jessewestend

When my car pulled to her door she was was staring at me like Sylvia Plath at the waters edge. Her fine, milk-white, New England skin shone like the surface of a moon's moon. My eyes ran down her shoulders and stopped at her delicate fingers clutching that ghost-white cloth purse. A simple bag filled with secrets. She had always been much like that purse. Delicate, thinly veiled skin covering a macabre collection of shady secrets. She called herself a writer, but I generally used harsher words to describer her. I tore down her image in the absence of her touch. Perhaps it was out of self defense or perhaps I was aware of the way anger fueled our lust. Or maybe that isn't even the right word. In the end we were eternally "just friends" engaged in our own form of contorted dialogue. She never spoke, but it seemed all we ever did is talk. So much must have been lost in translation. Sometimes I would lie awake at night wondering if it were the good or bad that lay just out of my reach.I don't even think we knew what our secrets were, only that we couldn't share them. We could only talk around them in our own little way. We would lay in silence for hours, half-watching movies we had already seen before either my words or her childlike hands made the first attempt at contact.
Her embraces spoke volumes to me. They told me how she had been loved before, and how it had gone wrong. They told me of her childhood, and spoke a great deal about her future. I knew her strength, and I shared her weakness. God did I love to listen to her but my ears still ached for sound. My heart burned at the thought of it and it became on and off obsession. To hear more than stories about other people or work. To listen instead of interpret the things she had already told me so many times in her repressed way.
"Vocalize! Speak to me. Just talk... please"
I begged, for I knew that while her hands could say so much her throat would always remain forever silent. And all I had was this atom bomb of emotion welling up in my heart; an encylopedic collection of things to discuss, describe, detail while my hands, while all of my expensive tattoed skin grew ever colder to the touch. Her hands fell on deaf ears, and my words just bounced off of her skin. I suppose that is where the conflict came from. Because somehow, beneath it all... we needed each other. We were just terrible at it. Terrible at everything.
So when I pulled up outside her apartment, and she stood there with her sweetly slouched posture staring at me like I were the oceans eternal edge I knew why. I knew that she was terrified of falling into me and never coming out.
And like the force of nature I could be, I wanted nothing more than to consume her...