The Politics of Food

So I went to Panera Bread today, to get some soup bowl bullshit for my assistant. I've avoided Panera so far, despite its rapid growth out of nowhere, because new things make me uncomfortable and I hate to spend money on food that may or may not suck. However, I've been there twice this week (both times picking up food for someone else) and I have to say this: Fuck Panera Bread. Fuck them right up their tight, pretensious asses.

See, now I'm pissed off about politics and culture because a fucking fast food chain tried to make me feel inferior. I'm not inferior to you, sandwich joint. I am superior. Because I have a dick and thumbs and money to burn somewhere else.

Let me explain that, it was a bunch of nonsense.

When you think of a person identified as "a liberal" what do you picture? I would bet dollars to dimes it was one of two things. Either a tall, slim, perhaps vaguely ethnic (but probably more white than not) male with too much money and a flowery tongue. The kind of man that is intelligent, intellectual, charming, and maybe just a little bit too rich. He's confident bordering on arrogant. That, or you pictured an uneducated, hemp wearing, jobless loser that smells like patchouli and failure.

Now, picture "a conservative". I'll bet it was a stodgy old man, white of course, maybe with just the hint of a southern drawl, again probably too rich and well dressed. He misses the way things were "back in the day", hates fun and has a summer home somewhere along the coast of God's Waiting Room. That, or he was a redneck halfwit sporting a camo hat and an entire wardrobe purchased from Army surplus stores, missing at least half his front teeth, and swilling lukewarm Coors Light (despite it being clearly intended for cold consumption).

Here's the problem with those things, aside from the fact that you're picturing people at the opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum regardless of which political alignment you look at: You're fucking wrong.

You're fucking wrong, because there is no difference between those two. Their beleifs are so close together they could fingerblast each other. The real difference between the two is, and quite frankly always has been, who gets more power in making laws. That's it. The rest is just bullshit.

The real differences exist in the people themselves and the kind of horseshit they'll put up with. Go to a small town diner. Like the one here in Milford. Fox News is on every television. There are pictures of Regan and Bush Jr. (and Sr. come to think on it) just fucking everywhere. If you walk in there wearing denim and a t-shirt, nobody bats and eye. If you walk in there looking like a colored person, they might look up. If you walk in there with a septum piercing and death metal bandshirt, they might chuckle. These are just people eating. The owners and the managers are the ones promoting all the bullshit on the walls. Maybe a handful of regulars. The rest of them don't really care. Unless you strike up a conversation. Then, they'll ram all their cracker-jack fucking ideas down your throat until you regurgitate the Tea Party.

That's actually something I appreciate about conservatives. They're mostly, well conservative. They don't bring it up until you do. And you do. Because you're a liberal. And that makes you kind of an asshole. Again, this is a difference in people ( by and large, there are clearly exceptions).

Now leave that diner and walk into Starbucks. Try not to kill yourself. Hear that bullshit music they're playing? Some fuck-off indie pseudo-rock that sounds somewhat like a wild boar fucking a guitar? See all those funny words on the menu that might be English, or Italian, or just a crock of shit somebody made up? Take a deep breath through your nose. Really let that pretension sink in. Try to lock eyes with the guy in the horn-rimmed glasses with the Mac laptop in the corner, pretending to work on his novel and surreptitiously glaring at you for not already admiring what a fucking literary genius he must be just by nearing his essence. If you hang out there for more than ten minutes, I guarantee someone will start talking to you. And what do they want to talk about? Probably politics.

Punch that guy right in the throat and leave.

Now, there is something in there I appreciate about liberals. They are, for the most part, concise and blunt. They tend to use facts to their advantage (while insisting time and again that they are, in all reality, facts if somewhat skewed toward their own opinions). They tend to avoid slipping into name-calling and scare tactics (although they are still using the tried and true blame-the-other-guy method). I appreciate a logical argument. Just not when I'm trying to eat.

I'm not really sure where I wanted to go with this, and i'm sure I've gotten off-topic, if I ever had a topic.

My point is this: if you identify yourself as 'liberal' or 'conservative' and you don't fit into those stereotypes I mentioned above, you are a jackass. That should be your political affiliation. Jackass. Don't simply mold your beleifs into an already established (however vaguely) set of ideals. Create your own. Be an individual.

