Sometimes I just miss you

Texts during work, right after we had lunch together:

“...And you’re sexy.”
“Why?”
“Hahaha, guess where I am in my cycle?”
“Duh. Lol”
“But you really are sexy.”
“I think you just miss me”

Ithinkyoujustmissme.

Oh. It’s impossible, the missing. How I miss you. Even though you are right there, weaving in and out of my life, and I am right there, weaving in and out of yours. It’s unreal, the missing. But there it is, eating up my spine alive.

I want us to talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. TALK. Oh how we can fucking talk. I want each and every word to evaporate off our skin and then thunder down so hard we scramble under the covers. Then I want your skin and your scent and your taste and your breath. Oh your breath, oscillating into my mine. Oh your breath, building up all the parts of me I cannot see. I want the joy of feeling strange parts of us colliding: my soles on your undulating back, your chin nuzzling into my clavicle, your lips on the precipices of my hips. I want you spilled into me, forgetting yourself inside of me. I want to believe holding those pieces guards against how much I’ll miss you when real life demands work and responsibility.

I want to believe I could exhaust myself here on your body. That the words and the love and the lust and the energy could shut me down, cool me off, leave me not wanting so much. But it never happens. The words rise between us, like steam, again and again and again, no matter how many times it seems like we strained them all out.

The words rise and then, so do you. And I melt under the mechanics we cannot see. A puddle of awe, made from words. Words that came from wanting.

And the wanting that started because I miss you more than I can say.

Husband socks

The hallway is where straggler clothing loiter before finding their way to the hamper. There’s no sense in overcoming this habit of disorganization; it just feel so natural to surrender pieces onto the hardwood as I strip for the shower. So there is always a smattering of clothing parallel to the bathroom, like tumble weeds made out of poly blends and cotton. Like old snow that turns ashen with each passing day. This time, when I round the corner, a small patch of electric blue screams from the floor and catches my eye. A lone athletic sock, wadded into a ball, leaning against the molding stares up at me. For reasons too slippery for my tongue, when my sight absorbed my domestic negligence my brain labels the carelessness with “my husband’s sock”.

What the hell is that?

Because that is not my husband’s sock. I have no husband. I have a lover who loans me socks when I show up to teach classes in his gym without any of my own. I have a friend who listens to the victories and insecurities engraved on my cells; a priest who offers absolution just by stomaching my self-indulgent confessions. I have a companion who compassionately feeds me dinner and volleys back inquiry about any subject under the sun. I have a soul mate who tongues my mouth and cunt with equally engaged passion; a comrade to fondle flesh with as a means of resurrecting god.

I have a rare thing, an ingenuous thing, a thing so difficult it shreds my soul bare.

But I do not have a husband and I never will. He is not my husband and he will never be.

Then why does my mind apply words with a complete disregard for their meaning? Why is that ball of black and blue “my husband sock’s”?

I want to tell you it’s because “husband’s socks” makes it easy. That you would immediately understand the significance of this relationship if I could summarize it with just one word. I want to be like everyone else in the universe and use a language that is succinct and fulfilling; a language capable of highlighting the importance and the need for protection of a relationship that stands singular to all else.

I want to tell you, that like everything else in my life, I wish it was easier. I wish I could make you understand the burdens of that come with mind. I wish I could just say he was my husband even if I’m not built to withstand the monotony of being a wife. Husband and wife aren’t titles can handle the gravity of our relentless honesty; they aren’t labels with enough elasticity for the feelings we inspire in each other. But still, I wish I could say husband and you would know that this is about a meeting of mind; the purpose behind evolution, the fluke of sheer luck that we have made it this far.

This is not about shared property and rigid gender roles. Not about limiting the range of our independent explorations. Not about grand gestures in front of a superficial audience just to prove we’ve lived and made uninspired noise.

But this is about sickness and health. This is until death do us part but understanding that vast time and spaces away from each other is not the same as death. This is about letting love move in the way that love sees most fit.

None of that makes it easy but so much of that makes it magical. I pick up his lone sock and inhale; it still smells so much like him even if I dragged it through 60 minutes of intense sweating. There is so much of him inside my head, woven in the never-ending prattle of my subconscious. This is not my husband’s sock but I wish for some way to explain that this sock defies too many physical laws. How the fuck did this sock get here in the first place?

