Diary of a Human (5 page)

DIARY OF A HUMAN

5 Fall(ING)

5.1//beginnings

That awkward hug that endures for half a minute too long.  I let myself melt into her suffocating, staggering embrace last night.  Hello and goodbye.  She held my hand and it felt all too natural to touch her arm and the small of her back as I maneuvered around her shapely form.

That laugh. Gut-busting, grinning white teeth, head tossed back.  She touches my arm and then buries her head into my shoulder, near tears.

That scent. Indescribable, inimitable, unforgettable.

A cover band blares in the background, smoky men with gapped teeth challenge us for our pool table. And we laugh.

I stare at her, unnoticed, and long to brush the defiant tangle of hair for crossing her deliberate features  Brush the arrogant stand behind her ear.  Stroke my unworthy fingertips along her marble cheekbones, and down her jaw.

But not even her tendrils are willing to be tamed.

The weatherman claimed it was cold outside, but I didn’t feel a thing.  Her eyes smoldered into mine, her eye-lock never wavering.

I’m always confident at the end of the night.  She had controlled the evening with her captivating conversation and facility with the language I so hungered to hear.

But the night belongs to Aries, not Cancer.

5.2//wanting

No one realizes the torture of wanting that which you cannot have so have so well as I.  She reclines in my bed, a fingertip’s breath away, her radiating smile haunting even my daydreams.  Her poetic face may flicker beyond the candle-lit shroud that halos the room, but no one can deny her that smile.

I woke up with a hangover form that smile.

Her snowy flesh betrays the strength hidden within delicate and delicious exposed bone.  I could drink her skin all evening into the early hours when the sun refuses to stay in bed.

5.3//the player and the fool

She only stares at me when I do not look upon her.  But when we kiss, when I kiss her, I feel.  There are no words.  But I suddenly know I’m not going through the motions.  All my thoughts focus on that moment and the movement of lips and tongue, gently massaging hers with my own, our lips dancing for the first time.  I feel her body move against mine and my senses overload.

Even now when my thoughts roam to her, my hands on her hipbones and hers tripping along my stomach, there is a stirring within my body that transforms to a jolt.

She calls me a player and I find her the fool.  She paints my portrait in the form of a better-forgotten past rather than an optimistic future. 

She never looks to me directly, only through mirrors and other altered reflections as if fearful that my piercing gaze could melt the fences she has constructed around her fragile heart.

She fears I’ll play her like these tired strings, but I know the truth.  My fingertips are callused from playing the same repetitious tune.  When will the song end?  Only she has the power to snap shut the lid of this music box and save me from myself.

5.4//father time

This morning I lay in bed, awake, while the world outside passed me by.  The moments turned to minutes turned to hours turned to sunlight fading.  Try as the rest of the world might to jar me from this solace, I turned a deaf ear to its persistent ringing and knocking all around me.

Life rumbled by beyond the windowpane, in dire of a new muffler, but my reality was muffled by the softness of your snowy skin and buried under mountains of unmovable flannel.

The heat of your body betrayed the iciness of the early morning, and I felt consumed and scorched within your innocent embrace.  I remained a prisoner belted beneath leather straps and stretched denim, despite how my bare flesh flamed to feel your fire.

But regardless of my costume, I will continue to exist as such – a slave to Father Time and His delicate mistress, Patience, and will thus remain until the day you can finally see my true face with undistorted vision.

5.5//little yellow box

My thoughts have been taken prisoner and a ransom exists for my emotions.  I hear a familiar guitar riff and am catapulted to a moment from which I cannot escape.  My body is pinned beneath yours, pinned against a sapphire blue wall, but I do not wish to ever evade your form.

So I run away to hide in my little yellow box, hidden from the micromanaging of an overly demanding supervisor, sitting in silence, and hidden from you.  The only sounds, my hollow breathing and the pulsing thud of my heart, spitting rhythms in my ears.  The overhead light buzzes, and I shield my eyes from the harshness of its glow.

My heart is out of shape. And with you, it runs a marathon.

5.6//only when we sleep

My throat has gone raw from singing your praises.  My fingernails bleed from the biting steel strings of your bloody heart. And I can only have you when we sleep.

Your warm body curls naturally into mine and I stroke the soft strands of silken blonde between awkward fingers, watching your twin pools of blue slowly grow heavy with sleep.

I want to creep into your head and frolic in your brain.  Sneak past the ear canal and drum, slither up the narrow tubes and dive into the delicate pink tissue.  I yearn to sift my hands through the thoughts and phrases and watch them slip through my fingers like grains of sand.

