The last few hours have been splendidly strange. Most of it was spent in the plush couches of all the secret cafes I could think of, lounging about over long blacks, his hands massaging my thighs with my feet propped up onto His lap. Ocassionally, he'd bend down to kiss my knee and the side of my calves, lick the tips of my fingers, asking for a 'real' kiss, leaving me feeling completely out of the sphere of reality.
***
We were both standing by the philosophy section, browsing through the same book; something about how the demise of democracy would lead to greater individualism. It didn’t particularly make any sense to me, so I wasn’t concentrating much. What I was noticing was Him. There was just something about him and made me want to say something. Perhaps it was how he struck me as very bohemian. Maybe it was the choice of literature, the embroidered linen shirt, the funny goatee, I honestly can’t place a finger on any of it all. I figured he was one of those drifters wandering about
I struck up a conversation, and it somehow led to him mentioning Richard Linklater, LSD and Waking Life. We’d been talking for what must have been half and hour or so, while standing on the same spot, and I felt myself feeling very comfortable. Before I knew it, and without knowing, I’d picked up his hand and pulled him along to the graphic novels. It just felt like the natural thing to do, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it till later.
He started talking about Coffee and Cigarettes, one of those movies with self-explanatory titles and a lot of engaging superfluous dialogue where people sat around talking about stuff. It occurred to me to mention Before Sunrise.
‘It’s about two people who meet perfectly by chance on the Eurostar and find a connection and basically sorta fall in love with each other. And the guy, Ethan Hawke, he has to leave for the States the next day, and that’s why it’s called Before Sunrise, because that’s when they part and…
It hit me like bucket of what-the-fuck.
‘Oh Christ. You must be thinking I’m some kinda crazy girl trying to live out some convoluted, fantasy I just saw on DVD. Honestly, I know the resemblance (and I made a gesture that basically referred to him and me) is terribly uncanny, but I swear I didn’t do it on purpose.’
He laughed and said he thought it was totally bizarre too, but asked me to carry on with the synopsis.
We went for coffee at my favourite café (I love the colours of the décor), and must have spent the entire afternoon talking. He had a taste for my blend of wistful romantics, and we flirted in a very pensive, dare I say abstracted? manner. I would be conversing, and he would look right into my eyes for as long as I could sustain the topic, and not blink. He would stroke my fingers and twirl the edges of my hair. Or rest his chin against his palms and looked thoughtful, while sipping the foam off the latte. I thought there was some measure of theatrics, but it didn’t make the situation feel synthetic. At some point, it occurred to me that perhaps, without consciously knowing it, we were emulating the movies we admired.
I had wanted to take him to another secret little place for cheese-cake and live music, but when we’d gotten there, I’d realized the place had closed down. That’s the irony of truly hidden coffee places. The thing that makes them fantastic; that there’s nearly almost no one there most of the time, is also what closes them down eventually.
We walked around to the art museum, and there was nobody there (You can’t help but like government funded secret places). And there was a point in time as we were walking through a small corridor into another exhibit, where he stopped me midway. We looked at each other for one of those whiles that seemed like forever and I placed my hands on his chest. For a short time we stood there, breathing, before I turned and walked on into the other gallery.
There was a walk along the river, and as we walked he started to hold my hand and took liberties of my shoulders as arm-rests. Then at some point, he stopped and pulled me into him and kissed my forehead, and the tips of my ears. I was enjoying the sort of physical contact we had. It didn’t intimidate me and he was coming on very lightly. Then, as a bunch of pre-adolescent children and some Japanese tourists walked by, he pressed me to him and smooched.
I had felt like going home, because I had so much to do, but simply couldn’t. I suggested hanging out at my pool, and we spent the rest of the night sitting facing each other on a sun chair, talking about relativity and the human incapability to understand what the eternal was, because our minds were all products that had an origin.
He pulled me up towards him and splashed a droplet of water onto my right knee.
‘I know this is going to make me sound like I’m on LSD, but just listen. Imagine that the little drop of water is a universe, and there’s all these galaxies in it, and a million things are going on in it at the moment, ever since I created it, and,’
He stroked off the droplet, flicked it out of existence.
‘And now it’s destroyed. In one single moment, it’s gone. But whose to say it wasn’t much longer? Do we ever really know anything? We could be terribly small in the big scheme of things, and our time passes this slowly, or this quickly, because we’re this small. What about outside this universe as we know it? Maybe there are two people, exactly like us, you and me, and the me is going to whack everything we’ve ever known existed into oblivion…’
‘You Are on some sorta drug.’
‘I think it’s just you.’
I laugh. ‘Well, you don’t need to think about it in such a cosmic scope. I mean, look at us, feel us. It’s nearly
My arms went around his neck, perfectly out of their own accord, and I pressed myself against him. He told me I was a fine, wicked tease and hitched me onto his crotch, suffocating me in an embrace and pushing his against mine. I cannot deny that I was enjoying myself, but there came a point when I thought it would simply be a bad idea to carry on, and pulled away a little.
‘Gosh. You know, I’ve been having a hard on for the past hour. You know what are blue-balls? I’ve got them now, and it’s giving me this incredible stomachache. I mean, no, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to suggest we should do anything you don’t feel like, but I really need to use the bathroom.
‘You could come with me. I mean, you don’t even have to do anything, I’m not going to force you, I mean, it’s just Me, I’m perfectly… biddable?’
‘Oh? Are you at the point where if I just touched your dick, you’d come?’
I sighed. ‘You know, if I’d met you a couple of months ago, I might have not given a shit, but I’ve realized that with things like that; it’s great now. I’d fuck you, and I’m sure it’ll be fantastic. I like you, it’s been 8 hours, but I feel as if I’ve known you forever, you’re hella cute and all. And trust me, aside from the fact that it’s not biologically possible for me to have testicles ready to implode on themselves, it’s not any easier for me.
‘But I know I won’t like myself for it when it’s all over. I wouldn’t know completely, for sure. I could find out, but I think I wouldn’t like myself for it, honestly. God I sound like such a priss, I try not to be but…’
He was very nice about it, and it didn’t matter.
At breakfast, I mentioned my little belief about how people were just like cities, and how you can’t just read about a city, and look at tons of pictures on it, and imagine that you’ve actually been there. It’s not the same. And it’s likewise for people; Sometimes sleeping with someone would take you to that other level of consciousness for the person, give you that extra compassion.
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s all serendipity, and no one’s to say it would have been better if we did sleep with each other. Circumstance made it the best it could be, it’s really none of our business to have interfered with it, although if we did, it would be all part of chance, wouldn’t it.’
It’s just the way things are, I supposed.
Parting was such an annoyance.
If everything was really all part of a film, we would part without remembering things like email addresses. That’s the way films are. Melodramatic.
‘Oscar Wilde did always complain that women didn’t know the beauty of letting memories stay memories in their pure state, instead they are continually dragged out and rehearsed until they are all ruined and bleached of colour.’
He scoffed and wrote his contacts on a book he’d given me (Voltaire’s Candide).
‘This is reality. People want to connect, partings can never been final, it doesn’t have to be.’
‘Hah, all right. See you around.’
xoxox
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