Written on The Boy’s futon couch at 11:28 PM on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008, post-panic attack.
It’s getting worse.
That gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, that warning that I’m getting in too deep, that I should start clawing my way up and out of this hole I seem to be in. But it might be too late. I’m in way over my head, and I have no real strength to pull myself up. Even if I did, I’m not sure that I would want to. Not really.
Because when it’s good? It’s really, really good. He makes me calm, warm, beautiful. When I’m with him and it’s good, I am powerful, smart, funny, desired. There’s nothing like it, ntohing close, and it’s intense.
Almost too intense.
When it’s bad, it’s too much. tonight, it was too much. As he drifted off to sleep, I found myself hanging on for dear life, wide awake, gripping the tiny ledge of a huge precipice, and then I was falling, falling, falling.
He was there, though. Put out his arms, wrapped them around me, let me climb onto him, nails digging into his back, his arms, his sides. “Just focus on my breathing,” he said, arms around my shoulders, chest pressed into my back. I clasped his arms, tried to stop shaking. Focused on how much I love this Boy, how good it felt to be lying next to him.
For a few peaceful minutes, I was able to keep the thinking at bay. I didn’t think about how it’s been five months and he still won’t define it. I didn’t worry over the sex we’d had earlier had been so intense that I’d had to bite my own fingers to keep from screaming (how cliche!). For those precious few moments, I was in the present, and only the present.
It didn’t last.
He fell asleep, and I laid there, awake. Words, phrases, sentences took shape in my head. They started screaming at me, telling me to let them out. They needed to be scrawled across paper in the semi-darkness.
As we tunnel deeper and deeper, it gets more complicated.
A few weeks ago, he introduced me to an acquaintance. “This is my…this is…this is Clementine,” he finally managed to get out, and I rolled my eyes at his back. Not just a friend. Not his girlfriend, oh no. His sometimes confidant? The girl he fucks on a regular basis? His lover? Can you be lovers at 23 and in this century? Lovers? What does that mean, anyway?
There is love here, certainly. We have sex, but do we make love? I’ve never been comfortable with that term. Do lovers make love? Do they have to? If it started out as sex with very little emotional attachment and evolved into something much deeper, how do you categorize it?
It used to be that I couldn’t make eye contact with him when he was inside me because it felt like false intimacy, and now I find myself shying away because it’s too real, too much, it’s been forever since I felt like this and oh god didn’t I swear never to fall this hard again?
