She Was.

I’m wearing heart shaped bruises from the tip of my left shoulder to the crease of my elbow. I like them. My shadow proof. Purple night blooms, I check them every day for sides of fading. I should be wearing long sleeves. But I’m not. Smirk. My validation(s). He has beautiful hands but his touch is different. I watch his fingers trace up and down my criss-cross thighs and smile when they disappear under the hem of my skirt. I like this image and I want to catch it, keep it, hold it, frame it, send it in emails across the currents. My validation(s).  His name is the same. What are the chances? His name is entirely not commonplace but here we go again. He is dark and tall and a -can you even believe it – migrant with the same name. I’m talking visa’s and mothers and lacoste tshirts and my heart is hammering out of my chest because this is how it was supposed to be and it is but different, I am the same, he is the same but it’s not him. He picks me up on his motor bike and we speed wind through the city and this time my hair is not tangled by the wind. It’s tucked safely under the helmet he puts on my head, won’t let me ride without, and before he clicks down the visor he tickles the tip of  my pink pink nose. I love the bike. I love sneaking away from work, meeting, in secret, I’m playing stupid games, carrying two jackets, it’s so cold here now, my arms wrapped around him, my legs tight around his. I love that he has a bike. I love that I’m the girl telling the other girls to get on, it’s fun, it’s safe, you’ll love it. My validation(s). In my room, he curls around me, his chest warm on my back, his breath on my neck, his fingers curled around my breasts. I wait for him to fall asleep and gently push him away. The first night I slept on the couch. I can’t  be held. I feel like I’m drowning, stare at the wall, don’t sleep. But in the morning, I wake up and his arms are tight around me and I like it, in that instant of being half asleep and half awake for this first time I don’t know where I am and I like it. When he is tired, we both are, his english falters and I find myself speaking slower, trying to catch the thickness of his accent, and when he asks me the correct pronunciation of something, when he asks me what something means, I do my very best to keep my voice steady and my answers thoughtful. And I’m showing him around the place where we live, and we are walking, riding, seeing, through other eyes and this is exactly how it was supposed to be. Just like I imagined it, the missed experience I mourned when I came home, here, now, in my bed, on my tongue, in my living room, and yet it’s not. It’s the same name but not the same person. And I do not know if I am with him because I like him, or because of who he reminds me of. I do not know whether that resemblance attracts me or repels me but I know that he is alone here, and, that predictably, I too remind him of a girl who wore her fringe heavy in her eyes. Just the way that I do.

Confess:

When I slept with this boy he didn’t remind me of anyone or anything. His accent, his visa, his newness, his name, it never even occured to me. I didn’t join any dots. I slept with him because I was tired of waiting for someone else. I slept with him because he is charming and because when I was sitting wrapped around him on the back of his bike I thought why not. I slept with him because he wanted to sleep with me. I slept with him because I was curious. I wanted to see if that heat, that need, that fierceness between me and that much bigger than me man was a product of my own imagination. If the rightness I feel with him is real, can be replicated, is even what I want. And it is. But I am not willing to let him know. I am not willing to do anything about it. He is completely emotionally unavailable. And I suspect, more and more each day, that I am too.

Confess:

I am sleeping with him still, because if I do, if I can, if I can sleep with someone just like him, with the same name, then I must be over it, I  must be past it, and I can do it again, and I survived and I’m the stronger one, because I’m the one stepping back onto familiar territory with my eyes open and I’m  not running away from the dejavu and the thumping of my chest doesn’t mean I’m weak, it means I’m brave, and fuck you asshole, he’s better than you and he is younger and better looking and he has a bigger – ahem – bike.

Confess:

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. And I perversely quite like it.