I feel peaceful. Why is this? Peace is not my pretense or pretend. Meds, maybe, but there is nothing new there. Not being at work. Is not everything work? Diurnal ablutions. Shitting. Masturbating. It’s all a job, work to be done.
I should not feel peace at this moment. I should feel pieces. Pieces of a woman, pieces of her heart. Does she still think about me the way she did? How and when do I think of her. Even now I think of her mouth multiple times in a day. Purring sound that came from it. Lips softer than water. How she left me trembling, shaking and shaken to the core, which itself came dislodged and flailed in a nakedness.
She can never leave my mind. Today she reentered my face. Looking for something unrelated I found the panties she left me in a dresser drawer. They still smell sweet. I can still taste her in them. Even now that feeling she summoned from me, feeling of fear and joy and anticipation, it rises again.
It’s been 4 years since we spoke. I made her happy. That scared me. She was consummately happy after our times together. I was never fully satisfied. How hard she made me seemed impossible. So hard it should have hurt but any pain I felt passed on into her bony, ribbed-like texture. Her panties today were not just a placeholder or memento. They are her body, they are her breath, her mouth, the taste and tempo of her countless climaxes. Has anyone else made me feel so alive, albeit a contorted, disrupted form of being alive?
I did what I do. I looked her up online, to see if she’s still up to something, still out there. Her public presence is minimal. I suspect she is not even aware of some of it. A faceless business profile. A forgotten social media account. Legal proceedings involving a debt collection case brought before a California judge over 15 years ago. My head fills with white sand remembering our connections. For as little seems to be of her on the public Internet I find, curiously obscure to the searchies, her YouTube channel. It is mostly saved videos of vegan recipes and exercise regimens but there I am. She still has the videos I made for her, including one with a series of photos of her set to piano music by her favorite composer of our time. It’s not my best playing but that doesn’t matter. Every image in this video contains a novel worth of stories and intertwinings behind it. We lived dozens of lives together, and some of those lives rise in my gut and crotch as I type these words. I don’t mean to dwell on this but no woman ever made me so goddam hard as did she. It still makes my neck feel disconnected and my tongue lost. She scared me by waking up something inside me I did not know was there. I was terrified to be happy.
Pictures of her in this video will haunt me today. Her lonely, searching eyes, the softness of her mouth, my insatiable desire for that slender, lithe body. I knew her. She knows me.