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Transgressions
Aug. 30th, 2010 03:42 pm I don't remember exactly when I stopped wanting her, but it happened with as much intensity as when I started loving her. She still resembled herself, but she was no longer hot to the touch. She began to physically manifest all of her inner turmoil. Her face grew thinner. She covered her once beautiful body in blurry tattoos, her skin had stretched with an extra fifty pounds, but never bounced back once she lost it all within months. It hung off her hips like pants a size too large. The drugs and her refusal to eat had sallowed her olive complexion, dulled her hair (half Iroquois, she had once had the most lustrous black hair...).
The night that we had sex in the back seat of her Sunfire for the last time, I waited patiently for it to be over. That was the night I could no longer ignore the fact that things would never be what they were. She didn't touch me the same way. Or shine in the dark the way I remembered. I knew I would never feel the way I once had again.
It took two years to climb that mountain of shared time (four very long years...). And I don't look back now. My memories of her began to smudge, blur together, then apart, bleed into the rest of my life, my imaginings, the things I read; I became confused as to what had actually transpired. Shaving our heads together and watching the hair fall onto the bathroom's tiled floor became some strange dream I once had. The feeling of her fingertip dipped in tempera paint using my naked skin as canvas... The way her features gathered up into that look of sorrow deeper than that of anyone I had ever met... Every day it got harder to remember as she was passed from hand to hand in prison, rehab, and mental health facilities. I stopped listening to her messages. I cried less.
I was thankful for this unremembering. I rid myself of all the things, both beautiful and grotesque, that might remind me. Eventually, it seemed to me, I had made the whole thing up. And although my past is written all over her body (the ink, her ragged fingernails, a scar on her left hip), when I look down, after everything, I realize that she left not a mark on mine.
Girl of the World, I tell her, you were only a figment of my imagination.
The night that we had sex in the back seat of her Sunfire for the last time, I waited patiently for it to be over. That was the night I could no longer ignore the fact that things would never be what they were. She didn't touch me the same way. Or shine in the dark the way I remembered. I knew I would never feel the way I once had again.
It took two years to climb that mountain of shared time (four very long years...). And I don't look back now. My memories of her began to smudge, blur together, then apart, bleed into the rest of my life, my imaginings, the things I read; I became confused as to what had actually transpired. Shaving our heads together and watching the hair fall onto the bathroom's tiled floor became some strange dream I once had. The feeling of her fingertip dipped in tempera paint using my naked skin as canvas... The way her features gathered up into that look of sorrow deeper than that of anyone I had ever met... Every day it got harder to remember as she was passed from hand to hand in prison, rehab, and mental health facilities. I stopped listening to her messages. I cried less.
I was thankful for this unremembering. I rid myself of all the things, both beautiful and grotesque, that might remind me. Eventually, it seemed to me, I had made the whole thing up. And although my past is written all over her body (the ink, her ragged fingernails, a scar on her left hip), when I look down, after everything, I realize that she left not a mark on mine.
Girl of the World, I tell her, you were only a figment of my imagination.
