The Naked Truth

What would I do if you were here now? Whinge about how tired I am, is my first reaction. I’d like to have my hair stroked, and a bath run, and a cup of tea made, and a cigarette lit. And if you could breathe for me, and fall asleep for me, that would be good too.

But I wouldn’t. Sometimes I open my door and am taken by surprise at the memory of you coming up the stairs to me, and I relive pulling you into the hall, and then in real life I grimace at my downstairs neighbor and promise I’ll make sure the outside door is shut and the gate too.

I’d turn you over, face down, and lie my body over yours, face down. Face turned against your neck, breath warm against the chain. My arms stretched out along the length of yours, the tender inside of my elbow cloaking the hard bone of yours, and my fingers would close around your wrists. Breast squashed flat into the broad breadth of your back, and my body would curve over the rise of your ass. My legs would be laid against yours and my feet hooked around your ankles, but only for a moment.

When I say maybe we wouldn’t drive each other crazy, I don’t know if I believe myself, or if it’s what you want to hear or not (it would be more convenient if we did, after all; better if it was just a hopeless cause, but sometimes it’s a comfort to doubt that).

My legs laid along yours until my thighs fell open and my knees came up so I held you gripped beneath me. And I’d lie there silently, though my fingers would release their grip a little and curl in wordless imploration until I felt you twist yourself face up, and then what would I do?

You shouldn’t ask me when I’m tired, because then I think I’d just feel such peace, but if you were here now, I’d be neither tired nor peaceful, just adrenalized into fight or flight mode (but I’d fly to you, not from you, and it would be the mating dance of fight that would effortlessly prevail).

Whatever you wanted, that’s what I’d do; whatever you want now, when I write this, or when you read it, or when I tell you.

A first, in reply to Marianne’s challenge.

She leans over the edge.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“In a place of great blackness”, I reply, and my voice bounces echoing off the round ridged walls, all the way from the bottom to the skylight of daylight at the top.
“You poor thing!” she calls down, not even attempting to disguise the soupy insincerity of her tone. “Do you suffer terribly? Is your life bereft of all joy and meaning?”
“Not really,” I say, sulkily. “But I’m tired of my job and I could use some cash.”
“How awful for you. Do they work you very hard in the salt mines? Are you forced to camp out there as well, slinging your hammock from stalagmites of sodium, (hoping the stalactites hold firm and don’t pierce you with their well-seasoned spikes while you sleep?) just so that you have shelter from the raging storm?”
“I wish you’d go away if you’ve just come to mock. It’s damp down here, and the self-pity is rising round my ankles.”
“But my heart goes out to you, so sad and lonely down at the bottom of your well of misery.”
“Thank you. A little sympathy and fellow-feeling is all I ask.”
“Are you unloved, undervalued, depreciating fast in the present emotional climate? Are you helpless and homeless and hateful? “
“I’m loveable!” I yell. “My value rises steadily, and holds firm and steadfast in the face of adversity, even when it oozes through the laces on my boots”, but she’s on a roll now.
“Are you deformed and warped and twisted by misfortune?”
“No! It’s just that I think I’m getting a cold, and it’s making me look a little peaky.”
“Ah”, she says. “So not some life threatening disease, just a semi-fatal psychosomatic malingering?”
“As usual,” I say. “It’s the cross I have to bear.”
She laughs softly, and I hear a muffled rattling against the walls, and then a splash and the watery push of a ripple.
“Goodness, you are a long way down,” she calls, and lets another handful of gravel and not over-small pebbles rain down on me.
“And where exactly are you?” I ask, when shouts, curses and imprecations have managed to dissuade her from heaping the threatened coals upon my head (“But just think, the ones that missed you would fizzle out in the water, and at least you’d have a little light while they fell. And if you didn’t manage to dodge them, and they burnt you, then I’d have really given you something to cry about, wouldn’t I?” “I’d rather you didn’t”, I reply, with all the dignity that can be mustered from the bottom of a pit of darkness).
“I’m in a very peaceful place,” she says. “A little like a padded cell, but more stylishly upholstered. I requested plum-coloured velvet on the walls, none of that unpleasant white vinyl stuff.”
“You’re very fortunate,” I say. “It sounds like a much happier place than the one I find myself in.”
“That’s because they wouldn’t allow me to keep any baggage,” she tells me, and the faint light where I can nearly make out her face peering down at me seems to dim a little. “I brought you with me but you kept tripping me up with your despondency, and that annoying little cough you’re developing, with its reproachful phlegmy rattle. They said you had to go, and so I tossed you down here.”
“I think my cough is lifting,” I tell her. “I think I see that perhaps, in the great scheme of things, the torments inflicted on my soul are only minor inconveniences. I think I see thankfulness for my blessings glimmering in the dark, like little fireflies of hope and happiness.”
“This is the thing about the isolation room”, she continues, as though I’d never spoken, “ they stick you in there with yourself. The one thing you’d like to be isolated from (immunized against) gets thrown in after you just before the door clangs and the lock turns.
“Objectively, I have no problem with your company. I generally find you amusing and sometimes surprisingly interesting. My problem with you now is that I want a kind of brainwashed and freshly laundered peace: to lie on the floor and gaze up at the skylight, and fill up my mind with emptiness, and to let the good roll across me unimpeded. And instead I find you ambling aimlessly across me, trailing grubby cobwebs of thought and memory and apprehensive expectations: all the baggage I’d have liked removed from me at the door. This is the problem with DIY padded cells: you don’t get the rigorousness you really need when you have to negotiate your own details.
“But I had the forethought to ask for a nice dank hole, as well as the velvet, and you foolishly leapt into it.”
“I think it’s too dark down here even for me,” I call up, somewhat forlornly. “I think the dankness makes me cough, and the mustiness makes me sneeze, and that if I came back up again, we might find some compromise between my wish to wallow and your need for empty-headed tranquility, and that if you allowed me up, the mud would dry, even though I feel it rising to my knees now, and we could brush it off and pretend it never happened. ”
“I think I’ve had enough of you”, I think she says, just before she lets the trapdoor drop shut.

