The Warm Room of a Cold House
I know you hate it when I do this.
Even the ones before you, they all expressed it
One throwing the pillow to my face, harder than I would have allowed
The last one nervously laughing it off
You just sigh after I ask and that tells me a lot.
And yet I keep doing it, I understand now why
It has nothing to do with the answer, or the reaction on your face, or the meaning of the words that follow as a badly thought out reply
And it has everything to do with how I answer, or the reaction of my body, or how I interpret whatever comes out of you.
I keep expecting me to change.
“You would never cheat on me, would you?” I manage to speak without panting.
The room is dark, but the cars’ headlights flash through the window and slide over the white walls every time they pass
Your eyes blink twice towards the ceiling
“Why would you say such a thing? No. I wouldn’t”
Expected
“You shouldn’t. Not even if you stop wanting me.”
Ghostly audacity I have.
“I would never, not even after”
I curl up against you, my head resting on your ribs and feel the sigh incoming.
Half my attention directed on the echo your voice left inside my mind, while the rest is listening to your heartbeat
It drums deeper for a second.
Reinforcing my craving to blindly believe everything you have ever said
Ignoring the disappointing fact that you are a guy and that you are human
Wanting to be as ignorant as I could be, like I was before I understood how people work.
But the warmth of your breath hitting my hairline brings me back to the room
It feels colder.
And I decide there is nothing I have to decide at the moment
But I feel like I have to feel everything that is going on or else I will forget it too.
My memory has never been the same since the pandemic hit
and my therapist says it was only triggered.
Now I am amazed with how little it can retain
but my therapist says it’s been like that since I was 8.
And that is why I get glimpses of stuff I did not know existed, when I see kids eating ice cream or when it starts raining while I am walking outside or when your voice makes that infatuating manly moan.
Things like that fill me up with something I cannot describe because it’s joy for a split second and then it is a pure void.
Those glimpses are memories my brain desperately tossed away
Like a sheet of lined paper from a school notebook that a kid with undiagnosed ADHD ripped out to put a huge ball of chewed gum on its center, crumpled it and threw it to the floor, far away from the bin
There’s crumpled pieces of paper like that everywhere in real life, it seems
It’s only adults who pick them up.
“Stop asking things like that”
Another car rides by, this one sounds heavier, probably more of a truck
“I feel bad when you ask. Like you will never trust me on anything”
Silence
Unlike mine, your mouth is not synchronized with your brain
So it takes me by surprise every time you speak on its behalf
“I believe I can trust you”
I believe it, really. I just have not felt it.
Because believing in you would mean trusting myself
and I cannot trust myself when I am convinced that what a guy is saying is true
Ask any woman, she gets this too.
That night I sleep so lightly, each time I open my eyes in the darkness my thoughts are not interrupted
Eventually, your alarm goes off and the sun comes up again as well as the ends of your black hair and you sit against the bed frame, unsuccessfully trying to ignore the weariness.
I can feel your eyes placed on my back but I keep pretending
Because on the blunt list of events that make me feel everything is worth anything
it’s written His kiss on my forehead every morning before he goes to work
I have been perfectly aware of every single one of those.
Then you get up and I glance at your back as you get past the room’s door
and that’s the spell that effectively drops me into a deep doze
How exasperating.
To give so much power to something so mundane
But it’s a choice I have made
To paint it with remorse would only be abusive.
