When I have too much coffee my chattering mind always takes me back to the Husky House where Jesse sits across the table from me in his thin t-shirt through which his shoulder blades are so plainly visible. Soap-tasting coffee, and fluorescence, and spilled sugar. I drag my finger through spilled sugar, trying to trace his outline. The woman who refills our cups is named Tweety. Her name tag says so. We don't comment. This is not the kind of time when you can make jokes. I wonder why this night is so deeply burned into my psyche. Her lipstick bleeds into the lines around her mouth.
Jesse was here, back in my life again, for about four weeks this summer. He is gone again. He always leaves. This time he was not so emaciated. This time it was my sister who had died. Jesse is not a fuck-buddy, he is a funeral buddy, and this has been the root of our intimacy. Fucking was incidental. (I sometimes wish I could still see it this way now.) When I was twenty-four Jesse told me that being close to me was like trying to hug a fire.
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8 comments:
Anyone ever told you that you have a way with words?
Made me shiver.
sometimes our lives arrive in us moments we never could have imagined. Sometimes in these moments we are more alive than we ever thought was possible.
In my experience, fucking was never incidental. But I know I'm strange.
I am pondering what it might be like to hug a fire since I escaped from one at close range as a child. Will ponder some more, and yes, you do absolutely have a way with words.
Thanks meno. I like words very very much.
Paul, is this why you think these moments are more deeply etched in memory?
Susan, you are not strange. Incidental is the wrong word (said she who pretends to be good with words). I should have said it was beside the point. I have never been caught in a fire but I have been burned enough times to know I don't want to hug one.
While I concur with the comment of heartinsanfranciso, I also appreciate your choice of the word 'incidental'. I put my own meaning to it, 'as a beside' which seemed to fit with the context. I'm big on words meaning what you mean them to mean rather than what the dictionary says.
Sometimes it is worth being singed!
...and you have a marvelous, burning way with words.
I like it when words are bendy like that. Like the word "singed" for example, should really be the past tense of "to sing". "She singed like a nightingale." Well some words are more flexible than others.
I actually get the incidentalnes of it. Sometimes the fucking is the main thing, sometimes it is part of a larger whole, and sometimes it is nearly beside the point.
You savvy...
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