I lay back in my sheets, the sun in my eyes and in the palms of my hands feels like a knife. I could use it to slice the dry twists of my tendons, free the strain on my joints. I can hear the voices of gulls outside, laughing a dark river. I think of the person I love, naked, and me a few steps away, hidden in the underbrush of their bed.
It is monday and I am alive with pain. Day 3. Pain so massive it surpasses the physical space of my body. It becomes an idea, takes up the space where the idea of self used to be, pushes me outside myself so i am nothing. I stand outside, stalking the world.
How could a weak, perverse woman like me, someone who dreams of a knife to cut pain out of her joints, be a lover, be loved by anyone? Pain whispers that I'm a splinter. I burrow deeper into the white earth of my bed, hiding in my body is like borrowing into a rose bush, full of thorns, even at the root. My joints brittle as dry twigs, pulled by the fray of pain... I drop the pain, it's a thought so I can...
think carefully about fucking someone I love, holding their body hard to the line of my desire. I think about washing their t-shirts, their sheets, I'll fuck them until my name is like a smear on their skin, a stain. I'll hang their laundry out to dry in the sun. I watch myself laying in the grass and moss of my bed and think of my hands vanishing into cotton, their hands. I look up at the ceiling and imagine the sky. I don't move my hands though, pain is there, a blade of sunlight on the bone.
We are just animals, and we prepare for winter, a change in season or emotions, like animals. Perhaps now more than ever I think that so little, almost nothing, distinguishes us from them.
Like me, for instance.
I'm an educated woman, a university graduate, member of an art gallery, I own a passport. A woman from a good family, a bright girl with a good head on her shoulders, the best head you'll ever get, a deviant. I'm more of an animal than a fox or a wolf, face stained red from a feast, jaw popping.
I slowly slide a hand into my underwear, fingertips to labia, spread apart around my clit. I'm responsible and pay my mortgage, I drink dark roast coffee and buy artisanal bread. I think of my lover behind me, about to come on my ass, but instead turning me over suddenly and coming inside me, a surprise even in a fantasy, filling me up. I think about all the ways this hasn't happened, and want so desperately my mouth is wet. What a nice surprise in all this chaos, that I can howl. Turn and turn under the moon. Chase my tail.
In the moment I want to come, I want to say, I can't imagine my life without you now, it's as though you've always been here, like clouds and rain. I need I need....
But instead pain is a dry twist under my kneecaps and in the soft meat of my hands and feet, hiding in the joints between my fingers so even these small motions of pleasure release a fog of dull agony. Weather the pain.
I sink deeper into the earth of myself. I want to snarl, to let my lover bite me and savour my skin, sweet from fucking sweat. But instead pain is a silvery reflection of a knife slid back back to me. The sky is red, violet, trembling. I am a scorched pasture, groping in dead grass for a metaphor pain (love) like a knife ( a fang) a needle.
I talk to pain, the way I look into the sun -
I never want to see you again, my love.
I'm a woman, a wild animal in a black skirt with long tangled hair who some fool taught to read and write. I think of my lover fucking me in the dirt desert of our bed, sticking their fingers deep in my mouth so I smile and drool. Pain chews my bones but I spread my legs, healthy and beautiful, an animal beyond repair.