And then he kissed me

We talked about random things.  We talked about silly things and got to know each other.  He was nice and kind and inquisitive but not creepy.  He was equally interested in knowing things about me than he was talking about himself.  He wasn’t secretive or evasive.  It was a great first conversation and I left it smiling.

Then we talked about what we were doing.  What we like to do and where we’ve been.  We talked about the past and things we’d love to do in the future.  Some of the things he’s done that I’d love to do.  We joked about doing the same thing but at different times in the same place.  We reminisced and fantasized along the same plane of existence.

After that we talked about our actions.  Things we do and ways we act.  Various likes and dislikes and how we can’t understand how other people don’t share our likes or dislikes.  We came up with cutesy nicknames for each other based on these and teased each other based on others.  The words adorable and cute were bandied about in my direction and I told him to stop making me smile so much because my cheeks are starting to hurt.

Eventually the conversations led to something slightly more risque.  It was hot and I was hot and he seemed hot.  I was more empirically hot in the sense that I was sweating from the heat, while I found him more and more appealing with every conversation we had.  I looked forward to them.  When he would text me and say hello I would light up.  I had to contain myself slightly because I didn’t want to seem too eager and come off as desperate.
He asked what I was doing and I told him, purposefully, that I was folding laundry in slightly more than no clothing.  His attention was always readily available but his tone changed.  His words went from fun and flirty to flirty and suggestive.  I suggested just as much and we suggested each other doing very suggestive things.
We slipped back, comfortably, into our usual conversation of silly and fun to goodnight and in bed.  A smile permanently plastered on my face as I drifted off to sleep.  

Soon after we decided to get together to test the chemistry and physics, to see if the pull was just as strong and the reactions at the same intensity.  We met and we shared a drink.  We smiled and laughed.  The laughs were genuine and held in reserve for fear of looking too comfortable.  I don’t know why.
The drinks turned into more drinks which turned into a bit of food.  I can eat in front of him?  Wow.
Hours might have gone by, or just a single one I’m not really sure.  It was a great time, just as good as our texting and then better on top of it.  Better because I could see his blue eyes behind his glasses.  I could watch his smile when I did something dumb that he said was adorable.  There was even that moment I got to feel his hand along mine while his fingers dragged over my palm to see if he could make me shiver.  It was amazing and I didn’t want it to end, but it had to.

We got to my car, because he walked me to my car.  We smiled our goodbyes and hugged our regrets behind them.  We stood under the streetlight which, itself, was under the stars.  The busy, warm night was all around us and even though it couldn’t have gone any better I wish it wouldn’t have stopped and was a little sad that it was ending.  Would this be the best night we had together and it only just began?  I’m always so negative.

And then he kissed me.

Do you see me?

“This is basically like a menu for people.”

She wasn’t wrong.  Dating had become a strange phenomenon.  There wasn’t any spark or meet cute involved anymore.  Now it was similar to the way a couple picks a sperm donor or, as Melody said, the way a person picks their food off of a menu.

“Yeah, but Mel, attraction plays a role things anyway right?  I mean, come on, when you’re seeing someone from across the room, as all the songs say, you’re only noticing them because of their looks right?  So, here you are.  Seeing someone from across the city.”

“Not the same,” she was still a romantic.

“Of course it is,” I wasn’t.

She shook her head in response, “no it isn’t.  Not even close.  You can’t get that feeling from a picture of a person you’ve never known before.  Someone you’ve never seen before.  It’s not the same.”

“Fine, tell me why then.”

She turned towards me with her hands in front of her.  They were pointing at me like arrows and she was attacking my assumption that online dating and meeting someone in the real world for the first time are the same.  She was riding her horse and she was going to die on it in battle.

“So many reasons!”

“Such as?”

“Pictures lie, for starters.  Its a snapshot of a person.  They might be pretty but what if they have a terrible voice.  What if they walk funny.  What if they smell bad?”

I laughed, “so you’re reason why online dating isn’t as good is even more superficial than online dating?  Wow Mel.  Wow.”

“No!”  She laughed and pushed me, “it’s the reality.  The reality of all of your senses telling you that someone is the one.  Or, potentially.  You can watch the way they interact with other people.  You can see the way their smile slowly creeps across their face.  The sound of their laugh, a genuine laugh, when someone says something funny.”

She stopped for a second and dropped her eyes from my face and looked at her shoes.

“The way your body trembles the first time they brush up against you in the slightest way and you catch the scent of them whether its cologne or the soap they use or just their natural smell.”

She paused again and fidgeted.