There are 8,420 days between our birthdays and 5,317 miles between our birthplaces. We were incubated in nonconsecutive generations, seeped in vastly different culture. How did we ever manage to have a conversation, let alone share garments? And yet here is his sock sauntering up against my dirty laundry; weird evidence of love’s lack of concern about logical prerequisites for its unfettered manifestation. And here is more evidence amassed in unpredictable fashion, over weeks and months and tear-soaked years. Here are the bruises from his kisses sometimes violent undertows, turning yellow like overripe fruit, mottling my thighs. Here is the poetry scrapped from our gums after a million small moments of emotion jostled our individual souls bare. Here is a story encrypted into my maneuvering of my veins; an impetus swirling behind my blood’s flow. Here is him crying in my arms over love lost, over his broken vows for a woman who was once the reason he rose out of bed. Here is me coddling the most tender facets of his psyche, spoon-feeding him perspective and chicken soup. Here is he cradling my insecurities and salvaging the sharp edges of my bravery from a depressive monsoon that swears I am a bad mom. Here is us listening to music in the back of an outdoor café at 11 pm on a Wednesday; here is us laughing too loud in downpour while we pluck sushi from square plates.

Here is us when we are beautiful: naked, glowing, open. So much electricity in our salvia and in our syllables. Here is us as immortals, male and female, vulnerable and oscillating, one into the other. The meaning of everything in motion.

But here is us when we are brutal: sterile, insensitive, cold, so full of rage the only color in our universe is red. Here is us as demons, selfish and explosive. Here is me erupting rage when he permits his other lover too close to my force field. Here is him stubbornly resolute about not caring about the outcomes of his actions. Here is us submerged in metallic silence. Here is us creating hell on earth.

We’re capable of forfeiting reality and creating either fantastical extreme: heaven on a Tuesday afternoon, Hell rattling off its slumber at the most unexpected of places. In the upheaval of either universe, emotive thought dilutes my blood, oxygenates me as if for the first time. How did we get here? How does anybody ever get to either of these places when they still have these lumbering mortal feet?

It can be jarring at times, to have a love like that. To be worn down the demands of this love’s honesty and passion. But we persist, throughout all the endless reasons to cease the connection. It is not about the intercourse; it has always been about the discourse. There is something cyclical and essential in how we speak to each other; something divinely inspired that heals wounds that each of us has housed way before we ever met. There is something restorative about heading to heaven only to fall back down to hell. We do not catch each other. We do not make promises about paradise forever upheld between our flesh.

We just tell each other of the journey and wet each other’s skin with our laughing tears.

He is not my husband and I am not his wife. I am just a woman who lets him be himself and he offers me the exact same privilege in return. I have no insurance if this relationship tanks; you would never be able to offer condolences the way one would if there was a divorce. If this ends badly, I suspect the damage would be much more complicated than a divorce. We share part brain and part heart. It seems so much easier to split a bank account.

I guess when my brain slips and says “my husband’s sock”, what it’s really trying to say is: I wish it were simpler. I wish I could make you understand what the risks are and why we take them.

Sometimes, I wish I were simpler, that he was simpler. Maybe then there’d be a better label for his dirty sock.  

A Man and A Woman of Their Words

“I keep my promises” he said, our backs leaned up against the front window of the studio. The glass was cool and it chilled our skin. I was probing him about his intentions, about the whimsical ambivalence of our budding romance.

This was months ago, bordering on years. His eyes were crystal and open; all the pigment in his face rallied behind his claim. “I keep my promises” he said again, in a half smirk, gaze lowered to meet mine.

I only half believed him.

I think about that now, as he exfoliates my back, my breasts press up against the sweaty bathroom tile, moist with the steam of the shower. He does keep his promises. It’s only the discrepancy between expectation and reality that throws me for a loop; it’s only the meandering hiccups of life that interfere with our plans.

At the first cold snap in September I asked him to bludgeon all the dead cells from my soul. He said “Of course”. I went out and bought my most favorite exfoliant to strip my skin clean. The days accumulated until they became months. Until it was really, really cold and my dry, sensitive skin nearly wept for relief. 

“He always gives when I really need”  I think, as his hands undulate down my spine into my ass, buffing my backside until it sparkles red. He spins me around into the lava-hot jets, sweeping the lingering bits of sand from my shoulders. He massages more exfoliant into the sinews of my triceps, the division between my quad and hamstring, into the grooves of my clavicles and the underscore of my breasts. Into soft, yielding flesh between my thighs. His face is stitched in concentration; the exact face he makes when he loses himself in his carpentry while distressing wood. He catches me looking at him and gives me a quick but real smile. He goes back into deep focus, swirling his hands on my naked body. 