I’m going to be offline for a bit. Here’s last April, when I was a lot more prolific than I am now.

I think I can’t come like this, on top, with a cunt full of face, but before my eyes roll up in my head I watch my fingernails claw their way down the headboard. Before that I looked down and saw the mark on the top of my half-exposed breast already blossoming into a dark-centered bruise, and the gleam of my braced thighs as black gauze slid down them to obscure him.

Face down and gasping, I feel his tongue on my ass and his fingers inside me, and then when he pulls my hips up and pushes my shoulders down , my tits swell against their black lace constraints. As he fucks me I feel his hands slide fabric up my back, under it, and using it for leverage. And I wonder now, about the politics of dressing to be undressed, the armour of seduction. I put this on so that you will know I dressed thinking about you taking my clothes off; I put this on so that when we are in public you will know it’s underneath and waiting to be revealed: I put this on so that you know I dress up to please you; I put this on because sometimes not-naked is more naked than nudity; I put this on because maybe this reveals more of my soul than when I’m self-protective in my skin.

But at the time I don’t think that, because what I do think is: too intense, can’t take it… and as if he senses it he fucks me harder, making me press back and flinch away, unsure if I want to crawl across the bed to safety, or grab tight to his cock and keep it there, bottomed out inside me, a blissful torment.

When he rolls me onto my back and I claw my way out of the fabric, I feel I have some remnants of control again, although in reality I’m pinioned and helpless, pounded into the bed too hard to even voluntarily move a muscle. But it focuses me, feeling my bare skin against his, as though my downed defenses have been a choice I made. I feel my own heat, as though my cunt encases his cock in a thin layer of lava, and although he sears me as he fucks me, it’s what I want. And helpless as he holds me, what I can’t control can hold him tighter.

His hand stills. It’s going to take me too long, and he’s falling asleep anyway. He’s been working hard all day, he says plaintively. I do hope he’s going to be tactful enough to take back the implication that having sex with me is hard work, but no chance: fucking me takes it out of a person, apparently. I move his hand from my pussy to my breast, and tell him to go to sleep. He’ll wake me up in a couple of hours, he promises, but we both end up sleeping like the dead for the next ten hours (ten! I know! So not sex-bloggerlike. I’m forced to conclude that it’s been hard work fucking him too).

I mean to say, in the time between him falling asleep and me falling asleep, that this is what I missed most when I walked out on my life of sex and drugs and Guinness. I missed the sex for a bit, and the drugs for more than a bit, and carried on with the Guinness, but what I really missed was the warm security of a body at my back, and a hand wrapped round my tits.

I miss this place (this one, not necessarily everything beyond its violet walls (not coincidentally, the same colour as the room I write in)). I miss the slightly schizophrenic relationship I conduct with myself within these pixels.

I write in my notebook, but it’s a different process, writing with a pen in my book with the peacock red and gold against black, with the pocket in the back for a poem, and a couple of photos, and a post of someone else’s. The pages aren’t quite big enough for my awkward-looking, sideways, left-handed way of writing, but my bigger notebook that has a raw spine to open out flat is too big to fit in my bag. What I write seems to have no focus, and it’s not as though I don’t have inspiration. I can’t find the hook, the something that makes me want to explain it to myself. I write, but there’s no reason for the words to move anywhere else, no need for them to be transferred to a typed white page where I can see their form and hear their beat.

