I lay in bed beside you, feeling the damp warmth of your breathe on my neck and the weight of your leg, your thigh, heavy across my hips. I hoped you would awaken and move, but I didn't want to wake you; so I didn't move. My pelvic bones hurt a little, but then love-making hurts a little too sometimes; so it was okay.
I don't know what to feel towards you. I want to love you, but I don't (and I don't know how).
It is not quite lust; you are not really my type, and I know I am not yours.
It is not quite liking: I don't know you, and you don't know me. We repeat the same inane things to each other every time we sleep together, the first things that come to our minds. You told me about how you weren't doing well in school, but how if you managed two B's, you could stay. I told you about how I wanted to be different for different's sake until I got tired of that and now cannot figure out what I want to be, or do. Are these fears that we share, our deepest truths, our hidden selves, or are they trivialities that we discard, harmless minutiae laid out for whoever would have them?
Neither is it disliking: I wouldn't have come again, satin sheets or no, if I disliked you, and even though it was unhappy break-up sex for you (I am just "the girl on the side," those are your words, and you were upset about someone else), I could not sense a disliking.
And of course (this is a given), it is not love. It is nothing like love.
So why have you been on my mind? Why you and not someone else? People I'd cared more about and who cared about me. Guys who were better in bed, or with whom I'd had more sexual chemistry, or more sexual tension. They have not been on my mind as much as you have. Why?
I don't want a relationship. I don't know how to care about someone without eventually asking them to leave. Just walk away, I say. Just leave, just stop, don't. I don't want to make this work anymore, I've said. You deserve so much better. Can we just be friends again? Every old, tired line: I've said them all, often in quick succession, because I didn't know what else to say. I never know the right thing to say.
And I know you don't want a relationship with me, because you talk about the other girls in your life when we are in bed, and I don't mind because it makes me feel safe holding you and knowing we won't need to work to make "us" work, because there's no "us" upon which to work, no pain, no tears, no wounded pride, no break-up sorrow, for either of us. We can be happy together when we are together. We can be happy apart when we are apart.
Then I made the mistake of reading your blog. I watched the videos you linked to. I read about your hurts and sorrows. I began to savor your bittersweet prose and poetry. Now I am presumptuous enough to assume I know you, and I am uncomfortable and unsettled that, while I am just another hook-up to you, your writing has made you three-dimensional and real and much more than just another fuck buddy to me.
The more I read what you write, what you wrote for others' eyes, not mine, I realize I would be delighted to get to know you, to really know you (and not in the Biblical sense, because I'm afraid we've taken care of that already). The truth is, I would like it very much if we were buddies more than fuck buddies, "friends with benefits" more than mere "benefits."
Anyway, you stirred, your cherubic face reassembling and readying itself for the heaviness of humanity, the burdens of the day ahead. I had slept little because your clock chimed every hour, and every hour, I would turn in bed to find you asleep, untroubled. When I finally climbed out of bed, my worries flew ahead to a test later in the day, but all I could recall was the strange disjointed sequence of dreams, that gift of restless nights, incomprehensible images that exhaustion threads together, and our bodies, and our breaths, the primal panting, the heaving, the sighing--that was all my mind could hold. I did poorly on the reporter's test that day, and I couldn't make up my mind if it had been worth it; so I chose to forget about it, and about you.
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