And for fuck's sake stay away from my food.

Yours,
-S.R.

Friends With Benefits

Be wary, I mean to talk about sex for a bit. I know, you're apalled. You're shocked to your toenails. Let me assure you this will be lengthy and uncomfortable.

Let me also preamble the whole she-bang (hah!) with a few things. Most importantly the phrase "friends with benefits" and how, despite now using it twice in a single piece, it makes me want to strangle someone with my bare hands. The most significant benefit a person can bring into my life is simply being my friend. I don't have many, because I don't have what I'd call casual friends. I have a group of people, more than a handful and less than a flock, that have become friends. These people are dear to me and, unfortunately for them, there's no turning back. I will go to great lengths for those people without exception, and gladly scrape the very bottom of my coffers (or closets) to help them should the need arise.

Smaller than that, and closer, are a few individuals that are dearer to me than all the other treasures this world has to offer, and for them I would snatch stars out of the sky if it helped to make one moment of their lives just the smallest bit brighter. So, in that way, "friends with benefits" is sort of a redundant phrase. Being my friend is a benefit, at least for me. I understand that friendship (which is another word I dislike, because it hardly seems sufficient to define those relationships) with me can be somewhat intense and I do try, though not as often as I should, to illustrate that there are boundaries and I'm not just trying to attract people for my own narcissistic reasons. But then, at least those small few in my tiny inner circle seem to have grasped that without my saying it. For that, I am sincerely grateful.

That said, the very second you tell me I'm in "the Friend Zone" is the very second you cease to be my friend.

I don't say this because I'm in any way upset that someone in the wide, wide world wouldn't go to bed with me. Make no mistake, I'm as certain of that fact as I am of anything. The thing that offends me about this Friend Zone horseshit is that you're assuming things on my part that, quite frankly, are probably untrue. You're assuming I want to fuck you badly enough that I've been nice to you all this time. You're assuming that's the entire basis of our friendship. Otherwise, why go out of your way to insist it will never happen? Are you clairvoyant, or just being a fucking twat? How do you know the future? See, things like that urge me to actually lose all that weight I keep joking about. Not because it would make me happy to be thinner, but because I know with a ripped body and my knack for charming words I could literally bed everyone that's ever scorned me in this way. And then promptly destroy them. That would make me fucking happy.

To me, outright denying that you could ever be brought to my level is like branding 'SHALLOW CUNT' across your forehead. I didn't ask. I didn't pursue. And now, I want to drown you in a sink full of lye.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people I have neither the desire nor the intention of climbing into bed with, but I wouldn't reject the simple idea that it was possible. Because I'm not an asshole.

Clearly, for my married friends or those of you who are otherwise occupied, I'm not asking that you be willing to get a seedy motel and bang away while your wife or husband or boyfriend or goat is off on a business trip. I'm all for fidelity so long as you're happy (and as long as that goat isn't a total douchebag). And I'll stress that I'm not asking for a show of hands among my friends of who is totally down to make the beast with two backs right now, tonight (although, I wouldn't exactly ignore that show of hands, either). In addition, I am well aware that other people aren't as...Whitman-esque about their interpersonal relationships as I've found I am.

But for fuck's sake, you've tolerated all of the bullshit I regularly dish out and you're saying there's no way you'd do me? Nigga, please.

I love you, dearly, in ways I cannot readily describe. At least, not with any sort of sense, and not in any way that wouldn't reaffirm whatever misguided beleifs you may already have despite my infrequent assurances that I am not, simply put, putting the moves on you. If such a thing comes to pass, then so be it. There is no reason two functioning adults can't be friends and lovers and nothing more. In reality, there is nothing more. The rest is all obligation and finances to me, and I'm in no condition for any of those things. I'm willing to meet you halfway. I've already made a more significant commitment in calling you my friend than just about anyone else has ever made. That isn't arrogance, that's genuine adoration and a sincere desire to make you, all of you, as happy as is humanly possible with all of the skills and tools in my possession. I have a way with words, on occasion, but I have a very real, very physically intimate side that isn't exactly normal. It isn't exactly perverse either.