“You remember those things.  They mean something.  They develop in your head and fester until you become obsessed with them.  You make up fake conversations that you have with them about the first time you noticed them and you pretend they noticed you for the first time then too.  It’s a story you create in your head because the reality is they don’t know you exist and you’re too afraid they won’t care when they find out you do.”

Melody wiped her eyes and sniffled then picked her head up and smiled at me.

“Why would you want to deprive yourself of that by meeting someone online, huh?  Isn’t it grand?  Doesn’t it sound wonderful?”

She tried to laugh it off and turn to the computer.  She clicked through a few profiles.  She found someone who looked nice.  He wasn’t too attractive but he wasn’t someone who spent most of their life in dark hallways either.

“He’ll do I guess.”

“I guess?”  I looked at her with my forehead making all kinds of squiggly lines.

“Yeah I don’t know.  He seems nice.”

“Mel, you don’t want someone who seems nice.  You want someone who seems amazing.  You want-,” I stopped this time.  She picked her head up and looked me in the eyes with tears floating on the brink of escape and I stopped talking just to stare at her.

You don’t always remember the moment you really noticed someone.  You always knew them and who they were and you looked at them hundreds, if not thousands of time, but you never can remember the moment when you first noticed something specific about them.  Like the way they smile or the motion they wave their hand in when they pull their hair behind their ear.

Right then I noticed the way she looked at me with her teary, reddened eyes and I looked back at her and my mind spoke up out of turn and asked if I had ever noticed how beautiful she was when she cried.

I shook my head.  I couldn’t answer.  I couldn’t say out loud that I hadn’t and talk to myself like a psycho, but I did notice.  I saw her looking at me and staring into my eyes and she was so beautiful that I wanted to kiss her.

I didn’t though.  I couldn’t.  I didn’t even know what that was.  Why was I looking at her like that after all of these years of knowing her?  It didn’t make sense.

I shook my head and mumbled something.  She turned away and we decided that online dating would have to wait.  We went out for ice cream instead and sat on a bench until the sun fell and the moon splashed stars across the sky.  We talked and laughed and sat in silence.  It was one of the best days of that summer and I’ll never forget it.  It was the day that I realized I liked her.  It was the day when I truly understood what she meant about online dating.  It was the day I saw how beautiful she was when she cried and when I vowed to never see her cry again.

Compliments

“I love the way you write,” she said, and it was the beginning of the end.

It was the beginning of the beginning, but I’ve always fallen for easy compliments on things I’m self conscious about.  My hair.  My clothes.  My voice and my writing.  All it took was sincerity in her voice, perceived or actual, and I was overlooking a vast ravine and wanting to jump into the nothingness just to hear her say it again.

“Sorry, what?”  Never take a compliment for a compliment unless you hear them say it twice.  You may have misheard it and they said something different, or they were just being nice and will dismiss anything said previous.

“Your writing,” she held the piece of paper and shook it as if it had bells hanging from the edges, “I love the way you put words down.  The expressiveness.  The visuals.  The oddity and randomness of it.  I really like a lot.”

Does she really like it a lot or does she love it?

“Thanks.  Yeah.  I don’t know.  I just kind of dump my mind onto paper sometimes.  I don’t really know where it comes from.”

“Well its nice.  You should do it more often.”

Now it’s just nice.  I should have just said thanks and left it at that.

I nodded and smiled a closed-lip half smile and kept my head down.  I wanted to write some more but nothing was coming into my head.  Nothing except that she might have been staring at me.  I was too nervous to look up and confirm it so my pen just swirled around the letters on the newspaper in front of me where I had been writing in the margins.

It was out of boredom really.  Sitting random places doing random things.  My cellphone was the high quality, super rare kind that could still only make phone calls.  It probably could take pictures too but computers nowadays didn’t have the sophistication to handle the tens of hundreds of pixels it was capable of capturing.  So busying myself like everyone else in the room with their necks crooked and faces glowing against the light of the tiny screen wasn’t really an option.
So I would grab a piece of paper nearby and entertain myself.  Often times it would be a newspaper or a magazine.  I’d never take a current one in case someone wanted to read it, but there was usually a day old paper laying around so I would grab that and paint the canvas with my nonsense.

Most of the time it was literally complete nonsense.  I would keep my head down and listen to the conversations going on around me.  I would start writing parts of them and then take off from there into a world of the bizarre pieced together with fragments of reality.  When I was done, or my time was up, I would leave the little piece of brilliance on the table for someone else to enjoy or become perplexed by, either way it was out of my head and splashed across the page and I’d never even remember what it was a few hours later.

