by Hannah Watch
(01/22/03)
It was the way in which he tied his shoes, I suppose, in the way that I did not, looped three times and one hard tug. He knew something about ropes, too.
I found that out later.
Bowstring
He told me he knew something about being hitched, and I nodded, glitter of sapphire gin on my tongue, as a four-inch, maple-toned Blahnik dangled from the tip of my toe. When I smiled, corner of my blue eye, his cresting went red, the colour of flush, anticipation. Wary, I prepared myself to leave, but the stool he'd sat me on was high, and my feet did not touch the ground.
Clove
Acupressure, piquant, smelled like Christmas, a velvet oil slick traced on waiting skin. "This is how I will heal you," he said, and I told him I wasn't broken, and he touched me again, just below where thumb met wrist, cluster of nerves or an artery, he never qualified, just commented, "Never here."
And he pressed into the soft tissue below my joint, and I think I nodded. "Same with here," he said, as he pushed his right elbow into the hollow where collarbone met neck.
"And here." He pressed a sharp knuckle into the curve of flesh between arm and chest, and I nodded and he circled me three times.
Tautline
Even in the dark, from my perch, tremble string, my arms out wide, I could see through the velvet, and so it was discarded. Silk reminded me of someone else's past and latex caused my eyes to water, but I had long ago stopped crying.
When everything smelled like birth, the underneath of skin and inside, I wondered if leather had always been his first choice.
I hadn't told him it would have been mine. But beneath my mask I saw black, and with his hands on me, I saw a thousand stars.
True Lovers
"I'm falling," I told him, and he nodded -- I could feel the gesture in the length of my hair. Behind me, three loops and one sharp tug. "It's how you tied your laces," I laughed, and he glanced at me once. Just once without blinking, and I tasted silicone.
Itch I wanted to scratch, just below my heart, but we were both already secure, all of our entanglements perfectly in place, and I could not speak through the meal he had just fed me.
Buntline
When he was gone I would stare out the window. Listen to the tick of my wristwatch, how it clicked away the time in which we were apart, how it spoke in some foreign language only we might understand. I hadn't asked when he would be back, and he hadn't told me. But the watch turned time inside out, and everything passed. And he was still gone.
Terminal
Evening, beneath a ceiling of harshlight glow and smoke, they claimed I spoke a language they couldn't understand. Words dropped from my tongue like sand or gravel, hardgrit rain, and eventually they stopped listening. I watched them, just for a moment, but their dance was not our dance, everything dripped dull and dingy from the tips of their smiles, and even the gin on my tongue tasted like stale water.
Endless
When I left, I told them it was because you were exotic. A strange spice-drug and in my system now, and how could they know, how could they understand? Beneath the music I could feel something like disappointment, like desertion, but it didn't cling to me, not like you did, not like what you did to me. Length and line, and you are my endless, ankh and figure-eight, and you have wound around me three times, and I can not forget you.