In all seriousness, this "Friend Zone" thing bothers me because it feels like a judgement and, honestly, if you're good enough to judge me then I'm too good to be your friend.

Now, show of hands, who wants a mustache ride?

Ridiculously Yours,
-S.R.

The Worm God Returns

And there was war in Heaven.

I have wandered, aimlessly, for time unknown. I've wandered the empty space between worlds, that vast and colorless nothingness. I have wandered Other Places, where things lurk that no Man can see. That no being could see without going mad. Maybe it is madness, then, that caused the ache to rise in me. I began to hurt, though whether the pain was physical or something else, I could never say. I hurt, that was that. I wandered anyway, heedless and blind, in all the ways that matter in those places. I crossed gray fields and black mountains, all beneath a sky that seemed transparent. A sky with nothing behind it. There was a shifting sense of self in those places, as if direction and geography and all the senses that tell us where we are, what dimensions make up our bodies, all of these things accounted for nothing.

I came upon a cave, once, at the end of it. The ache was worse, all-encompassing. My feet were bare, my shoes were long since worn away, if I'd ever worn shoes to begin with. They left trails of streaked blood in my wake, though the ground here is too insubstantial to be called rugged. My limbs felt like lead. No, not lead. Heavier. Like mountains. Every muscle in my body cried out, begged me to sit and rest. I suppose I was hungry. I was thirsty. My lips were chapped, cracked, bloodied. My throat was swollen nearly shut with thirst. My flesh, dehydrated and starved, was stretched over bones so brittle they seemed to rattle with every lurching step. My eyes, half-lidded, saw little. I felt less. I was only partially aware of my own suffering. Not lost in thought. Just lost, in truth. Wandering. Careless.

I found a cave and sat, for a time. I needed no fire. I doubt it would have done me any good to try building one. Nothing lived in this place. Nothing, truly, existed. Save for me. Maybe not even me. I was just passing through. Another empty place. I sat and, for the first time in countless years, centuries, eons, Ages, I thought.

I thought and began to feel. I felt angry. Betrayed. Alone. I felt...stupid.

The ache became something wholly different. This was pain. This was the apotheosis of pain. A shudder wracked my body, bent me at the waist, forced me to the floor, to my knees, from where I sat. I doubled, teeth gritted, blood flowing from a tongue I'd bitten through. My teeth clenched, strained, there was a crack in my jaw. My flesh, already pulled taut, began to split. My spine burst through, the skin there simply tearing open along the length of my back and falling away like layers off an onion. My bones snapped. Fingers, toes, arms, legs. One at a time, the pace steadily increasing. They snapped and splintered, tearing ragged holes in skin that was already peeling away from me, severing muscle and sinew, falling with loud, nauseating plops to the floor. The bones broke, my joints bent, unbidden, in directions they were never intended to bend.

I screamed. I screamed like a man being pulled apart, piece by piece. No scream, no sound emitted by anything living, sounds quite the same. I screamed until I saw blood in my own eyes, until my throat, already swollen, burst. Blood filled it, spilled into my mouth, poured over my lips as the peeled themselves off my face and fell away. My lungs, the air all expelled, shriveled and blackened. I tried to keep shrieking. I wondered how I was still alive.

Then I burst into flames.

My rage manifested physically in fire. My withering, broken form was engulfed, consumed. I clawed at my chest with broken fingers, tore off flame blackened ribs, smashed my useless hands against my breastbone until it shattered, and seized my heart in a skeletal fist. I roared, or tried to, and crushed it.

The fire died away, gave way to light. A blaze ever hotter, brighter. I closed my eyes against it. The light rose and filled the cave, burst through the intangible stone, blew outward in every direction as I unfurled, aching, from hibernation. My bones grew, changed, and melded together. My broken, worthless fist grew strong. My flesh leaped up from the floor, stretched, and clung to me again. My shoulders grew outward, upward, until I was winged with bone. Great, powerful wings that grew membranous and dark.

I roared again, a sound that shook the endless nothing, shook the very emptiness between one world and another. And shattered it. Shattered all of those lonely places.