I wasn’t even sure anybody read any of it.  I thought someone might read a few words and then furrow their brow at the oddness then toss the paper in the trash.  I didn’t think people actually sat down and made it through everything.  It was a chore, and I partially did it as a joke.  I would sometimes end the writing saying that the reader has wasted minutes of their life they’ll never get back reading my nonsense.  Yet, here she was seemingly reading every word.

I finally let my eyes come up for air and took a quick glance at her.  She wasn’t staring at me but it looked as if she might have been side-eyeing my paper as the tip of my pen swirled along the words of the bold headline.  Was she waiting for me to write more so she could watch?  Strange.

When I brought my eyes up and not-so-smoothly took a look at her to see if she was watching me she noticed and caught my eyes with a smile.

“Well ran dry?”  she asked.

I shook my head, “no just the right inspiration hasn’t come along yet.”

“Oh.  What kind of inspiration do you need?”

I looked down away from her engaging smile and interrogating eyes, “I kind of know it when I see or hear it.  It takes a hold of me and my mind unfurls like a flower.  I don’t really control it.”

“Unfurls like a flower huh?”

I nodded.

“That’s kind of poetic.  Those visuals I was talking about.”

I don’t know if it was being conveyed on the outside of my skin but on the inside I was feeling flush and blushing.  I’m not used to praise or admiration in anything I do.  It always felt fake whenever anyone would say something nice and I never know how to take a compliment.  I froze and she kept talking.  I felt like I was sweating.  I completely forgot how to communicate with another person.

“I uh, yeah.  I don’t know.  I-, uh, uh huh.  I’m like-, uh, heh,” I wanted to bang my head on the desk and groan so loud but she was still staring at me, or at least it felt like she was.  She was still sitting there trying to engage with me and my tongue’s decided to swell three sizes too big and cut the circulation off to my brain.

“You know you could just write about me,” she tilted her head down and tried to catch my lowered eyes.  I looked up with my mouth slightly open in surprise.

“Uh…huh?”  I always gave the most eloquent responses when confused.  This is why I preferred to communicate in written word, I could write a hundred times better than I could speak.

“Me.  If you don’t know what to write about then write about me.  Make me a character.”

She was smiling.  Why was she smiling?  Write about her?  What?

“What would I even write about?”  I had forgotten about my awkwardness and engaged in the puzzle of what/huh/what are you talking about.

“I don’t know.  You’re the writer.  I’m just trying to give you some inspiration.  Selfishly of course.  I want to read what you’re going to write next and if its about me I’m curious to see where you’ll take that story so, yeah.  You can just write about this, right here.  Our conversation.  A back and forth and see where it goes.”

I wish she would stop making eye contact.  It’s so annoyingly polite and she was being too nice.  It felt like a trap but I couldn’t help it if it was.  She was asking me to write.  She requested my words written down for her.  The abyss was long and wide and never ending and I was going to fill it with words for her.  About her.
They would build a bridge from one end to the next and she could walk along it and peer over the edge to see all of the beautiful things I’d constructed below.

And all it took was for her to say, I love the way you write.

Write write rewrite

Phoning it in is kind of stupid, right?

If you’re going to write something, right it well.  Of course that can’t all be done on the first try.  Finished master pieces seem like they flow and you can’t help but romanticize the idea of words flowing like water from your fingertips.  Perfection pouring out.

But it doesn’t work like that.

Great writers, and great writing, takes effort.  It takes pain.  It takes time and love and passion.  It takes lust and desire.  It takes everything in you spread across the page or the screen.  It needs to be you.  All of you and everything in you.

So when you write, and when I say you I mean me, write.  Focus on what you’re doing and write.  Take it out of you and write.  Pull it from you and write.  Make it personal.  Make it real.  Make it hurt.  Make it feel like Sunday morning.  Make it feel like the look she gives you when you say something perfect.

Don’t just get something down.  Write.  Write again.  Rewrite it and then write some more.

When you have no thoughts for thinking

Let’s make this about a girl.

What better motivation is there than the kind of girl that takes over your mind and won’t let it go?  It wraps around her wrist and swings along with her walk, taking you for the ride as long as you can hold on.  Everything she does is noteworthy and you don’t have to strain to find magnificence in the way she bats her eyes or hums a tune.

She doesn’t need you to force it, either.  It’s natural.  It’s not something she tries to do or you try to do, it just happens.
It happens when you see her face for the first time in the morning.  It happens when you’re missing her at night.  It happens when her legs are wrapped around your waist and your lips are finding new ways to press against her skin.  There is nothing unnatural about the way you fit with the girl.  You’re a circle spinning on top of a circle.

