Often, the best kind of release is long before you’re untied.
hair
“leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them." – Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell, a poem by Marty McConnell.
I like the moment where hair becomes a liability. Where it sticks to foreheads and temples, where it slides and clings between fingers. I like the fact that somehow we want to get barer, to shed just another hindrance until it is us at our most basic and needy.
I like the shoving of limbs that comes with that. The folding them up and the stretching them wide. Suddenly, even the most essential things have suddenly become dispensable, excessive. At one point, they were the very things we caressed, lingered on, drew from them painstaking and labored admissions of desire. And, now, like our clothes, we attempt to toss them aside.
It’s interesting to me that for how extensive foreplay and physical upkeep can be, for how much we know prolonging and lingering enhances this, our bodies creep toward a singleminded desire, removing the excess and diving forth into the necessary.
I went out and had a really lovely dinner with my friends tonight. We were laughing, chatting, enjoying ourselves. Until, suddenly, Elle walked in with one of her friends to get some pickup.
It was incredibly uncomfortable. Because while I talked to SG a lot about my feelings over the situation, I haven’t shared with her how I felt. I just had sort of decided that this and a few other things were enough of a reason to cut her out, at least for now. She’s not a positive presence in my life at all.
I tried to act like I didn’t see her, but she made a beeline to my table to say hello. I was polite, but didn’t give her much more than that. I don’t want to be confrontational. And I especially don’t want to let her know how much what she did affected me, because that would just be feeding into it.
I didn’t say goodbye when she left. But, it upset me how uncomfortable and small around her I felt. I absolutely hated it. It was even worse to explain to my friends why I had not been particularly friendly to her. I haven’t told very many people about the whole SG debacle because I didn’t want to start anything.
Fortunately, the rest of the night was lovely. But I just can’t stand how much I let certain people affect me.
You know, what spring does and all.
That is what you want to do, isn’t it?
“Ah! Do you have to be sensual to be human?”
“Certainly, Madame. Pity is in the guts, just as tenderness is on the skin.”
– Anatole France, The Red Lily.
Photograph submitted by jeunefille18.
Sometimes, you just want her all at once. You realize that you’re not capable of such a thing. You bring her close but you can never quite bring her close enough. You press yourself into her with such force that you suppose that perhaps you’ll finally just fall into her.
The top layer of our cells are sloughed off. It’s a little disgusting to think about, but there’s something romantic about the idea that we leave a little bit of ourselves everywhere we go and on everything we touch. And so you can figure that part of her is on you, part of you is on her.
And you figure maybe that’s a huge part of intimacy: not being sure what’s you and what’s her anymore.
She has a set of rules to follow regarding how to sit in chairs. Perhaps they’re a little particular, but most are in the interest of posture, others aesthetic.
When she’s caught, she’ll insist that she’s sitting up straight. She will tell you how this shows her off better, how it makes prominent the lacing of her corset or the thin fabric over her rear.
And it will all make perfect sense, but so will the added punishment of the top of the back of the chair digging into her stomach as she’s pulled up, bent over it and dealt with properly.
“Great Babylon was naked, oh she stood there trembling for me,
and Bethlehem inflamed us both
like the shy one at some orgy.
And when we fell together all our flesh was like a veil
that I had to draw aside to see
the serpent eat its tail."
Agh, help.
Tumblr community, I see how you helped Heart with her little date lingerie decision.
Well.
That guy from my frat and I are going out tonight and left to my own devices I’d dress like a second grader (actual quote from a friend). So um help me figure out an outfit and please suggest stuff because I just don’t know.
This message brought to you by my inability to be a functioning adult.