Meeting Secret

Blind me.

Build me.

Break me.

Bruise me.

By the end, I want you to own me, taken up in snatches and locked away. I am a curse to those who don't understand what blessings are, or how they may be disguised.

I get lost easily. Frightened. Fascinated.

Please, if I beg, will you find me?

There is reason I'm a Gemini, not a sign built on earth. If I am air, what are you?

What...aren't you?

This is fright in color. Something nearer black than the dark side of the world. Something sickly and exposed, like laughter left to for long. Broken open or apart. Something sinful like you've done before, but exhilarating like the first time an underage girl went down on you.

REmember the feeling of her lips as she tried to remember how to breathe? That's what it's like, just stretching for a moment you can't remember properly because sentiment gets lost. Degraded, paraded along the shores of virtue too dark to reminisce by.

Do you remember anything like the light of the lighthouse offshore the first time you actually made-like and didn't just fuck? Or maybe it was love, except she didn't remember it that way - just came up for air when it was all over, and kissed you, and when you said "I love you," her eyes glimmered.

"I like you," she said. "A lot."

Really, all that mattered was that it was a lot. More than a little, or just is. The qualifier made all the difference, until it felt like she'd proclaimed her undying love for you from the top of the world.

It really is just imagination. Hard to recall exactly, but take my word for it. Imagination. Not reality. Not like the first time a candy bar walked out of the dollar store in your pocket, or you asked a man for a twenty and got it because you had a knife to his back where no one could see.

They all thought he was generous, or later, that he'd known you, because he refused anyone else who asked, with cold looks and pleasant "fuck off"s.

Imagination is just a folding of reality. Remember it.

Imagination is nothing like when you started calling your best friend by her last name because too many boys had her first. Or when you spent an entire afternoon sleeping in an elderly man's living room because he was away and you felt more comfortable in an empty house than being home.

Maybe it's close to the panic of losing a sharp edge after one too many drinks, but when you learned to long for loss of memory, the whole damn world taunted you. And you still couldn't lose control. It was written into you, the way your eye color was established when you had just gotten out of second grade. Before then, everyone just assumed they were grey, like the rest of your monochromatic existence.

You had to borrow paint brushes from an old friend and rob the corner store to add something like a rose tint back into life.

And somewhere between taking coins off the street and taking them from people, you discovered how many shades red has.

If this were a fictional account of someone I knew, I'd lie and say it wasn't. But when I'm writing another life in the twilight zone from Sunday backwards...no lies necessary. It's still not true.

But your first boyfriend wanted to ask who the sixth man in your life was, and I told him I'd inquire. There's only been four that I know of and half are gone by now; virtue of time.

Have you ever kissed wind?

I have and here's a secret for you - he uses a lot of tongue ever though he's gentle about it. Not like making out with water and having hands touch you places reserved for a final date. I guess I could forgive him, though, even if you couldn't. He's good enough in bed and I don't like kissing much anyway.

But I have a secret to tell you. Listen close because it's important and I don't want you to forget too quick. I don't like kissing because it's too close. That's a vulnerability. Something broken down into where it hurts and I can't get away. Unless I bite, because anyone sane pulls away after that.

The ones who aren't sane...well, I don't leave much to deal with, usually. But every so often I don't have a real reason to bite. Just the voice inside reminding me, "you're afraid, he's too close." Sometimes I need that reminder.

Like this one time when I ran away from home because I couldn't stand the silence. I flew on wings made of carpenterized steel to someone else's hell-hole and spent the day admiring birds and getting mistaken for someone brave.

I have the bruises to prove it, because I crashed so many times when I was flying, and the earth had a smug grin every time I launched myself back into air. Or at least, that's what I tell people. The ones who believe me just nod and shake their heads; clumsiness is a natural mask.

Serves well for every time I find myself associating with the other side. Anyway, what you have to know is this - my secret...

IT's in the way they look at you, with their eyes. That's what reminds me what fear is. Not selfishness or a depth of self-loathing, but fear. And I'll tell you right now that I'd feel safer with someone trying to kill me than having eyes meeting mine, and something unknown in their depths.

But that's a secret, and I know you won't tell anyone because truthfully... Who else is there to tell?