I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it —- to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I wanted you to love me back and show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer —- that’s the kick.
But I can’t say that aloud, I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like?
By the time she was seventeen, her whole life was unbearable. And when I think about it, I know just how she felt. It is terrible when there is absolutely nothing to do or worth doing except to lie down and hope when you are naked she won’t laugh at you. Or that he, holding your breasts, won’t wish they were some other way. Terrible but worth the risk because there is no other thing to do, although, being seventeen, you do it, Study, work, memorize. Bite into food and the reputations of your friends. Laugh at the things that are right side up and those that are upside-down —- it doesn’t matter because you are not doing the thing worth doing which is lying down somewhere in a dimly lit place enclosed in arms, and supported by the core of the world.
I have lived a long time, maybe too long, in my own mind. People say I should come out more. Mix. I agree that I close off in places, but if you have been left standing, as I have, while your partner overstays at another appointment, or promises to give you exclusive attention after supper but is falling asleep just as you have begun to speak —- well, it can make you inhospitable if you aren’t careful, the last thing I want to be.
Decades reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed only — but it was something — that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but not all, of those few men and women since the invention of writing, who wrote something down. An unfair sample.
The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
And if love itself…was the fruit, she could keep loving if she chose, which she at forty-one did not. Petie once told them — he acted it out — that when fishermen gaffed a hooked shark aboard, to save their legs they slit its belly and gave it its own entrails to chew. She would not.
Beware hot people with tattoos met while teenaged — they mess with your head, and it’ll turn out they weren’t that hot anyway, and that their tattoos were in fact laughably bad. But there’s no real way to take anyone’s word for this. Except mine: wait! Don’t do it!
oh ma gaaaaash, I wish this advice column had been published in 08
Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.
i am 21. i take a lot of pictures of myself in bed, but not in a sex way. in a fancy way. just shut up and be friends with me.
