#138
Risky. An exposure. Profoundly vulnerable. Lick my heart. Let’s do this together. I’m not going anywhere.
A tale of telling your crush that you have a crush on them. Like being at a diner in high school drinking a milkshake and not knowing what they will say, so you suck it all up the straw and then look down at the leftover whipped cream and the cherry stem staring back at you.
Nervous overly beating heart.
Pits that drip with sweat no matter the amount of deodorant applied.
Stomach that turns into rubber bands, puke imminent.
I wish it was in a restaurant, I know a few good ones in town. I can always get a table. Or a cafe, one afternoon. Big windows we sit in front of to watch the people outside, those who don’t know what we’re plotting, exposing.
Instead, the usual room, the dog asleep on the bed next to my desk. And then, no answers, a few new questions, a relationship left open, devoid of decisions or conclusions. A mind left wondering what you think of me.
It has to be outside of this usual room, that’s why dinners were invented. That’s why we have dates and drinks and introductions. Concerts to go to. It’s so that we can test it out, accidentally touch hands or arms, see if the electricity exists, or if the goosebumps surface from below. The restaurant so that if we’re not into it, one can excuse themselves and go to the toilet, only to sneak out the back, leaving the other hanging with a check and service charge. Restaurants are for being around others who are also all striving to understand the world and their place in it. Some of us, looking for answers to why specific people enter it and leave it.
It’s up to you, she says to me, to decide on what to do. But my decision has been made, now it’s up to you, I think, to help me make sense of it. But what I really don’t want is to talk about it anymore, I want to hear, sorry I have a partner, sorry I can’t, I’m engaged, I have kids, I’m a lesbian, I don’t date patients, but instead I hear encouragement and openness to continue to talk about it as if it’s abstract, something that happening around us instead of to us, to me. Abstract experiences, third person narratives, outside ourselves.
I don’t even know if what I said surprised her. I don’t know if what I said connected, or made sense. All I know is it was a truth. It was honest. And I’m not carrying it around in its old form anymore, but in this new form which is less of something and more of another, but what those are I’m unsure of.
Same time next week.