Absolution

Was last night a beginning or an end? The frenetic interlocking of our two willing bodies our intimacy deepened in the conscious decision to forgo a physical barrier between. Not so much a choice as the natural continuation of our selves colliding. Creation absent a tangible product, save the deepening necessity of each to the other. Where do I lie when I lie in your arms? Your bed made temporarily ours, will my stake hold in your sheets continue on or is this afterglow payment of my dividends in full.

Lain bare beneath you, above you, in all the permutations of my entanglement with you there were no nerves. No lingering doubt of worth or beauty. Only burning, searing within my skin, an unyielding need to feel you closer still. Apologies tumbled from my lips for the urgency of my limbs, meant only in the sense of the regrettable hastening of an end to our dance. The most delicious exercise of control we held ourselves a single rushed breath from the edge chasing the next peak in a tumult seemingly without end. Exposed we faced each other lips pressed together frozen in a moment, culmination in a kiss. I felt your smile and you felt my heart race again or, perhaps for the first.

The purity of your gaze is devastating. As though, for the first time ever my best self is seen by eyes that owe me no mercy. The relentless necessity of your finger tips a marvel. How they can touch this body and crave ever more the softness of my skin. Your mouths hunger, how it chases my lips my shoulders my throat bare as the rest of my entirety to you. In the way you see me, touch me, taste me. The unapologetic way you take me devouring me physically, visually, emotionally, mentally. You set the self residing in my head ablaze, exorcising the legion in my mind. Effortless folding into each other, with you a serenity never in my life have I known.

As we enter this new chapter who is it that you will be my lover? Faced with the inevitability of a line now crossed to be crossed and crossed again until it disappears as even fond memories are wont to do. What will you do? The decision passed to you, to decide the continuance of that glorious closeness, perhaps given foolishly? The truth of my questioning evidenced in the leveraging of my intimate self for your promise, an implication of a promise of a maybe one day love. In suspension I wait mid breath for the moment your text message comes. Innocuous, the low hum of plastic and metal signals a renewed connection. I breathe. Tenuous brevity afforded by the cruel miser, ambition. In moments left on the altar of academia you, a physical manifestation of a dream, fade just beyond my ability to fathom the reality of we.

You crossed my boundary, breathing life and vitality into my hollowed beauty. Is yours the natural charm of a practiced seduction or the genuine appreciation of my oneness ended finally perhaps by your presence? When I gave into you, gave myself to you, shared with you if only in risk the most intimate of physical acts, that of creation, which warmth I wonder did you feel. Was it the very depth of my innocent vulnerability exposed to your hunger that you felt or simply one more supplication to physical desire? In these aching moments of uncertainty, questioning of my place in the pantheon of your life I wonder what have I lost in losing myself in you. Or indeed what have I gained.

Projection of my negative sense of self worth on my relative worth to you anathema to the forward motion I so wholly crave. Raw and fresh it corrodes, an acid splash burn on our memories particularly those yet to be made. Few and new those moments of bliss the delight of your body, your voice, your scent somehow you have become tainted by my natural enemy, myself. By the insecurity I will never let you see. Demons tearing at my phantom control. The ephemeral veil with which I conceal that part of myself I wish to annex to a self no longer standing. I see them in my eyes and hear them in the very tremor in my voice. They live in the spaces between my breaths when the persistent roar of self doubt overcomes all else.

I want to love you free of them, for so long the most defining part of my private self. I want to be able to trust myself in your absence, to love myself as perhaps you do or one day will. The possibility for so much before me, perpetually it is in jeopardy for my inability to separate the self and society in my head from the one around me. An entire world warped by one warped image. Such horrors hide in the beauty others see. A world of darkness binding torturously winding the perception of all that I am into a tangled knot of expectation and emotion aimed decidedly in the most self destructive direction. More so even than the grace I have found in your smile, I need to heal myself. In the ashen rebirth of the Beth that has never yet been, perhaps, I’ll find peace.