investing in you

I know I tell you a lot of things now about my lover, ex-crushes, current crushes and infatuations, but I can't help but continue to have a faint sense of guilt, lingering in my mind; a feeling, wispy in a way, that I led you on. We were meant to be professional, under the aegis of circumstance, but both of us know that we became friends quickly. Like somewhere down the line, the water broke, the sac of dutiful role assignments stretched open, and we embarked on what we like to call an adventure -a journey without an ending. I wonder what it was about me that broke the shell, that sprayed your mind with a sense of awakening. That drove you to a literal frenzy where, I remember, you said that you'd be okay with quitting your job. I let all of this glide by, not commenting and choosing to avoid topics, because I developed a fear of losing you. And I didn't want to at any cost. So silence became an answer, a lot of the time. Facades became common, more often than you will ever realize, and deep within the cave of my belonging, I was rotting with a seed of hidden identity -unclear, shattered and terribly lost.

A lot of people out there chatter constantly about investment; time-stamping and cataloging every step of every move. Choose your friends carefully, is the mantra I hear everywhere all the time, or maybe it has been for a while now but surfaced to human civilization in different shapes and forms throughout the tunnels of history. So the natural outcome of living in this counter-culture results in the investment in the right set of friends, I suppose, in which we live together in a zoo -taking, only, and not giving back. The economic nature of it all makes me think that I live in somewhat of a dealership, that every hour is a transaction of a visionary enterprise and that every step I take should have some positive outcome. But it forces me to think of a question I have shied away from for a long long time. What was going on between you and me?

I keep going back to that one night at the bar, in the crummy basement with blue lights and a flashing sign of Heineken entrapped along the hallway. I was drunk, after 8 shots of liquor, and so were you. Your frames were bent along the ridge of your nose, and you were sitting at the bar, in a trim black dress, staring at the television screen, laughing with your friends and looking at me from time to time. I saw you giggle through the corner of my eye, and a misty mold of your body hunched around the outer edge of my strained peripheral vision. My friends were around, dancing to the music. Swaying their hips, snapping their fingers and shouting in song when the choruses came along. People chugged their beers like buckets of rainwater, and flirted with strangers in the bisected corners. Some held hands, or sucked on nipples while others tiptoed to the backyard to bellow out smoke. I knew it was you, but I didn't care to talk or even go up and say Hello. Why? Because it may have made both parties uncomfortable and in a small town like ours, ignite a spark littered with rumors. What also crossed my mind was the fact that if I had said hello, it may have demonstrated a personal interest. What if you thought, let's take it to the next step? What if you thought, oh may be this is going somewhere? And in all my cold nonchalance, and box of untruths, what good would it do to egg you on?

And so began the skirting around. Touching topics, leaving questions unanswered, and addressing issues selectively. I believe yours was an escalation of emotions, on the swing of a sharp, angular spiral with shaky balusters and lubricated hand rails. You climbed up in your petticoat-ed whims, not lying, not in a pretense, but in unsubtle innuendos. I wasn't sure at first what was going on; what a sudden influx of pleasure puffs, food, wine, books and smiles! You took to discussing the sex couture of your thongs and the lace curlicues of your bras. You took to an explosion of divulging your desires, your convolutions, the softness of your breasts. You opened your arms, and the partition of your lips, and the curtain across your trimmed vagina. And broiled within me a patchwork of complexities; layers and layers of fishing across, detached and unhooked and eventually recoiled. Extended to me a tongue dripping with beads of your secrets. And pulled me ashore to the beach of your inner self, the human B, the desiring B, the B beyond a cage of professionalism. And I went adrift, waddling on waves, wallowing in foam and tart-colored make-up, swimming away, gulping carcasses of crabs from droplets of the sea's devastating glands. Like cancer dispersed within my capsule of reasoning. Like I glossed over reality to reflect on you a segmented, modular guide to living. Of which I have tired, over and over again. Muted by misgivings, and blinded by a thicket of prickly, devastating lies. But you have been patient. Knowingly ignorant. And a part of my fragmented family.

I have a lot to say. And will speak another day. But this is my muse for a Monday evening. When the winds outside, in turnip cloaks, play civil auctioneers of Spring.