It is only in dreams where we consent to that for which we long. Identical dreams. Our bodies unmoving, untouching, unrealized; our minds entwined and tangled up in desires like sweat soaked, cotton bed sheets.

My legs grow weary from wading through the dense, rich, heavy, complicated, diverse thoughts that bog your consciousness.  But in dreams I swim freely, my limbs no longer held with constraints.

5.7//seventy-five, twenty-five

Three-fourths of you believes the words that I write to you.  Three-fourths trusts the syllables that escape my lips.  One-fourth of you lays awake at night, alone in your bed, and wonders if I share my own with someone else in your absence.  One-fourth of you tears napkins into shredded bits when out with your friends, nervous that I might be smiling at another woman’s joke.

And to save my own sanity, three-fourths of you thinks of me. But one-fourth does not. There is only so much I can control.

My favorite pillow smells less and less like me everyday, and the memory of your presence is as fresh as your perfume on my flannel sheets.

5.8//hold my hand

There is nothing quite as intimate as holding hands with your lover.  The lacing fingers fitting like the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: locking, entwined.  Hot hands, anxious to roam freely.  You feel her lips pressing with need against the bare skin of your neck, the teeth just barely grazing the flesh, lightly nipping and biting to show how delicious she finds you.

I let her devour me without restraint.

And I wait with pseudo-patience for the minute when she will allow
herself
to be consumed and devoured by Emotions and Feelings that cannot be walled up behind her dam of Caution and Pragmatism.

5.9//trust

It was as if something inside her had been flipped – a hidden switch that previously had been rusted static from betrayal and distrust. The long winter months had corroded the material so that only patience and time could move this woman.  There was something set, determined and intense, in her features as we battled with that early morning goodbye.

I kissed her hard with a passion unrealized, eliciting soft moans and heavy breaths from each other’s throats.  It was more than the tension and anticipation of a month without release; it was the crumbling of fortress walls and the shedding of protective armor.

The chatter of drunken strangers melted away, blurring over as though only she and I remained in that moment.  I stood with her in that darkened alley, holding hands, our foreheads lightly touching.  And even though she existed with eyes closed, I felt as though she could see into my essence and I into her own.  It was too hard to let go, to turn my back on a night filled with laughter and truths.

She says I have her wrapped around my little finger, but she has me drowning in her Being.

5.10//Lub-Dub

My brain is cluttered with typed fonts, smeared with Xerox ink, and littered with paper-cuts.  My fingers bleed highlighter yellow and thin blue lines that dissect the off-white page flood my irises.  Yet with all of these distractions, I still am preoccupied with thoughts of you.

My head is clogged with maps and kinds and social unrest, but my beating muscle, whose tissue I now know all too well throbs only for you.  The gentle, rhythmic Lub-Dub, Lub-Dub now echoes a new refrain.

When I look at you, smiling, eyes crinkling, I experience a wash of emotions and I force myself to blink fast and swallow hard so the tears of my happiness will not soil your powder-soft skin when my lips press against your own.

I cannot hold you long enough or tight enough.  Cannot resist the urge to touch or cling onto some part of your, if only a bit of cloth.  My hands feel empty without your fingers laced around mine. My bed, vast and empty, without you a fingertip’s length away.

5.11//found

There is a gaping hole in my chest where a happy heart once resided. 

And once upon a time, a damsel in distress, full of green eyes and anger, found herself an armored knight. Unbeknownst to this carefree knight, the damsel collected hearts, like the preying mantis and her mate.

But I found where she hid my heart.

You had it.

And I’ve come to collect.

I have learned form the mistake of my predecessor.  The mistakes of a woman with forked tongue and green eyes. A woman who shed her skin with ease, becoming someone different to everyone she wished to appease.

And I want to say the words, just as she did before me. But her mistake will not become my own.  So as I watch the words slip out from between pursed lips, floating in the stale air of a smoky bar or creeping out beneath the silence of art, I will shove them back into my hollow cavern, down my itching throat, until they bed in unsettled stomach.

Love.

You are guarded with your own words because of her talented tongue and the perceived perception of its affects on me. But we will cleanse our palate of her name, erasing her form an expansive vocabulary, freeing your own town to admit the words that I long to say as well.

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DIARY OF A HUMAN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eliza Lentzski is the author of lesbian fiction, erotica, and romance novels, including
Date Night
,
Love, Lust and Other
Mistakes, and the forthcoming
Second
Chances. A university professor by day, Eliza and her partner live in the Midwest with their pet turtle and cat.

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