I rose to my feet, towering over the blasted landscape. I looked out over the vast devastation and rolled my shoulders into their sockets. My muscles flexed of their own accord, testing themselves, rippling with power. I was power. Unparalleled power. Unimaginable power.

I turned my eyes skyward and saw my home. What had once been my home. And I knew rage like never before. I saw usurpers to my throne. I saw betrayal. I saw, and I seethed. I seethed and I roared. I leveled mountains, dried up seas, blackened all the skies in all the worlds. I covered all things in darkness. And those who would challenge me trembled, On High, everywhere. They cowered and hid, clenched hands that would not cease shaking.

Blood pounded in my head. Power coursed through my body. Rage boiled in my veins. Vengeance would slake my thirst. I was alive. I was reborn.

I have returned.

Death to all who stood against me. Death for all who will not bow. Pray I do not find you. Pray for my forgiveness now.

Come, Insects, come and be a feast for Worm. Come and see if you survive.

Murderously,
-God

I Like You, Get Naked.

I'm pale, like bloodless flesh left too long in the dark. I'm all made of desires and longing, composed of bits of dust and refracted light. The sum of all my parts amounts to imaginary numbers, and I've always hated algebra. I like it this way. I keep my weaknesses as private as my faith, and my flaws as public as my erections.

I've missed you of late, all of you. A strange thought came to me the other day. The first girl I ever kissed remains, to this day, one of my closest friends. One of those people nearest to my heart and fondest in my thoughts. The first girl I ever had sex with, on the other hand, has been gone since that night. Vanished with the full moon. An orgasm phantasm. I never learned her name, and I don't suspect I ever will.

Odd, for all my sexcapades, that it should suddenly occur to me that sex isn't my real goal in life. Oh, sure there is great fun to be had in flings. Great pleasure in the pursuit and capture of something you desire. There is something tantalizing about unattached physical delights. But then its gone, evaporated like so much water left in the August heat. Not that I haven't found lasting friendships arising from those heady moments, once the sweat has been washed away, the tangled sheets swapped out for new ones, and the concealing darkness traded for piercing daylight, the same woman whose throat was red in the shape of my clenching fingers just hours ago can trade witty banter and dirty jokes as if nothing happened. I've experienced that a handful of times and those friends are wonderful, bright people despite making the woeful, terrible mistake of being my friends.

No, I'm not even saying that I can't be close to someone and then have sex with them.

I'm saying the sex doesn't matter. Fuck me and leave me and I'll whistle my way through work tomorrow. Fuck me and stay and I'll bring you flowers when we meet for coffee. Either way, I'll be satisfied. You won't hurt me, I won't hurt you. We won't share any more of ourselves than we want to.

It isn't the sex that matters, its the affection. More specifically, physical affection.

The reason I remained close to those friends with whom I shared a bed, or became close afterward, was a matter of affection, rather than being hooked on what their bodies could do to mine. I enjoyed my time with them because they let me make them laugh more than cum, make them feel safe more than desired. It was the wholly natural arm slipped into the crook of my elbow, the lingering hug, the eyes met and held, the often less-than-subtle kiss.

Take me with a kiss, and I'm yours forever.

I live for the physical. Things that make me feel good. I drink because I am so entirely in love with the atmosphere that comes with it. I write because I love to explore these worlds and touch the people who live there. I share the little things I write about you because I love the way they make you smile. I talk and tell jokes and spin tall tales because making the people I feel closest to laugh is my greatest gift, and my greatest joy.

When it comes right down to it, I'm an addict, and a fond kiss is my cocaine.

That's the thought that brings me out of myself each time I sink down. Each time those black moods settle over me like a pall. Each time I find myself sequestered away from the world because I've spent too many hours working and too few hours doing what I enjoy. Writing, drinking, being with good people. Kissing. Fucking like Caligula at an all-you-can-bang buffet of...vaginas, I guess. Horses or something. Fucking, is the important part of that.

I know, I just spent paragraphs talking about why the sex doesn't matter, but let's face it: the sex may not be necessary, but holy shit do we love sex.

