saw for the first time only hours ago. And I am tracing the line of the tattoo asking you what it means and you say “Ab initio crede quod habes te habes” (In the beginning believe you have it and you have)