That time…

(excerpt from: black love letters)

It’s been six years. Six years since I’ve heard your voice. Six years since I’ve seen your face. Six years since I’ve heard your laugh. I miss your laugh. Six years since we’ve sat across from each other in front of bottomless cups of coffee having breakfast at all-night diners, not thinking about tomorrow’s work day. Six years, since I’ve sat in your car. Six years since you’ve walked into my apartment. Six years since I’ve touched your body. Thoughts of my favorite parts of you still makes me close my eyes and submerge myself into depths of your moans and sighs in surround sound when you transcend. Six years of not being able to look into your eyes in the sunrise, tangled in my sheets the next morning like the knot that I can’t undo. Never could learn the makings of you.

I’ve married. I co-parent. I have more gray hair than not. I’m less athletic. I’m probably a little rounder. I eat dinner twice. I don’t exercise as much and my dessert comes in 8 x 10 cake pans. I’m almost more adult than I planned, I stand in line with coupons for snack meals at midnight after I put kids in bed.

If I could but touch you, I’d never stop. The smell of earthy, wood and cedar encircles me and I connect it to you. The fullness of you, teases me before I go to sleep and before I fully awake. Oh, how I yearn to rest my hands on the sides of you, longing for the skin they were made to touch, the arms they were made to hold. My tongue remembers your skin, the salt in the back of my throat, before I drank of your sacrifice, after I swallowed from soft places and found where good meets evil and blackness encompasses all. I died and was reborn each time your nails broke skin, entrusting me with the balance of love and lust, selfishness and selflessness — we practiced compromise. I remember the last time you sat on my lap — exposed energy — your arms holding me with a possessiveness that temporarily shut down my thoughts, silenced sounds, and killed time. The life in your core: fire, water, and air. your elements, blew breath into me and lingers within, you left remnants of your past lives and they moan in my sleep, wake me in mid-night with subliminal freedom hymns.

I love my wife. She is beautiful. She is the sun. She is happiness. She is completion. She is optimism. She is waves upon bodies of water that’s calm no matter how fast or slow my wind blows. She is cool and peace. She is reason and non-confrontation. She is love. She is reliable and dependable and loyal in her own way. She is ambition without understanding. She is fearless courage. She is magic. Her inner child is never far away. She awakes in song, with wings singing lullabies to the skies and meditating to future lives of her descendants, knowing they will survive. She has a smile that makes others want to steal her light. She calls when she’s on her way. She might grab something en route, from a drive-thru, as a celebration, a reward, or just to break the rules. She is a good friend. She is a great friend.

It has been six years. Six years too long. Our souls met and bushes burned within. I wanted you. I love my wife. The passion between us, I haven’t had with her. I miss it. I want a passionate love, an intense love affair that never ends. To be touched by one whose soul contours to mine the moment we touch. We draw each other close without words or movement. I want an enamoring unfulfilled like bottomless cup of coffee, even if lukewarm or old. Our eyes meet and we cannot help but to flirt which leads to kissing which leads to undressing and starting fires that must spread. Moments remain for days.

Marriage is safe. Marriage is stability. Marriage is stagnant. Marriage is marrying your best friend not marrying your most passionate lover. I married safety and stability. I married reason and what’s right and just. I married tomorrow and not today. I married the future built without a past. I married her and not you when I really wanted to marry you and no one else.

Your lips. Ah. Lips that touch mine and makes me… I love the erotic. Marriage is not erotic. Marriage is not sexy. Marriage is not talking dirty or being lewd. Marriage is planning dates that might be sexy or might be dinner with other married couples, after finding a sitter and having to race home because the sitter cannot stay. Marriage is sex long overdue. Marriage is scheduling sex and not calling sex what it actually is. Marriage steals away the animal, caging the kill, drugging the roar, and censoring the primal, the instinct gets numbed and stilled. Marriage lights candles, drawing foreplay as we go, turns on instrumentals, recreating times of ‘when we were…’, then getting tired and skipping sex for sleep or tv. Either way, I lose. Marriage is for keeps.

I long to feel your fingertips against my lips. What I wouldn’t give to be between your legs, wrapping you neatly around my body, not requiring forgiveness, packaging you in comfort, in your blackness that’s just as pure and true, my hands around your thighs to pull you inside, to coax beauty out of you and in, clean you of rejections residue, to be baptized, in your freedoms, our sex is free from sins, baptisms come from the release within, ending in wanting to shed your skins — we conquer abomination. You bestow kisses of gratitude when words have no say. Bliss and thanks gently caress what’s within and wait for me to return with sighs of salvation, in patient expectation, wanting permission to be saved again.

Marriage is organized sexiness. Marriage is after midnight, not on school nights, right before the morning alarm goes off, timed and neatly served, sexiness that has a limit. Marriage is quiet sex because the kids might wake and hear. Marriage is professionalism and decorum. Marriage is clean and disposable, no one looks like they just had sex because they did not. Marriage is standard. Marriage is missionary sex. Marriage is silence, you could sleep through. Marriage is quick sex no experimenting. Marriage is orgasms for the sake of peace, later. Marriage is commitment to the marriage.

You are living. I was alive. I was living. I was passion. You’ve been my favorite mistake. You’ve been my soul mate. I wanted a commitment and you weren’t ready to give it. I wish I wasn’t in a commitment. I do anything to get rid of it. Marriage is not lust. Marriage is not addiction. Marriage is not on fire, insane, jaw-dropping, pounding, exhausting, primal, or passionate amounts of sex, hiding in small spaces. Marriage is safety. Marriage is not too much. Marriage is always not enough.

I desire danger. I want risks. I long for excitement. I look for passion. I want to talk politics. I miss that. Marriage is comfort. Marriage is presentation for the sake of presentation. I want to talk into tomorrow with you about dreams and goals, healing and self-control. I want to hear your voice calling me in my sleep, softly, while you caress my skin contemplating black on black peace.

You are the sweet addiction that I have not been able to kick. I love my wife. She is especially important to me. Sex is almost everything. Sex is talking in a way that words can’t say. Sex is communication in which we can’t control our responses, we are truly free. I have lost myself. I’ve imprisoned the wildest part of me. We have everything a marriage is supposed to be, on the outside. It looks beautiful, it looks worth it, it looks like something everyone else wants to steal, it looks perfect. Every night I go to sleep alone beside one that I don’t dream about. We plan our tomorrows over bills that we flip coins on when we’re going to pay. We sleep with no rest. There are no spoons and sleep is best had under separate covers with space in between. Marriage is making love more than being in love and there is no time for love that comes in shifts and small doses. Marriage is kids, bedtime stories, a second dinner because the first one had too many vegetables, tantrums, melt downs, and middle of the night nightmares that drains you dry.

I walk in the erotic. We have great conversations. I love her more than I’ll ever be able to verbalize. I am devoted to protecting her, especially from me. I am the air and I miss the air. You are the air. I can’t breathe. I want to breathe again. I am half alive. I married fire. Air with fire. Only one can exist and it is surely not me.

You remember that time we lay on concrete, on the lake front, under a dark purple sky, with nothing but each other to keep us warm, after midnight, before dawn, our bodies side by side? I couldn’t know that you’d become part of the sky, waiting for me, each time I’ve wondered if I’m alive. I don’t know where you are or how so much time passed us by. I remember that time... I was a simpler me, before we became wives.