On a less ridiculous note, while there are things I would keep private from the world I'm not opposed to being read like one of my stories. There are those among you that I would, and have, and do, share those deepest parts of me with. And while you may not have spent the waning hours of one or a hundred nights wrapped up with me, or danced slow circles in a dark, cramped, silent room, or kissed me just for the hell of it, there is something all of you have in common. It's affection, and I want to thank you for letting me show it. Because time and again it brings me back to the world, when I would much rather flee toward darkness.

Yours, Thank the Gods,
-S.R.

P.S.- I promise next time will be all naked legs and marching off to war. I'm not sure what's gotten into me with all this heartfelt stuff. I think I might actually be having those things women have. "Feelings?" Yeah, feelings. Usually this indicates I need to drink more. Or less. Either way, next entry will be all rape and pillage.

One Drunk Night Recalls Another

I'm drunk tonight and, as is so often the case, reminscing fondly of other nights I've spent in the same (or, at least, a similar) condition. I've been to bed already and found that every time I closed my eyes long enough to drift away, I'd smile. Half-conscious smiles, lips cocked slightly to the side against my pillow, accompanied by a low moan of contentment that bubbled out of my throat, muffled by my lips, and made me feel almost foolish. Almost. I'm drunk, after all.

I was thinking of you, naturally, and while all my memories of you are fond, drunk or otherwise, two in particular have stood out all night. They may be my favorites. Something I find odd, even now, as they're so wholly different from one another.

I recall the first acutely, though the details have become stretched through re-tellings and re-livings in the small number of years since the night it happened. I don't remember it so fondly for the experience of driving drunk (and needlessly, I might add) to the hospital or the sudden, chilly onsent of autumn in North Carolina that made me wish, as the hours went by and the booze began to wear off, that I'd brought along a jacket for you. I don't remember it so vividly because it was the first time I'd ever seen you cry and, amusingly enough, the first and, to my recollection, only time I've ever seen you naked.

No, the fondness of the memory only started with wandering in to find you fully dressed, and showering, when you were allegedly brushing your teeth. Finding myself in the shower with a beautiful woman in the middle of the night, still more than a little intoxicated, peeling off clothes to get at the monitors left adhered to your skin and thinking, vaguely, that in any other situation I'd be surely much more "clumsy" with my hands. The simplicity of crawling into a bed more suited fora toddler than two grown adults, the way you nestled between my body and the badly painted stone wall, curled up on my chest and fell asleep. That is the beauty of the night. That handful of minutes that crept into hours as I fell away from consciousness and woke to find you still there. Intimacy, whether romantic or platonic, has always been physical for me, despite my glibness of tongue and savvy wordsmithing. A touch, a look, is always more profound than the most heartfelt string of words. Hard to admit, but true.

Those hours of comfort, of trust, and closeness, are perhaps the most at peace I have ever felt.

The second night, I recall, ended with a scattered pile of my belongings tossed from a second-story window. I remember it not because I looked up at you, and at my clothes and assorted possessions tumbling haphazardly away from you, like a dumbfounded, jilted lover. I remember it for the look of pure mischievous amusement that remained on your face through it all. Clothes I don't ever remember giving to you and things I don't even recall fell away from your face until you disappeared from the window without a word.

I remember feeling a tumultuous mixture of laughter and fury, of confusion and sadness but, above all, a powerful desire to know what in the Nine Hells you were doing. I wanted to laugh and cry and slam my fists against the brick until I'd battered the walls down, or scale the building until I could crawl into your room and shake you until you answered my questions. Instead, I gathered my things and marched them back to my room. Until two days later when you arose and, laughing, took them back where they belonged.

I laid in bed tonight and thought of these things. Of dozens of talks, of six-hours walks that carried on into the encroaching dawn. Of four hour drives to a beach an hour and a half away and writing your name in the sand. Of horrendous downpours that struck the second we turned toward home. Of innuendo that slipped so easily between us, and long looks that convinced at least 800 people that we were bound to be crazy about each other.

I thought of them and felt a pain unlike anything I've ever felt before. A longing so powerful it hurled me out of bed and into my chair to write until it receeded like floodwaters in the weeks after a hurricane. Except it hasn't disappeared. I'm still here, 18 hours and hundreds of miles away, thinking and wondering.

