Before I open my eyes I hear my cat purring, her steady breathing in sleep. The cat is curled in the bend of my knees, her fur a miracle of black snow. I wish it weren't so oppressive right away, the knowledge, this slow idle dread. But I enjoy the slice of sun through the curtains, the rainbows cutting through the prisms from their red threads, I enjoy the solitude and the silence, the sound of birds and scent of coffee being made. The sky is full of wind and clouds. I think of his hands, his grip would be soft in sleep, grow more firm as he woke, on those few tender moments on the ragged edges of sleep.
Later, after drinking my coffee and doing yoga on my floor and taking a long shower, I stand on my balcony and feel the last cold touch of winter in the air. Spring is here, glimmering on the edges of the wind. Perhaps the cruellest season to deny us the freedom of touch and motion. Every part of this feels sour with a personal twist of cruelty, more personal because I know reality is so utterly indifferent.
Did I need this reminder that the human condition is nothing but naked vulnerability to change? No. I am intimate with the management of this fact. Instead, I think a few days ahead of myself, the handful of times I might leave the house in the coming weeks. What might become a routine for the next several careful tense months.
I will go out and pick up books from the book store, they will leave them waiting on the sidewalk outside their door, wrapped in brown paper. I will attempt to buy some medication if the federal government releases it the pharmacy to give to me. I have heard whispers that soon no one will be able to prescribe it unless it is to treat the Virus, that maybe this is already happening...or maybe it's just whispers, but still the prescription took three days secure. All the resturants are closed, with their tables still set. I wonder if I can logically calculate the risk of buying fruit, chocolate.
Is it a sin to buy flowers now…
Things that were, a handful of weeks ago, small simple pleasures or quick errands have become goals, wary challenges. Buying milk and eggs suddenly confronts one with their own morality, the lives of others.
Is it any wonder I am fucking ravenous. Craving, almost desperate for the immersive, hypnotic pleasures of another person's body. My hunger seems to scale in direct proportion to the need for distance
A person, their hands and their mouth. A risk, a call, a cataclysm…
We speak in stillness because all around us is stillness, the only that moves are fear and love. An ability to share a space resonant with a silence that forms words, to breath each other quiet, to be still as sleeping dogs. And in this stillness, we describe frenetic streaks of violence, so many things I wish to make possible. Stillness can heal and offer comfort. Even now, when for so many, it is a cut, a wound in the dark.
Maybe I like being wounded.
When you love with violence stillness can reaffirm and reestablish safety, you learn to look for it, use it when you have it. In this dreadful stillness, there is the motion of us. Digital distance connecting the every day through touchpoints, photos capturing the movement of hands, phones casting little pools of bright in the night, where I rest fingers tips against the glass I imagine touching their skin.
I wonder if he thinks of me, waits for the soft buzz of his phone the way I do. I wait for his words the same way I would wait for his key in my door. And in waiting, I die a thousand little private deaths. Because that's what it feels like. It feels like dying. And even now, maybe especially I'd rather die of wanting. The great story is that love exposes all our secrets, makes us surrender them with a whisper. But we know the truth, and maybe it's more true now than before: That some things can't be said. Not even in whispers. Not even in love's voice. Some things can only be hunted out of you, taken down with teeth.
Some things have to be cut out from where they hide, close to the bone.
A private apocalypse is an option chosen by some. I test myself periodically and lie in bed and think about him in the dark, his hands around my throat, cutting me open, opening my ribs like a doorway, letting me out…I become a bright shadow of myself, a wolf. It is hard to believe sometimes that I can stand to be so visible, so naked, exposed to chance and whim. And not even my own. It seems impossible that I would love like this, especially now, but everything inside me is dark as night, rich and sensual as fur. My heart is a predator's heart, a hunter, unknowable, its chambers opening and closing like a fist. His fist. I want him to split my lip, spit in my mouth.
I want to taste his blood.
To most of the world right now I am untouchable, and the world cannot be touched. There is taut frayed energy in the air, a high heat rush to cool, a great leap apart. But he sees my slight motion in all the empty silence. Lingering stories, late nights spent around the glow of my phone, bruised knees and pruny fingers, an imaginary bite mark under the hem of a sweater. It's not there, but I can feel it like it's obvious. And it must be, this feeling, like I'm wearing red. It must be visible, a flush in my cheeks like I have a fever.
( Is that safe to write…)
I can feel him wafting out from under my clothes like smoke. My bed is dressed in black and grey, and the city is covered in silence. I think of him saying my name. Snarling into me. Sometimes I think of it like a whore's bed and smile, a setting for pleasure and power. Sensual and brutal and dark, in a dark room. I painted the walls black plum purple. Warm and cold at once. Some nights I lie awake trying to find the lesson I am meant to learn kneeling at the feet of love, wearing love's bruises and the clothes it chooses for me. At night, the torrid of his words and the pressure of his hands on my chest makes me pant. If I listen, I can hear my heartbeat echoing in another chest.
Love. A confession.
A bright sound for so dark a time.