You can dance.  You can sing.  You can do things you never thought you could before, and even if you can’t do them well you lose the fear of looking like a fool.
Why?
Because she doesn’t care.  All you need is her smile and when she points it at you all of the dumb things you’ve done are just there for laughter and dammit if he doesn’t have the best laugh around.

Let’s make her everything.
It’s dangerous and rarely ends well but while you’re in it, its worth it.
She’s worth it.

 

The girl with the red hair

I saw her standing there against the back drop of a fistful of trees, but the hard focus of my lens made it appear as if she was in a forest.  She wore long Bohemian clothing that swayed in the slight breeze after it tickled the leaves above her.  I held my camera up and stared for a few moments before dropping my eyes to snap the shot.  There was a waviness to her hair that cascaded down her shoulders.  It was a perfectly aligned mess.

She wasn’t looking at me.  I don’t even know if she saw me, but I couldn’t stop looking at her.

There were freckles peppered across her face, as if she dropped a can of red paint and it splattered back randomly in small droplets.

I took the picture, several actually.  I snapped them as she stood there and looked randomly around as if she were waiting for someone who should have already been there.  It feels so rare to catch these glimpses of beauty unencumbered.  No requirements or obligations, just observation.

She disappeared in a random direction with a random man and I’ll never see her again, but at least I got to see her that once.  I got a picture of beauty and for that I’m thankful.

Maybe I’m Not A Fraud

Do you ever have moments in your writing where you think, “damn.  Maybe I’ve actually got a smidgen of talent,” and the possibility of what you’re doing is made a little brighter on the horizon?

That’s why I keep this blog.  It’s a snapshot of my writing.  As I originally wrote in my About section I used to write silly little things in the margins of newspapers or in magazines and on random napkins and leave them wherever they were.  After a while I ended up missing the chance at keeping those random writings and having them to look back on.  The stories in my head were gone and I’d never read them again.  So here I am now.

I was reading back through some of my past writings of the last couple of weeks.  I came across a few that I remember enjoying when they were done and I gave them another scan.  I smiled.

“These aren’t that bad,” I said to myself, “actually they’re pretty good.”

Then I kept reading.  I read two or three more and then I got to one that I didn’t really remember what it was about and I opened it to read.  It was short, not even a thousand words but the further I read into it the more excited I got.

It wasn’t a great story or amazing surprise but I felt like it was really good writing.  The flow was good.  The descriptions made me feel.  I put myself back into the character, the narrator, and I could feel it.

Of course I’ve instantly gone into anti-ego mode and told myself that it was easy to get back into the character because the character is me.  Someone else might not find it as easy, but I still liked the writing.  I enjoyed the description.  I felt something and that’s what I always try and do with what I write.  I’m not a great plot organizer or twist ending writing type, but I think I have the ability to write things that can make the reader feel what the characters are feeling.

I hope that’s enough because it’s always enough for me.

Hey

I’m in bed with you.

Again. Because we always end up in bed.

It doesn’t matter if we argue or feign indifference, we always find our way out of our clothes and against each other’s skin.

I’m going to drift off to sleep in a few minutes but I wanted to capture this moment. You’re asleep, freshly fucked until my legs burned with quit but I refused. I never tap out first.

I wanted to save this moment in my mind at how beautiful you are and what I would give to be lying next to you, just like this in 30 years thinking these same thoughts. Hips worse for wear. Legs would be burned out long before I’d want them to, but you still there next to me to watch sleep afterwards.

So goodnight, gorgeous. I hope your legs are as sore as mine will be in the morning, and I hope you never leave my bed.

Integrity

All I do is repeat pretty words by people with minds much more beautiful than mine in ways that are far less articulate.  All I am good for is second rate bargain bins and what not to do’s.  All I can be is this person with their fingers on the keys typing out emotions that don’t quite click.

I wonder if the past dies as silently as the future.  The words are still there.  The smell fades pretty quickly.  The taste and look of you aren’t far behind.  Memories betray us like the sun will one day.  Burn me as I touch it’s face because I could not comprehend the heat that comes from something so far away.

Don’t ask me to explain myself, I’ll just let you down.
Everything in life is only seen through memories of people who tell stories better than me.  All I can do is repeat those pretty words.  All I am good for is swimming in the tears that pool along the bottom of your eyes.  This all makes sense.  Don’t worry, it will all make sense.