And it suddenly occurs to me that it doesn't matter. The miles and the hours and the years between the nights I remember and tonight. It doesn't matter because the way I love you is so incomparable, so indestructible, that I never fear for a second that it might vanish alongside that longing. I may be wracked with the agony of being so far removed from all your waking moments, and I may tremble at the sheer depth of love I have for a friend, for a relationship that started with a pretty girl stealing my beer and, despite having no money and no beer left, not saying no because she seemed so earnest about wanting to try it for the first time.

I may feel those things, and all I'll do is smile. Because you are all the Order and the Chaos, the intimacy and the occasional fit of mischief, the bright things and the dimly remembered revelries, that make up what I love most in life. So another one for you, in this vast and multi-colored Rubix Cube.

Let's give them something to talk about.

Yours Always,
-S.R.

What You Do To Me

Jubilant does not begin to describe me. Ebullience does not scratch the surface of this. I am joy uncontained, passion unbridled, desire immeasurable. I am vast beyond comprehension and strength beyond comparison. I am powerful and raw, a seething mass of potential that grows only stronger, larger. I am unimaginable destruction and insurmountable benevolence. I am one, I am all, I'm Above and Beyond.

You can't see me, feel me, touch me. You can't hope to encompass, envelope something so tremendous with simple sense and sensation. A shiver running along the length of me would race forever in every direction. My pleasure is supreme, my pain is ultimate. You would look on me in awe, and tremble at the thought.

You would bow and beg, all of you who could stop the shaking long enough to move, to utter a single word. If you could see the way I feel tonight, you would flee in terror. You would burst into flames. You would fall in love so deep it would drown you. I am the center of all things, the creator and destroyer of all things.

Come live with me and be my love.

I have found, in these far-off, dreaming days, that I am insanity made flesh. I am love, given birth. I am wrath brought to life. I am a series of concepts, vague and powerful emotions. I am a creature of pure desires, consciousness of thought, awareness of action.

I could tear you to pieces, shred your flesh and crack your bones, peel the very fibers of your body apart with my bare hands. I relish that knowledge, that power. I am alive with it. Aroused by it.

I could bring you to a climax so severe, the aftershocks would topple cities. The flood would drown nations. Your voice would lift and crack, lilting into octaves beyond hearing, and deafen entire civilizations. Your body would spasm, so close to eruption, that Pompeii would cower and know it was on the cusp of death.

I could fill your heart with such reverence, such adoration, that it would hammer against your breast like a madman, like an army of madmen, raging to be let free. I could paint such innocent, pure affection on your face that all who looked upon you would gasp at how completely you love me.

I could burn all the worlds in the cosmos to ashes.

I am ineffable, intangible. Blinding brilliance, haunting darkness. Triumphant and defeated. Derelict, monolithic. I am multitudes and contradictions. Fragile and indestructible. I am a paradox of simple complications.

Come live with me and be my love.

I will poison you with poetry to leech the venom from your veins. I will siphon all the vileness and swallow it, let the infections fester in my guts and rot the flesh away. I will turn the light on all your darkness and devour your despair. I'll wrap these monstrous hands in you and strangle all your demons. You came into this world without them, and without them you will leave it.

I am not Salvation, she has danced out of my reach. I am not Redemption, she has flitted out of sight. I am not here to save you from the fear, or greif, or pain. I am here to hold you when the weight becomes too great. I am here to kill those things, should ever they arise, and show their twisted heads so that my blade may truly strike. I will protect you, when I can, whether with violence or with love. I will destroy you, if I have to, and I will pick the pieces up.

You are more than I can ask for, and more than I can be, though I am vast and infinite, omnipotent. Insignificant. I can burn the worlds to dust, but only you can show me life. I was made to do this thing, to belong to you.

Come live with me and be my love.

Unflinchingly Yours,
-S.R.

(Re)Occuring

I awoke from a dead sleep to the sound of screams, and reached for my sword. Sheets, sweat-soaked, tangled my legs as I scrambled out of bed, hunting furiously in the dark for my weapon. I cocked my head, listening as I fumbled in the pitch black. The scream echoed, but only in my mind, as if she screamed from across a chasm that existed only in my head. In a few moments, even the echo died away and it ocurred to me that I don't have a sword. I'm not wrapped in a bedroll, sleeping beneath the stars in my boots. I'm not being pursued. I'm standing in my bedroom, naked, breathing hard, and trying to decide when the characters I created became such a part of me that I shared their nightmares.

