I’m biting my lip. There is a storm brewing just beneath my skin. This one came on fast, if we ignore the building winds and inconsistent sirens over the past few months. I’m searching for my next bad idea, and you’re looking better every minute.
Are you willing to be a mistake? Or are you grasping for something more substantial that you haven’t named yet? I know what we look like. It’s worth every moment to see the envy in their eyes. Those who don’t want to fuck us want to be us. We are disjoint from language. Paint yourself across my skin. I’d love to see you try to stake your claim.
I say this as though you have or want a claim to stake. Why do I want to be your challenge? I want so badly to crawl inside your skin and push against the edges and feel you gasping at the pressure.
My voice is coming out in growls. My breath still tastes like whiskey dreams, flammable words and half-sober smiles through the cigarette haze. I want you to hurt me, but desire is a match and I haven’t swallowed fire in years.
I am a coward, because I can’t push the simplest sentences through my lips like what do you want from me? and don’t be so gentle. You make me ravenous, you make me crave, you make me giddy and ache and maybe just a little bit reckless.
I can feel the full moon tingling. The part of me that is aware of risk is desperately grappling with the part of me that needs to feel completely, fully alive, in the way that danger makes us aware of every breath. You are stealing my breaths, one by one, sucking them from my lungs and if nothing else, I want to feel them as they exhale into you.
Breathe in deeply. I taste like cigarettes and temptation.
I am brazen and fronting because I don’t know what else to do. I am full of false bravado that gets lost in neurological misfires, so when you ask me what I am thinking, I am floundering for an answer that doesn’t betray that I am nervous and scared because you are terrifying- for all I try my best to be real, I am someone else. An empty canvas because I don’t know what you want to see, so I’m never sure what to show. I have no context here.
But asking the question betrays that there is something to ask about. Without the boundaries, I cannot know where the edges lie. Perhaps that is the danger: I throw myself headfirst into things that defy language for the sole purpose to thriving in the ambiguity.
But I want you to miss my skin, if you miss that way, if you feel, viscerally, the impact of this body moving haphazardly through space. Where do I live in your mind? In the bedsheets or the moments inbetween, the ones where you have fucked my need for nicotine from my body then reminded me what I was missing? The ones where I finally forced the words out- if you’re going to bite me, then bite me– or the ones where I sit in door frames and pace the spaces where you stay in my line of sight? Could I possibly live in both?
There is a reason monomaniacal is my favorite word. Don’t mind the crazy; it shoots off like fireworks, a distraction to keep the rising panic at bay. It is- I am- both real and not real. I feel self conscious about where I left my boots, because they are in another room and it means more space occupied.
This switched from forward to back so quickly. Memory and desire fuse, but I only find words once the moments have passed. My body language is passive. A part of my soul is screaming out for something it can’t have, perhaps because it can’t have. I can only want what is unachievable.
I can only want with permission, with context, and I do not know where we stand to orient myself in this space. It’s discombobulating, and I like it. It’s a tension I can hold, even if the moments I snap back inward like a rubber band, I curse myself for a coward.
I move forward as I have, every step paid for with cracks where I have thrown my phone and the five pounds I accidentally dropped sweating out my anxiety at things I think I ought not to have said.
There is a storm brewing, and I want to tell myself that it came suddenly, but I can see the places where the pressure dropped and the wind lay still and I know this- and you- have been a long time coming.
My instinct is to divide this into separate writings because fusing these things together feels scary and vulnerable. Which is why I’m leaving them together. The pieces of this were written in the whiplash of emotional states, a reactionary place of bravado and reckless sense of strength, and a more tender place of thinking through and processing. I think it’s important to allow both to coexist. They are both honest. Also, there is an oscillating “you,” yoyoing from the general to the specific with no real context to differentiate. Take that as you will.
Monomaniacism 