My lover loves losing himself in actions of care. And when I’m the object of his care it feels like I’ve never been loved before. He keeps meticulously cleansing me, methodically, adoringly. Buffing my skin until I’m pink porcelain, smooth as glass.

He kisses me sweetly when he’s done. The bathtub sloshes with excess water, with the weight of my oldest layer clogging the drain. My skin slightly throbs, all the nerves on the surface recharged and wide awake. We towel off, both flushed with the luxury of a deep clean, our eyebrows perked in satisfaction. 

It’s always casual in my house. We’re casually naked, in our talk and in our bodies, our limbs and language strewn about the couch. I command him to inhale two lotions, letting the best scent win the privilege of being slathered. His fingertips dip into shea and wander into my calves. Those glossed fingertips knead into my thighs, into my hips, into my ass. He spends so much time on my ass you would assume it’s the thirsty part of me.

“Mr. M.” I coo through half-closed eyes and an open smile, “What are you doing?” I’m belly down on the couch, arms cradling my ultra-relaxed head, wet tendrils clinging to my face.

“Senorita S.” he responses, his syllables guttural, charged,

“I’m about to worship your ass.”

He slips to the side of me, his haunches in my periphery. The edges of his teeth graze my right cheek, his tongue trailing in the midst. He bites mouthfuls of flesh, playfully, greedily.  Then he kisses the transitory imprints, as if excusing his impulses. I can see his lower body; can see how the tension and excitement spread through his muscles, all the way down to his earnest, flared toes. But that is not the best part, or the most vivid marker of his desire. I can hear his pleasure in his inhalations as he pulls apart my ass, pressing his face closer; I can hear the surprised delight of his exhalations as his tongue wanders down my crack.

And I am soaked through; pussy completely saturated from all that sensual sound.

“God I love opening you up like this” he says, a rush of cool air circling my asshole, mingling with the wet edges of my pussy. I love it too, when he holds me like that, exposes me like that. I love it when he spreads me apart; when he looks at all the places I cannot see and tells me that they are beautiful.

His tongue is on my perineum, slinking upwards, slowly, menacingly. His fingernails dig into my spread skin and I hold my breath as the warm, wet contact of his tongue meet the tight, unexplored territory of my asshole. “Fuck” I say, under my breath, melting in pleasure. “Fuck.” He probes my asshole with his tongue, savoring the rawest part of me, as if it’s sustenance, as if it’s sacred food. His licks are loving and long, deep and devoted. I think this could make me cum. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as coveted as this.

And it makes me remember: I made a promise. Months ago, bordering on years.

It’s an unofficial one, an implied one. Because he never corrals me into promises, never tries to put parameters up with questions. It’s been years now of me teasing him with my history of anal sex, with the knowledge of my past sexual exploits. And he always gives me the same clear, blue gaze of intrigue, the same open face of yearning when I tell him one day soon it will be his go around.

He always keeps his promises, I think as I slip away from his curious tongue. I hop onto the carpet, skip into the hallway, throw open the closet door  with the magic of anticipation fueling my limbs. There is the lube, waiting. There is my hand, oiling up my pucker, before bouncing back into the living room to eagerly tell him the day has finally come.

I lay down on my belly, ass pricked up, spine curved and ready. The lube oozes onto his cock, his cock glides between my cheeks. There’s that initially gravity of tip-on-asshole and the fervor of taboo start to swell my pussy even more. He pushes the head in with the gusto of a teenager, with the bravado of a man who is justly claiming his reward.

And it hurts.

Not enough to stop the theatrics. Not enough to wane my enthusiasm. Just enough to shift the opening ceremonies. I saddle onto his lap, guiding his cock up into my ass, letting him view every inch of emotion registering on my face. His eyes are so blue, so alive, so excited with the novelty of the experience. I rock slow, building a fire in my hips. “Yeah baby, like that” he says, gripping my curves, feeling them dance between his palms. He thrusts his hips up to meet mine, pushing and pulling with my cues. 

And my pussy is melting. It’s spilling onto his pubic hair, labia full and fuchsia with desire. His mouth opens, reaches for mine. My hips slip back and forth faster, like a belly dancer on speed, making his cock hit all those delicious places in my ass that make me feel insane. There is so much adrenaline churning through my pelvic bone, spiraling through my pulse. When I look at his face, I can see it’s happening inside of him too—this overwhelming flood of sensation, an unbearable urgency of pleasure from fucking my ass.