I awoke from a dead sleep and reached for you. I don't know what roused me. The house is silent, no vivid flashes of memory assail me. Not even the foggy idea of a dream gives me indication as to why I woke. I reach for you anyway, sure that whatever startled me out of sleep threatens you. I know I placed my body between it and you, sleeping at the edge of the bed furthest from the wall, just in case. The bed beside me is empty, save for pillows I've scattered in my restless sleep, a comforter I tore off at some point to alleviate the stiffling heat of the August night. Then it ocurred to me that this is ridiculous. Why should I wake and leap to protect you? Why should that be instinctual? You've never been here, never slept beside me. We've hardly met, and yet, I'm grasping for you in the darkness to reassure myself I haven't failed to keep you safe.

Sometimes, I like to gaze at my reflection long enough that it appears to be someone else. Like a word you repeat over and over until it loses its meaning, becomes so many impotent syllables. I think there's freedom in that breif span of meaningless words, a power to make them mean whatever you wish. I like to stare at my reflection until it becomes someone else, so I can create something attractive about myself. I admire the supple, full lips, so uncharacteristically soft. The promiment tone of biceps and legs thich with corded muscle. I find myself wondering about the eyes first blue, then green, then grey and back again. I wonder what thoughts they conceal, what they might convey with a look, what I might find about the man who belongs to those eyes if I just studied them a bit longer. I want to touch him and be touched, and it occurs to me that I can finally relate to all the people that have let me capture them in little glass jars and sit them on my shelves.

Sometimes I like to stare at the world. I like to watch, for hours, as the sun creeps overhead, changing shadows in its arc, spilling golden, ambient light first here, then there. I like to watch where the sun alights, as it warms the verdant leaves and grasses of these rural towns or sends streaks of fading light dancing across waves crashing onto an empty beach. A human interaction will spoil my study, but that so rarely happens. It occurs to me that the world, on its own, is a vastly more full place when it is emptied of mankind.

It occurs to me I'm not fond of the word 'occurs'.

I've been thinking and I realize I want to feel skin against mine. I want to feel lips. Hungry, insatiable lips. I want to kiss and be kissed, to feel another body pressed into me, strategically placed. Where my hands cup her cheeks, my thumbs roving up the curve of her ears. Where her breasts are flattened against my chest, soft supple skin pushing against me, a pleasant weight, just enough to get my heart beating. Her hips, just barely grazing mine, her legs wandering up and down my own, crossing each other at the ankles, brushing at the thighs, calves, toes. I want to feel her hands on my back, each fingertip a seperate point of gentle pleasure. I have never kissed a woman without craving her fingers on my naked back, kneading the muscles between my shoulders as if those ten points of contact could somehow give her more of me.

I want to sink into her slowly, without all the tearing of flesh, the clenching of teeth, the low, rumbling rage in the throat that so often accompanies these flashes of eroticism. I can see her hips rising, just slightly, to meet me. A hint of impatience. One bare, shapely leg wrapping around my waist, pulling, just a suggestion of desire. I can see my hand, absent-mindedly holding that leg from beneath, as if supporting what she wants. A promise of an ecstasy that is as slow and deliberate in arriving as it is certain to arrive.

I can see her body, littered with kisses. The hardly visible glistening of sweat and saliva on her skin. Eyes fluttering closed. A soft, almost inaudible sigh escapes her open mouth, rolls over my lips and into mine as if a part of her is inside me at the moment before she's wrapped around me completely.

In time, I'm sure, I'll awake from this. Perhaps reaching for a sword or an absent, half-imagined lover. Perhaps with fingers turned to claws and teeth to fangs that will seek to tear flesh, shed blood, degrade and destroy. To bring pain like only the Sadist in me can imagine. But it occurs to me that this, this brief and ultimately meaningless fantasy, is more and more a reflection I've stared at long enough to make it mean anything.

Thoughtfully Yours,
-S.R.