the habit of being

I am a body like a Navajo blanket. I want you wrapped up inside, giving me shape.

(Alone, I cannot relate these things which have happened to us, because they are too beautiful, and I have decided I hate words. I am afraid of not writing them down; I feel like that it what I should be doing now. Starting from the beginning, every thing. But I cannot, and I wish you would do it for me. Put my hands in yours and make the words come. I need help. )

I am surprised by my own sexual desire, by the reality and intensity of it. It shocks me, that this want is not a thing of dreams and fantasies, or rather that those fantasies have so much substance, are so much who I am. I said to you, you are so much nicer to me in real life than in my dreams. I felt such relief in expressing that, even in such a modest and vague way. I felt I had attempted, at least, to bring together two worlds. I did something I had been previously unable to do.

As I stood waiting in the airport I ran over and over in my head these dreams I had been having, so many dreams over and over the two nights previous, and the second you walked off of that plane I wanted to create all those dreams, dreams that had forced me to get out of bed in the middle of the night. I wanted to tell you to do everything you had wished you could do to me, with me, in all those months since I had last seen you. And yet when you did arrive everything changed, and I felt meek and uncomfortable, and I cursed myself as we walked around Savannah, so oddly hand in hand, like we did not know what to make of one another. And how you said the same things over and over in the car when we left the airport, these things that meant nothing, and I laughed that fake laugh and curled up inside myself and could think only that I wanted very much for you to suddenly turn to me and say “I want to fuck you,” and I hated my lack of courage to say it myself. And I could not be genuine until I felt like that point had been made. This is how I view repression, it is very much the thing that made me unable to say that, right then, when you walked off the plane, even when I imagined that every aspect of my posture must have screamed it. (That part, of course, is only a dream.)

In a way, it is the same thing that keeps me from voicing my desires, even when they are quite specific. In a way, it is very separate, because as you said, I want these things done TO me, and that is a huge part of it. I want it to be your choice. I wonder if this is too idealistic an outlook. At the same time I believe that our wants, sexually, must converge, just because it would be fitting with everything else about our relationship. I am so excited with thoughts that things will only get better and better. That amazes me, that it is even possible. And somehow I know that I will never cease to be amazed.

All the same there are so many things I want to be able to say to you, and there are many things I feel I have no capacity to say. There are feelings I want to share with you that I could not even begin to explain to myself, could never put into words (I am limited, in that respect), unless perhaps I was extremely intoxicated. Sometimes I feel intoxicated when I am with you; I feel more alive, like the air that was once simply there is instead doing some sort of ballet dance and massaging my skin and screaming at me, daring me to move, all at once.

I want you to know how I felt when you tied that ribbon around my wrists.