His eyes are growing fire, the same color blue inside of a low flame. I love that color, his color, the rarest color on earth; I fall in love whenever it’s cast in my direction. It makes me remember that I am the first. The first woman to give him her ass without hesitancy, without shame, without unsubstantiated teasing. The first woman to unapologetically joust his intellect into a sweaty truce, the first woman to tell him he is always free to wander after wonder. The first woman hardy enough to tolerate the emotional force of her promises to him. There is so much in life, in our independent, evolving lives, that asks me to be brave, that demands that I be patient and kind. There are so many things to contend with, mundane, imagined and substantial. But I am the first of so many of those things and I can see that register in his eyes as he plunges his cock deep inside me, asking me in pressured speech if he can cum inside my ass.

“Yes, baby, fuck. Cum inside my ass!”

Fuck. This is his first time, I’m his first time. The acknowledgement shoots through my veins like heroin, tussles all my nerves with love. I cum, like a blathering lunatic, grinding shamelessly on his trickling cock, hips feverishly entranced in his hands.

We hop back into the shower when it’s over and laugh under the stream of heat.

We are dried off again, snaked together on the couch, naked and softly breathing. The side of my face is engulfed in his chest hair, like wild grass on a suburban sunbather’s face. It obscures my vision, caresses my lips when I speak.

“How do I smell?” he interprets. He knows I love his scent, his visceral, virile scent. The question makes me burrow deeper into his body, eyes hidden by the curve of his armpit. The scent only gets stronger.

“How do I smell?” he asks again, a laugh waiting behind his smile. I laugh for him and squeeze him, playfully protesting, “I don’t want to talk about it!”

We lay there and I breathe him in. I don’t want to talk about how he smells. I don’t want to tell him that it’s delicious, that his natural scent is the strongest comfort on earth. Don’t want to tell him that his scent makes me want to move mountains, makes me want to be his champion until my dying breath. Don’t want to tell him that something as ethereal as his scent gives me more security than money, education, or experience.

I don’t want to tell him that I wish there could be a promise that his scent will always be there. Because I could battle pink slips, foreclosed mortgages, terminal illness and whatever other meanness life throws at me and I could do it with grace if his scent was there at the end of the day.

I don’t want to back him up into a promise he might not be able to keep. I love that he is a man of his word.

So I don’t tell him how he smells.

It is in withholding that I realize: he is also, despite all the odds, the first.

No man has ever penetrated me, like this.

The metamorphosis of skin

I dressed up like a high class whore. He slapped me across the face. It was sharp and sudden and my instincts flew to the surface in defense. I became the unfearful. I became the girl who can stomach the pain without a flinch. I became the defiant one who glares her prosecutor in the eye, refusing to react with weakness.

I did not plan on becoming that girl. I did not suspect he could yank her out so immediately. I did not think she would manifest as such as I hinged my corset together, as I slinked into high heels. I did not think I would ever see her again.

He resurrected her. But she dissolved fast. Because then soundless tears fell, turning my face into a ramshackle charcoal sketch. There were tears like inky punctuation marks. I’ve reached a point in my life where I am more alive than numb. Alive with tears, alive with contrast. Alive and bleeding mascara on the floor.

My kink-tastes are evolving. Pain has been such an integral part of the exploration; the impetus, actually, of the exploration. But the pain has started to shift its hues, started vibrating in a pitch that is hard to hear. How this evolution impacts our playdates after dinner, I’m not sure. I suspected yesterday that he needed a stomping ground, an arena that could mirror back his prowess. His tastes are violent, cruel and real, when he feels like that. And so often I love him like that. But the pain has started to change its definition in my skin. It’s started to be a thing that dwarfs needs I cannot seem to every directly address.

In the end, it seemed a loving thing to do: to sacrifice flesh to his wishes. To let him leave his mark even it burned and left my face and figure distressed. 

The tender core of Cordelia Teal.

He lapped up all the spills, falling from my heart, leaking for my mouth like a sponge yielding it saturation. He lapped it up and the connection beamed through him like a sun split blessing for having sentiment sense.

I’m a fighter.

I am more fighter than artist.

More fighter than educator.

More fighter than female.

More fighter than human.

