Another midnight
Another crisis
Calling in the banners
For a battle half-lost
Mobilising the chess pieces
Black on white
Heart hammering
Sword raised
Tears into tea
A cry for help
Or a gunshot unheard?
I step into the rain
And listen
Your Time Was Now
What’s the worst that can happen? He asks, smugly assured of his privilege. He doesn’t worry about meeting strangers off the Internet, especially if they’re cute little red heads who politely reply to his increasingly persistent messages.
What’s the worst that can happen? It’s the slogan for my favourite commercial soft drink. A university summer spent collecting can after can of it as we hit deadlines and won a variety of useless, amusing, prizes from the codes on the labels.
Adoration Made Flesh
“You’re not giving me much to go on, ” you laugh, mid performance. I hear the implication, one actor to another. The search for a cue, the give and take of improvisation.
Theatre is forever more than just learning the lines…
Saccharine Bliss
His breaths are heavy, almost ragged with the scent of my skin. My hands are entwined in the long fall of his hair as his rests his forehead on mine, wholly of the moment, his lashes brushing my cheek like the fluttering of my pulse.
My breath answers him, a short pant of air that gusts lightly over his ivory skin, as his hands reach down the length of us firmly and without haste, wandering over me as if to read the Braille of my body.
His hands sink into the smooth pillowy pull of my buttocks with a groan and he pauses to tip his head back and snarl lightly at me, a vision of unhurried lust even as his fingers curl with possession against the soft flesh.
The Gesture
A reply was owed, and a read count has now been given and your silent audience shall continue the prose in more detail…
Yes. I have keys to your flat.
The key is a gesture. Trust with your carefully created space, naturally. An invitation to throw aside social convention and just run our course, certainly. It is the glass raised in toast to the world, a salute to chaos, a performance all of its own. But its also a physical gesture, a cape swept aside and a grand bow through an opening door, a wry nod to an endless intricate game, an invitation and a promise. It is another home. A home of your making where a still, quiet, space is offered to me without question.
The Squee Before The Water
The best way to describe it, is a curling up.
A drawing in.
A careful assembly of walls.
Its starts as my mortality creeps in. As my spark begins to fade and the knowledge of the coming days settles on me. I feel myself begin to slide, withdrawing tendrils of affection, becoming quieter, stiller.
It begins as I realise I have, once more, been running full tilt towards the edge of the chasm and the edge is now sprinkling the dust of my movements into the abyss.
Theatre Realised
It took me by surprise, the play.
I joined because I was nudged. That is the truth of it. I joined because at the end of the day the play didn’t matter to me but you, suddenly and inexplicably did.
I rode the rehearsal process without a care. I winged the audition, having only actually read through my speech a handful of times, instead of memorising it like I normally do. I didn’t bother reading the script before the read-through. I didn’t bother learning lines, just relied on my absorption skills. I forced myself, casually and effortlessly, not to care, to see it as an exercise, a bit of fun, a one off. I didn’t arrive early, I didn’t stay later. I made no real effort to socialise, reverting to old habits of quiet observation and gentle lurking. I did just enough not to fail.
Incapable
He asked me what he did that was so wrong. He asked me what he did that made me drop him like a hot coal after weeks of messaging back and forth. He asked me why I turned so cold after I was so warm when we met. He asked me in a single badly phrased and under-thought sentence, pretending he was someone else, playing a game I had seen through months before.
I wrote him a long message. I detailed all the things he did that I had disliked, the clinging, the incessant unending messages, the pawing desperation, the limp pseudo-helpless whining, the misdirection, the objectification, the manipulation and now the lying. The list was long, his intrusion into my life a twisted catalogue of ridiculous sock accounts and 3am text messages a year after the fact.
I read it back. I edited. Then I deleted the whole thing.
There, contained within everything I wanted to say and everything I wanted to let him know, was a single sentence. A few simple words said more than I needed to.
Knowing you, not knowing you
I’ve known you for a year. That is the plain fact of it, although we saw each other infrequently I have, in fact, shared a year in your life before all of this.
In that time I learned things about you, that you had good taste in lampshades or that you were always early to things.
But not this. Not this spiraling chasm. I sensed your depth in our hundred and one everyday conversations but not this.
When I met the boy he was someone I knew, instantly. Meeting him was simply catching up on what we had missed, a piece that sits as easily as I do in my skin. A soul I had met before, part of me. I knew him – perfectly recognisable and comfortable as mine.
This? This is uncomfortable. This is a vast colliding of souls travelling at speed and the impact has me spiraling. Fascinating, wonderful and terrifying. This is not getting to know you, this is not quiet days out and smiling over tables. This is a bladed dance, a flashing keening of edges, a feather’s whisper among skin, just waiting to draw blood.
The sheer marvel of it is enough to dazzle.
Snarled
I can write this freely here because you never did read my writing. You tried at first, all those years ago. You read my favourite books and I wrote you stories and you even wrote me poetry back. But words have always been a struggle for you and I respect that, even as I find pure unadulterated joy in the new writer ghosting my life.
Since we split things have been, for want of a better word, messy. The split itself was probably about as tumultus as our blow ups have ever been. In a way it was a fitting end. I never wanted us to deflate, it was better as one last frantic sounding of horns. Thousands of miles away, in a hotel room, on your birthday, riding on the coattails of a betrayal, in the whirling fog of your bipolar.
Darkle Musings 