trace

With today's lovely pains, I recall a conversation during my eleventh year of school. Seated backs against a heater in a tamely ocre corridor, struggling to stay warm, Sarah described to me the soft bruises. Underneath her hip bones, on the insides of her small, white thighs. She described the harrowing brown circles she held there surely, subtly; void of the concern with which I met her.

In the following months, I (as we all did in one way or another, at some point or another) became preoccupied with this sensation. It was not voyeurism on my part; not at all. It was a fixation with her. Sarah became a faded enigma. Instead, her physical frame was inhabited by stories set in bare-bar-mattress rooms.

I felt genuinely concerned about this fleshly toll that Sarah's stories imprinted on her. I felt sure that these green marks were signs of her lover's apathy; his self-fulfillment; neglect. Retrospectively, perhaps they were fitting gifts to the girl who marked the other side of her own legs, anyway. I suspect this was the case.

Myself? I've woken to both love and rebuke these aches. They feel like after dancing, when forgotten muscles are resuscitated into beautiful, practical use. While the dancing then (usually) continues for some time, and so dissipates the lactic acid, the settled blood; my year-practiced habit of one-off fuckings has upturned several morning assessments of reminder. Do I want to be reminded? Is this a wanted skin memory, useful to recall isolated moments after the person is gone? Or is it a reminder of the invented eighth game that held no benefit except for lesson?

This one, with freedom -- here comes a constant. More than memory.

Interrupted, perhaps.. Fearfully like the first; but I don't fear it. It is a gift: I get the lovely ache once, twice, perhaps four times. Then I get to feel it subside into familiarity.

It will be so nice when you are familiar. Like dancing.