She Was.

So, I’m thinking now that the bunny on the doorstep was some sort of omen-y precursor to the man that arrived on my doorstep almost exactly a week later. I’ve written about him before, big, messed up, messy, familiar, could be love but isn’t. I haven’t wanted to write about him again, yet, now, because I’m stubbornly holding onto the little girl belief that if I talk about it, if I write it down, instead of making it real, making him real, it will, he will, vanish away – poof! – on a cloud of make-believe dust. Except, I want to write about it, I want to think about it, and I want to keep rolling his name around on my tongue.

He is older than me. He is much bigger than me, and bigger than anyone I’ve ever been with before. He is completely other to me, completely foreign and yet completely comfortably just my size. I’m obsessed with self and other. I’m intellectualizing this. When I’m with him, I feel like I’m hovering above us, watching, listening, judging. And that is unlike me. When I was younger I wanted to know my lovers. Their thoughts, their preferences, their wants, their desires, everything, anything, that ever mattered to them, and yet now, now I find myself asking nothing and revealing even less. I am almost mute, waiting to see what he chooses to reveal, gathering his thoughts as he speaks them, I’m wrapped in what he chooses to tell me, instead of what I want to know. And I’m second guessing myself. I’m unsure, uncertain, stumbling. He asks questions and when I answer I wonder if I have answered honestly, if I believe my own answer. And I am not trying to give the right answers, or to be someone other than who, what, I am, I’m unsure in and of myself. I do not know how much I want to tell him, I do not know how close I want to let him be. And this has nothing to do with him. This is me fighting to let go.

And he is exactly the same. Together we are like two awkward and wounded animals, sniffing around each other, assessing risks and threats, hurts to avoid to come to fall into. We do come from the same sour place. And yet he makes me glad for other endings, because without them, I would not have him now. With the lights on we are unfailingly polite, distant, cool, in our heads, and yet as soon as the lights dim, when it darkens and we fall into each other, the words we can’t say fall out of our mouths and onto each other’s skin. He grabs at me. His face, when I pull away from his kisses, my response to it, it scares me. I know that I am expressionless. Unaffected. On the surface. It’s all I let him see. But, really, the pull between us, the want, it frightens me. And it frightens me, because on some level, I recognise, I think we both recognise, that this, this thing between us, is calling us to jump and try to swim.

I cannot, do not, know how to swim. I’ve always been too afraid to let go.

I do not want to fuck this up.

Last Wednesday, when I woke up, there was a bunny at my door.

She seemed lost, a little shy, unsure.

I consider it a good sign that she stopped here, with me. I don’t know why, but I think random bunnies on your doorstep in late autumn can only mean good things.

.

It is late autumn here, and it is beautiful.

The water is soft and the sky is heavy. Walking alone on the sand it feels like the temperature of the air, the rain, the sea, my skin, are the same. We are damp and almost together. I like that the day gives way gently and I watch, so that I can learn. Everything is transient here, now, the waves, light, dark. It feels good to know that. I’m so far past shame, and grief and hurting. But I will never believe in the flip side, in the bright and shiny, and neither will you and I like that about us. I like how well you fit. And I’ve never thought in terms of fit before. There are words everywhere, words that make me screw my face up and shake my head, to shake them out? I don’t know. But, I do know, that there is here and now and my breath warm soft whispering against your ear, and I’m thinking how I didn’t think that I would graze your skin again, and I’m noticing that you move into me, and how we move closer together and how we are both saying again, and I am asking you not to forget and you are promising that you won’t. And there is nothing, better, than promises and finding again something that you thought you’d long lost. I am patient. You are water soft.