I look at all these past tokens of our time together. I run them through the fingers of my mind, examining their bumps, ridges, chafing texture. I wonder how such fragments leave such a profound effect. How so little a time spent in person, produces in the mind the meaning or a meaning for all time. How impact occurs to the willing, how it descends upon them like a darkness, a shroud of their hopes and dreams but to vanquish them, in utter defeat. We writhe under the weight with a sort of pleasure, for defeat isn’t immediate but a gradual realization, the knowledge of personal truth chipping away at your delusion of what you thought you wanted, needed. That desperate ache that makes you toss and turn, churn your insides for how deeply the want goes.
How I yearned for you, is in fact how I yearned to know myself, how you vanquished me, was really the only way I knew how to allow myself to receive my wounds, those of improvement, betterment: the hot stove that teaches the fumbling child, the flame that licks the curious moth to death.
And so you’ve scalded and licked me—into this version of myself set on a course beyond your grasp. What you’ve set into motion, delicious unstoppable motion, is in fact the very version of me perhaps that you desired for yourself. That beast of adaptability—that lives beyond fear. You gaze at me, beyond your reach, I can feel your throat catch with thirst, I can feel the nail of fingers sink into your gripped palm balled into fists, for you are the one caged, and I roll around the front of your trap, teasing and toying, taunting you with your own creation.
This is the fantasy that plays out in my mind, and perhaps knowably in your own—we have corrupted one another in unspeakable ways, you never to be inspired again, replica after replica, they slide off, for intensity isn’t replaceable—eagerness neither. The lapping up of your ego was never so wet, so sated as when it came from my eager mouth.
The captivated gaze of my eyes, you seek out in cheap titillation with scores of others thinking the act of it alone leaves you liberated. But that hole, that aching, throbbing hole, that feeling of profound loss, my love, my dear, my tormentor and my captive, that hole—that hole is mine.