Because I can’t get here, the random things that I would post stay in my head, in a knotted confused mass. It seems, all of a sudden, as though there should be a criteria for what is posted. And yet, I couldn’t define what the criteria was previously. There’s a numbing effect to publishing these kinds of thoughts: an on/off switch that determines awareness of how public it is – as though I could keep almost private some things, and open my hands to share others; as though some part of my brain considers this my confessional of sorts, my sorting room for tangled skeins of spun out threads of sensuality and sexuality, and another is dismissive of the right of anyone who chooses public exposure to indignation over interpretation… and those two parts manage to slip by each other without communicating their point of view to the other.

I can see things I’ve written where these two awarenesses nearly touched: where what was intensely personal longed to be written, but I disguised it in obscurity (not out of deference to subject matter, but because I had to dive into it sideways, or see a concept not a sentence). I read back now and sometimes have forgotten what it was that I wrote with such camouflaged urgency, and can no longer even guess, where others are instantly clear to me, and bottom heavy with everything that compelled me to write them, rather than just what I wrote. But outside my head, they sit in pretty words upon the page, and make a different shape, and change the form of what preceded and succeeds them.

There is a list of things I will never write, and those are the things that give me licence to write of other intimacies. I’ll write how my cunt feels, what is going through my head while it feels; lists of what I like, but never of what is said to me or has been said. I’ll write the facts, and flounder in unfinished words if I forget the chronology, but I won’t reveal their underpinnings.

I offer myself freedom, with the usual provisos of respecting the privacy of others, and immediately set about constructing obstacle courses for myself to climb over (You must write the complete truth, and nothing but the truth, only make sure you do it without mentioning that, or revealing this, or letting slip the other and for fuck’s sake, don’t ever talk about you know what). More than an obstacle race it’s like that thing you do where you have to pick up more and more things without dropping them, or put on more and more clothes – but in reverse, so I wind up naked on the finishing line – and suddenly see my reflection, and am astonished at what I have exposed in my haste to keep my secrets close.

It feels, at other times, as though I am running around with a clutch of pins in my hands, desperately pinning the quivering bodies of butterfly thoughts to the earth, and then crouching to dissect them so that I can see what they are made of, and understand why they draw me to them: why does one encounter, one conversation, one touch make me want to examine it, find some connection to some other experience?

If I write about sex it’s because it seems to pull everything along with it in its wake in ways that nothing else I write about can do. It can’t be coincidence that the people I let see me most clearly are my lovers. It’s that cheesewire bite into the soft skin of the psyche that reminds me how the cerebral and the animalistic, the venal and the altruistic are bound together, and wrapped in a layer of emotion.

And that’s what I miss: the proximity, and ease of writing it. I miss the game of writing in private, and leaving what I write on a metaphorical park bench to be picked up by strangers, and screwed up and thrown away, or carefully folded and tucked into a pocket. There is a disconnect between the public and the private that is not rational, and can’t be defended, but it seems it has become necessary to me.

I want to fuck you because

I don’t know why, and it’s not as though I haven’t thought about it.

What is it (once you’ve discounted the mindless physical pull, because even when it’s there it’s not enough anymore)? Perhaps I want to bind your thought processes to mine with my body, kidnap your mind with my cunt, borrow your affection with the swing of my hips, seduce your synapses with a soft tit in your hand, keep you in my thrall with my sleeping bare skin next to yours?

But we could be friends. We could have a drink, and a laugh, and a serious discussion about the kinds of things you don’t talk about in casual company (the kind of things that are deeply-felt, but don’t crop up when you talk about the weather/work/kids/the slow slide into the sea of ice-capped politics) for fear of being considered pretentious, self-obsessed and possibly deranged.

The softness, the yielding: I think (but later, not while I’m melting softly, yieldingly into it) that there must be some reason men crave this, this physical vulnerability and contrast. Her mouth is so soft, and she kisses me back the way I think I kiss (and do I feel like this, taste like this? this nipple, this cunt, so this what their tongues feel, the men that fuck us), and the triumph I feel at the end is in the double mindfuck of doing what I know I feel. This physical vulnerability that echoes mine, is it a means to unleash some well of tenderness in those who are stronger, harder… and that thought perishes; we pit our strength against what is less yielding, and are pinned down, held open, pounded, hit and hurt: they must know there’s no brittleness below the softness, it doesn’t break, it fights back, and takes what it wants.

This how I wind my mind round yours: with my legs round your hips, my scent in your nostrils, my taste in your mouth, my cries in your ears. I push you through that caress that is so smooth and sweet under your fingers to the iron core that is wrapped in this apparent fragility. The little tendrils of thought and words and shared connection are pulled tight, bolted down irrevocably (for now) and the tightened with every tightening tremor of my body, and sealed with come upon my skin.

Here, and there’s another one here.