Learning How to Lose

New addictions are best when accompanied with old, slow comforts. We’re wading out, one footfall every second second as sand, silk-like, slips underneath our feet and into the deep.

I don’t really want to know you right now, but, God, I’m learning.

She spit venom in my exposed veins, the open wounds all too obvious, but the marks I left were worse. It couldn’t have been any other way: “I really hate you right now.”

“I know,” I said.

Feet slid backwards; I heard myself leaving. She asked me why; I turned my head. I was losing ground somewhere between the truth and lies and silence. I think they have names for this sort of denial.

My fingers hovered over a cracked light switch, my voice just above a whisper as I asked her, “Do you want me to turn this off?”

“No,” she said, and I slinked away, shifting the night onto my shoulders as I turned the lock and closed the door for the last time. I tugged it hard and heard the frame murmur behind my back.

Now, something in me should be fucked up, shattered and in a corner, waiting for repairs, but I don’t know if it was even living in me in the first place.

Her body grazes against me, neither of us stepping back, and we damn sure know what it means and aren’t fighting it as we talk against it, backlashing, backmasking, unhidden messages, and asking if this is what we really need right now.

Before we take take too many steps, before we gain too much ground, or before our sensibilities and consciences overtake us, before the night, before the morning, before the friends with best intentions, before the sedatives we feed ourselves, the adrenaline we count on to get us through, before the gender norms we tried on and railed against like all good intellectuals should, and before my fingers curl around your hips, before your teeth sink in my lips, before we forget we were going to try something unusual and traditional, before we realize we’re not the creatures but just the habits, before we have to wake up, just one more time before we have to give in, could we, at the very least, pretend? Because I’m having fun, I really am.

It’s a bittersweet agony.