she would tell me about a property she owned in nicaragua and how u could build a home in a hole in the earth. how you could scoop out a hole in the earth. that they do that all over the world these days.
it always felt cool, the thought of living in a hole in the earth.
she said she wanted to create a property that was an incubator of ideas, inventions, solutions. i invited myself.
she would go into something like a seizure when she would orgasm. it was frightening the first time. gratifying all the times after the first. i made her bite down on an apple once. she shook harder.
she called me one day months after she had ended it but before she had left for the second time. She told me that sex wasn't the problem, that it was quite the opposite.
how she ended it that one day in her room, crying.
how easily i'd let her go.
i had picked her up while a this american life piece was playing about an endearing teenage boy in love with an undercover cop. and the way i was with her, it resembled nothing of that boy's love.
and we both knew it.
two sensitive people in the world. cruel but sensitive. to feel on such a level that a body can shake and jerk and eyes roll back in pleasure, imagine what pain could do.
it's not supposed to feel like this. i know, i said. you never reached out to me after my dad got sick. i know, she said. i didn't want to be that person for you. i know, i said. two days before we found out about my dad, i had told her i didn't want to be that person for her while she was gone the first time. then she was the first i told and she didn't want my tears. we were both honest and wrong and right.
she called me after that first time on her way home, she was in new york for a week first. she said she was broke. she said a guy she was staying with had hit on her. i didn't tell her i missed her. or i don't remember if i did.
she was hit by a car on her bicycle the day we re-met months later. she had fallen off her bike and broken her arm a couple months before we'd first met months before. when i found her, she was distraught. it was on lincoln blvd near a car wash. she was crying. when i went to hug her, she pushed me away. later that night we kissed outside of a bad thai restaurant on lincoln blvd. it was warm like it was. she slept in my bed that night and i remember asking if she was in love with someone else. she said she wasn't.
i drove her to work. we weren't sweet like the last time. when we'd eat bagels. we weren't sweet like those first weeks when we'd eat bagels. we bought groceries for dinner one night. she was upset i didn't offer to cook it with her. i was upset she thought a guest should. two sensitive people shivering atop her mattress on the floor. it was freezing. i wanted to leave. she insisted i sleep over. sex was better than it should have been, even the way we'd taught ourselves to feel nothing for the other one.
the way she hardly wanted to kiss me the second time. like how our lips were loaded with too many of the things we'd never say, like fruit unpicked, withering on their vines.
then she ended things. after the radio. i remember her crying. i remember walking to my car and seeing a park full of people and purple sky.
months went by. she called me a day before she left and we met. she said i looked happier. we finally got her the right slice of pie, not vegan. i had one bite, my face flushed. i had not eaten sugar in the months since my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. she told me about a man she loved, truly loved. i told her about a woman. we were telling each other about ourselves. we were building metaphors to say what we never would say to each other. she told me about berlin and how much she loved it. she was obsessed with the internet, the threads and seams behind it. the interactivity. the design. we talked all about love. we walked down to the beach, the same one we'd been so many months before hand in hand. we had taken a picture on the pier together that she had never sent me. now it was another golden hour. and we were on the same beach again. the one just below where she had playfully flashed me her panties while leaning against a chain link fence up on main street. the same beach again.
the same beach where talia once told me that it's all beautiful, sitting together in my loyal junky car, she told me it's all beautiful even when people create something that says it isn't, that they know it's all beautiful.
she used an andy gump cuz she was on her period. she told me she was on her period. i felt stupid and felt like asking if she had to take her tampon out to pee. she told me i had to visit her in stockholm. she insisted. i emailed her once months later. she didn't reply.
now that everything had been said in metaphor, i think she was surprised i didn't try to kiss her that afternoon.
i couldn't. i didn't want to kiss anyone at that point in time. i was scared and frightened and terrified of life of death of men of women of god of everything. I was shaken and raw and split apart and my body was strong.
i was an absolute wreck and i had the immense strength to hardly comprehend it.
