Unbeknownst As A Cancer
We were drunk. That'll be the excuse. That'll be what we tell ourselves tomorrow. Tell ourselves but not each other - we'll never speak of this again. The second close encounter, the third time of asking, it's practically tangible now. How many more times can we do this? The question has me in its sights, red dots hovering around my head and my heart, ready to pepper me with bullets where I stand. How often can we do this before we have to fucking face it. Something happened here. There's something between us. When do we stop acting on it and acknowledge it?
Hands and lips and fingertips, quick soft slow, tempting and tempted, resistance and other futilities. This is the flashpoint. This is a different universe. Here it can happen, it can and is with no need for justification. This is how we feel, everything else is just a pretence, everything else is polite conversation, an imitation of the truth. Every single word I say to you as the sun stares down and the crowd blink sober in the daylight is my way of caging this. So conspicuous, our baby elephant, so quietly sitting there, leaving us to it. So barely able to bite my lip, even by text (our only other communication), so difficult to edit out the bit where I blurt it all out, all over the so silent so often. Our platitudes, our open channel of communication, a sustenance by itself, makes my every fibre want to scream. This time I almost don't stop before the line that pins my sails to the mast. The line that grabs you by the shoulders and looks you in the eye and cuts through everything else, to the quick. I almost don't stick to the nice safe subjects. Almost.
I do though. You do too?
I wanted it to be you, you tell me, in coy tones as a prelude to the act. We were drunk, right? The next day, up and out of bed at eight in the morning, bright and alert to the new dangers of recession hit Binge Britain and knifecrime, I'll text you to say, groo, I'm so hung over, I may never escape this quilt. You'll text me at eleven to say you've only just woken up. We lay the seeds of a denial we know we'll never be asked for. So. Last night. Did it mean anything? Will it happen again?
Instead, last night remains an unanswered question. A frustrating, swirling ambush of indecision and paralysis. A moment we share that only exists as an action, unobservable. A cat, alive and dead, in a box, in a messy, quantum universe. A sin of the past bound to be repeated. At least, I can only hope so.
Hands and lips and fingertips, quick soft slow, tempting and tempted, resistance and other futilities. This is the flashpoint. This is a different universe. Here it can happen, it can and is with no need for justification. This is how we feel, everything else is just a pretence, everything else is polite conversation, an imitation of the truth. Every single word I say to you as the sun stares down and the crowd blink sober in the daylight is my way of caging this. So conspicuous, our baby elephant, so quietly sitting there, leaving us to it. So barely able to bite my lip, even by text (our only other communication), so difficult to edit out the bit where I blurt it all out, all over the so silent so often. Our platitudes, our open channel of communication, a sustenance by itself, makes my every fibre want to scream. This time I almost don't stop before the line that pins my sails to the mast. The line that grabs you by the shoulders and looks you in the eye and cuts through everything else, to the quick. I almost don't stick to the nice safe subjects. Almost.
I do though. You do too?
I wanted it to be you, you tell me, in coy tones as a prelude to the act. We were drunk, right? The next day, up and out of bed at eight in the morning, bright and alert to the new dangers of recession hit Binge Britain and knifecrime, I'll text you to say, groo, I'm so hung over, I may never escape this quilt. You'll text me at eleven to say you've only just woken up. We lay the seeds of a denial we know we'll never be asked for. So. Last night. Did it mean anything? Will it happen again?
Instead, last night remains an unanswered question. A frustrating, swirling ambush of indecision and paralysis. A moment we share that only exists as an action, unobservable. A cat, alive and dead, in a box, in a messy, quantum universe. A sin of the past bound to be repeated. At least, I can only hope so.