all the motions of ordinary love (with excerpts from Woman (in the mirror) by La Dispute)

(an ode to my dumb bitch era)

We are laying in my bed, your arm loose around my waist. My hair is in your mouth, but you only open wider, swallow more, eating protein and keratin and skin, swallowing me whole. 

All the motions of ordinary love.

We’ve slept in, and the fading light of a late November day cast long shadows across my room, so that I feel as though I am half-dreaming, floating in the gray as I am. You move, shift, your arm still loose around me, and your eyes land on me. Your eyes are dark and big and wide, the lashes long and languid as you blink slowly at me like a cat. I keep telling you that I love your eyes. You keep telling me that I’m crazy. They’re just big, you say. Well, I like them, I say, and I duck my face into your armpit, diving face first into the dirtiest parts of you. I want to eat you up. I want to swallow you whole. This is what Sylvia Plath meant when she wrote, I eat men like air. But I’m not eating you, you're eating me. My hair is in your mouth, you’ve bitten my neck. You are ravenous and you swallow, swallow, swallow. 

You roll over, move to stand. I latch my arms around your waist like a child, begging you to stay in bed with me. You look chagrined, take a hit of your vape, raise one wry brow at me. I hate that you can do that and I can’t. I love and hate so much about you. 

And I watched you in that apartment somewhere from across the room, but it's all a haze. I remember vaguely the lights then staring there to you.

The light from my half-open blinds filters over your brown skin. You are darker than me, and you like to remind me of this when I remind you that my dad is Black. When I tell you to not say the n word even without a hard r, and you remind me that you are brown. You’re Indian, I say. It’s different. You laugh. I swallow down words like the bitter coffee on my nightstand. So much I want to say, and so much I don’t. I hate my cowardice, and I hate your nicotine infused lungs, and I love you and I hate you. I hate the way that I’m still dreaming of you, of this moment, clothed in the half-dark of my bedroom, months from now. 

Tiny dots on an endless timeline.

I wonder if reincarnation is real. I wonder if there are some lessons that I must learn. But I’m stubborn. I must learn them over and over and over again, and then I still never really learn. Am I doomed to repeat these mistakes? Do our timelines always converge? Do you always lock me inside your car, down the street from my house, where you pull down a whole joint? Do I always suck in oxygen that I cannot grasp as you tell me how you had a crush on your dead sister? I go home and I sit on my bed so that I can touch something that I know, and I fuck you, anyway, and I hate myself for fucking you, and I cannot get your taste out of my mouth for months after. The stars watch us from my window. The moon is full. There is a ring around it. I am told this is bad. We are so small, just stardust, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson would say, but I feel so big at that moment. Too big. I want to shrink, to become smaller, and so I bury myself in the dark heat of your body, but you burn too bright, and I am consumed. After we’re done fucking, you roll over. I ask you to hold me, even though I wish I could forget your hands. You say that you have to leave. Why do you hate me? I ask and I mean it and I don’t. You laugh and you say, You know that’s not true. But I don’t. I don’t. I’ve written and rewritten this story so many times, but it always ends the same way, with me alone in bed and you long gone, but still lost in the thick sheets of my bed, which cannot forget your scent no matter how many times that I wash them. I move on, my life continues. You are my biggest mistake. I wish that you never happened. You are the one thing that I cannot parcel meaning out of, and I suppose that is why you keep coming back. Now, in the dark, your witching eyes watch me, moonlight illuminating the scars on your knuckles as you tuck my hair behind my ear, and there is no closure because there is no such thing as closure with you. Your eyes watch mine, and I smile, and I taste your marrow inside my teeth, inside my bones. I bite your lip for good measure. I hope that there is still a scar there today. I hope that your new girlfriend asks about it, where it came from, and you say, “Nowhere.” Nowhere. But I haunt your bed like you haunt mine, and you can’t sleep for all your eyelid’s heaviness. I deleted your number so now I think every text from an unknown number is you. I regret you and I love you and I hate you and I wish I could forget you and I never even knew you.

We say nothing out loud and that’s what feels the most profound.