And when he laps up all undulating overflow of my soul, I want to fight to contain myself, want to fight by creating mountains to excuse the mess. I fight nothing but my own demons in his absences and I convince myself that exaggerated space is necessary protection. This is game I’ve played my whole life, a game of perpetual lose; a warrior’s scampering for cover, for freedom.

He walks around with his eyes lensed in beauty. And when he looks at me, swept in the formulas of aesthetics, I do not understand what he sees. When he looks at me and he says I am beautiful it is as if I engender the rules of design quivering with a pulse. I do not understand what he sees, only know that the moments he calls me beautiful, he relishes the acknowledgement; he radiates validation as if the discovery of beauty is the impetus of his existence.

I do not understand what he sees. I just have to trust what he sees.

And it is exactly that place that I am most weak.

And there it is again. The impulse to fight.

I want to fight to prove that I’m strong. 

Insufferable yearning

I want things that maybe you can't give me. I want your skin on mine, the heat of your pulse mingled with mine. I want to savor your body with slow, intuitive kisses, smoke out all the divots of design on your flesh. I want to linger in communicative touch, caress all my secrets into your sinews. I want your exhalations filling up my lung; want the length of our bodies to merge in precision, hips and knuckles perfectly aligned and tangled. I want the cool, alert taste from your mouth, want the warm, silvered electricity trickling from your cock. I want the deep utterances of your concentration permeating the room, penetrating my ears. I want the coils of your pubic hair careening my tongue, brushing against my eyelashes. I want the delirium of your hips pumping into mine, the delirium of internal mechanisms rotating under your key. I want the sharpness of your clavicles against the taut of your traps, above the virile bulk of your chest. I want the earthy hues of your body hair flecked with prismatic sweat, radiating pheromones. I want your juice, all your juice, all the effort and love and history it took to make that juice, to flood every piece of me until I drown. I want to be forever open to your advances, open forever for you and only you, malleable and pliable just for you, begging forever to fill me, overwhelm me, with the expansive illumination of you. 

A game of proportions

Fuck your other lover because you’re missing me.

Fuck her hard and raw; fuck her until the juice runs dries, until the static overruns the charge. Fuck her until she’s limp on the bed, dissolved under your hips, a victim of your yearning for my body instead of hers.


Fuck her like she’s never been fucked before; bombard her with the insistence for me.


Fuck her while your body screams out for me, clamors and perspires for me. Every thrush, for me. Every utterance, for me. Grab her flesh, her taunt, unyielding flesh, and listen to your palms whine for more, cry for the plum flesh of me. Plunge your knuckles in her curls, lose your digits in her dark, and sense your eyes craving golden refraction of lights, the halo that belongs to me. Drag her mouth to your ear and let her heaves underwhelm you, let them coax you into internally scripting my language in your head, fevering your semen with my feral memory over the immediacy of her docility.



Fuck her like she’s never been fucked before, with my silhouette haunting your periphery, with my impact menacing your brain, with my scent subtly lingering on the sheets.



Fuck her, mercilessly. Fuck her, unapologetically, with the urgency of how much you’re missing me. Fuck her. Fuck her to alleviate the need of me.




Fuck her because of me.

To the boy who used to come to my window

I felt like ripping out my heart

by listening to the albums

I know braid and pipe your soul.

The ones that dilute my blood with invented nostalgia;

the ones that replenish your bones while you think of someone else.

It’s been years since I’ve seen the whites of your eyes

glean against the flushed blue prism of your irises

As they sparkled in the sporadic spill of headlights,

in the darkest corner of my summer yard.

It’s been years since the fluorescence of your smile

creep over the silent pluck of your laugh

when I laid down the vulgarities of my tongue and soul.

It’s been years since I tried mining the youngest form of you from your oldest habits,

been years since we reclaimed something ageless in the repetition of our sorrows.

You have the woman you were always meant to have in your life

and I wonder often if you’re swept with abandon,

if it feels exactly how you imagined,

if your life unfurled in a spectral orchestration that leaves you breathless.

I wonder often:
does she give you enough mystery,

enough permission to periodically wade through misery,

enough electricity to make you rumble and run with your curiosities?

You always had a craving heart, a loyal heart but a restless heart,

a heart that belonged to the navy moon desert and the deepest trees.

You had a heart that needed shelter but needed freedom just a pinch more.

And I wonder, while I listen to the music my senses forbid me to enjoy as my own,
I wonder, does your woman give you all the things you never labeled,
all the things I’ve known all along?