The leaves start to turn before they drop.
It’s finally cool enough to sleep with the window open again. I wake up refreshed, a little chilly even, with my blankets wrapped to my face.
Maybe I’ve been single for too long, maybe I’m being romanced by the fall yet again, but there seem to be cute girls everywhere lately.
i felt disconnected all day. distant. disjointed. another bee in the hive. i don’t know why.
when i stepped outside getting off work, it was grey, breezy, devoid of sunshine.
the bass in my ears moved me. driving the beat of my heart. walking my feet.
the sun slowly came out, mixed bittersweet with the clouds.
and then you showed up. black and white across the street.
i kept my head down as you walked by, careful not to ruin that perfect image in my head. it was enough to keep me going. to make me smile when the most i could feel all day was neutral.
i love you but i don’t know you.
“Jeff?”
A voice calls me into the back from the waiting room.
As I get up, I notice that her eyes are dark against her fair skin, almost black. They’re piercing, but gentle, never intimidating. Her face is kind and welcoming, full of youth, like the younger sister of your girlfriend.
I follow. Her hair is pulled back in a neat, braided ponytail. Wrapped around the curves of her body is her dental gown, and she looks like a small, sterile package of energy. She asks the usual questions, speaking with unrivaled confidence. It’d be intimidating as well, if it wasn’t for the control in her voice.
Even after I’m seated in the chair and the ultrasonic scaler starts to whirr, I’m surprisingly calm. The unique buzzing, spinning, squirting, sucking sounds begin their symphony.
She rests her forearm on my chest for leverage as she works on the posteriors.
I start to wonder how appropriate it is, if anyone has ever spoken out. Or have they not had the heart, like me?
I feel objectified.
As she works, she makes one-sided small-talk, saying every word with conviction. With her tools in my mouth, I answer only in mumbled positives and negatives. She goes along the arch systematically, molar to molar, lingual to buccal.
I want to see her eyes again, to take a closer look at what struck me first. To avoid making an obvious, darting glance, I preemptively look where her eyes will be soon as she follows her predictable path, and wait.
Her eyes arrive, and I look away. It’s too uncomfortable. I’m peering into the world of another who’s distracted, not returning my gaze.
Her physical intimacy was innocent, I assume.
Mine may have been less so.
I want to take the bullet,
The one aimed straight for your heart.
I want to meet the wolves halfway
And let them tear me apart,
But that’s not the way they do it here.I want to lay on the tracks,
Feel hot steel screaming at me.
Expose the bones on my back,
Let me show you what I mean.Yeah, it’s a different kind of love.
I want to climb barbed wire fences
And warm our hands in blood.And this is my gift
Asking you to fix my ruined hands.
And it’s a gift that keeps on giving,
And right now it’s all I have to give.I want to write the perfect song,
And play it just for you,
While you are tangled up in sleep.
I need you more than I’ll ever know.
Until I stop breathing,
My lungs will take you for granted.
—Thrice, In Years To Come
I remember a time in my life when I was scared about love. A set of rather adolescent experiences in high school, of which I only now find myself comfortable speaking frankly, had caused me to cling to an unattainable ideal. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert well describes such a happenstance that similarly “made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today”.
Eventually, I had given up my ideal, but still felt forever tainted, regretfully breaking more than enough hearts in the process.
And as fleeting as the entire experience was, it still enough to galvanize, to make me want to take that bullet, or let the wolves tear me apart. Being tangled up in that mad love, the love that goes against reason or better judgement, softened the stone in my chest, and it felt like I was finally alive.
Gimmie a girl who can make me feel this way.
Entertain the hope that somehow you’ll escape me
Weld the bolts and close the iron gate
Drink deeply the illusion of your safety
My how wishful thoughts inebriate
Masquerade and revel in your opulence
Writhe unfettered by your stabs at ignorance
Swim through hues and whispered tones of heresy
A dozen strokes to run your blood cold enough to believe
Remember me
You look so surprised to see me here
Hells black wings did I over perch these walls
For stony limits cannot hold me out
And now you all die
—Thrice, The Red Death
And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever
—Edgar Allen Poe, The Masque Of The Red Death
It’s simple.
Gimmie a girl who isn’t afraid to ROCK THE FUCK OUT to this song.