It’s the last conversation we’ll have for three months and I can’t hold back the tears because as much as I want to seem fine and brave and whatever — I’m not. I mean, I am — fine and brave and whatever — and I’m also so fucking sad. A mess. Truth is I love this mess. I love the ache. I love feeling whatever this tension is.
You’re on the train while we’re speaking so the signal keeps cutting in and out and the words are garbled and somehow that’s appropriate.
I sometimes dream about trains and romance and melancholy. On the way to see you for the first time everything is that certain shade of grey anticipation that makes me squirm into my hips and lean hard into the headrest. At first I think it’s the chemical smell of the entire bottle of axe body spray the guy next to me must be wearing that’s making my heart beat so quickly.
But then I sink into the heavy thrum and notice actually I’m worrying about if we’ll like the way each other smells and how the kiss will be and for a while I totally leave my body while reading Finding God Through Sex. Not that I need the lessons. You already fucked me 32 ways to heaven, listening to me moan on 3 hours walks and on 5 hours phone calls you recite poetry to the tune of “And the World is Made Right When We Fuck,” and I am pure ecstasy. I am rolling mdma. I am timeless openness. You are listening, awestruck.
How could my armor not dissolve? How could I not fall?
I have to laugh at my yearning because I listen to this song called “I’m Not Going Anywhere,” when the longing consumes me and I’m saying it to myself and I’m imagining the man who will say it to me and I’m imagining God and imagining is a very real coagulation of effervescent particles self entangling. If you hold it so closely, yet with a loose hand, you see the golden threads weaving your dream.
You showed up golden but maybe somewhere, I didn’t believe it — that a good man would stay.
I’ll write a new story. Hold it with tenderness.
Everything about me is porous. I imagine my skin singing, a trillion little mouths imbibing life’s beauty. You like that about me. You like the way my hair is effortlessly wild and messy and the way I never comb it, not because I don’t want to but because I lost the only comb I liked and it really doesn’t make a difference.
You like that never in a million years could you pin down my system in words — but you see it and you feel it and you know that if you want to draw me out of my own swirling world, all you have to do is breathe deeper than me, wrap your thumbs around my hipbones, fingers curled into the curved space just above my ass, and press your whole self into me.
All you have to do is breathe the moment open and hold me like my body asks you to.
All you have to do is listen with your whole spine and the deep, dark, thick of your heart and give me the honesty of your body. And I will give you everything.
I will unfurl as the infinite petals of a peony in your strong hands and I will bite my lip and beg you with soft eyes to fasten me to the wall and let me feel more support than I ever have, from every angle.
You’ll feel me slowing, a velvet ember slithering in your full body gaze. Slipping, slipping, slipping.
You’ll unravel any thread of doubt with a single glance.
Your hand will find the pulsing ache between my legs and I’ll die, just like that, needing nothing, wanting everything in every way forever and always. Amen. And it is written. In my heart and my fingers and my warming skin and the tissue of my muscles and the marrow of my bones and the fascial web connecting everything. Touch one strand and the whole web quivers through eternity. I am yours, I am yours, I am yours when you claim me.
This is epic dear Faye xxx
Such fun, Faye. The very first time I heard my Dad talking about sex was when I overheard him saying to my mom, “Trish, you remember that overnight when we screwed all the way to Hamburg? Hell, the train did most of the work.” She howled and her eyes twinkled. He was a funny man.