Susceptible To Tribulation at a Moment’s Notice
Part 1: The Crescendo
I’m guilty by association. He shot me point-blank in the chest, it’s that simple. He’s puking the contents of his stomach, waiting for the gun shot to clear off his ears. I hear nothing, it’s all his, the cold sweat clutching to his body, his heart’s pounding. All the stench of the heavy air he breathes in. All his alone to have and bear.
Greetings, we won’t meet again. I’m free to roam through it all, able to skip and cut the pieces that resemble a broken puzzle, in hopes of a review of how I got here…maybe. You think this is my story; that makes him the villain.
Since I’m bleeding all over the cold floor, it all slows down to a blur.
It’s at first too much to bear, but the loud bang will eventually clear off. He will regret doing it. And yes, in case you were still wondering, it’s me talking and not him. Once the sound clears off his ears, it will be too late. In the meantime, I’ll tell you a story, not an honest one. This journey towards the eventual demise is short and senseless for me, full of regrets over what could’ve been and should’ve been, this time it’s about what might have happened.
I find myself now having to explain how I got here, or is it there? Well, this doesn’t begin there or anywhere. Before all else, I would like to extend to you a cold welcome, and if you can, don’t get attached. It’s already one too many people crowded, and every heartbeat left in me stretches me back a decade going backwards, all while you think of what did happen.
It’s morning and I’m reluctant to get out of bed. A taste of ash and iron in my mouth, still dizzy from the night before. Hungover? The answer is no. There is no sleep as comfortable as the one you shouldn’t be having.
The eyes of a face staring at me across the mirror, singling me out in the empty bathroom. I throw in peppermint to cover the stench, and deodorant for the obvious reason.
You might not realize this, but I do care.
I find myself drinking my big black jug of coffee in a sterile looking aluminum box of a place. It’s cold and grey matching the weather on the outside.
A single looking damsel with the tight shirt under a leather jacket. I can stare through my shades while I undress her to the sharp looking curvature, I cut myself fantasizing.
It’s time to opt for a chance to copulate.
“Do you have a lighter miss? We could share a smoke or two”. I know it’s mediocre.
She slowly turns her magnificent head, long raven hair tied behind, a cigarette between her manicured fingers, she brings it to her crimson lips, presses on it as she sucks the smoke in. I’m plucked into the smoke, sliding with the nicotine into the darkness inside her mouth carried away by the moisture of her warm saliva.
Her lips move but I don’t hear it, I know that I’m obliterated at the end of her sentence. I walk back to my place coughing my lungs out.
How about that? Yes. I don’t know what she said. I can jump over the embarrassing bits by my shutting myself inside for the duration of my destruction. The phone vibrates in my pocket, It’s Delilah. She’s the only one who would leave me empty dragging my legs in the morning and still wants to go again the same night.
I find myself dangling between my thighs, until her small fingers press down my trousers. That’s a proper wake up alarm. She smells of lavender soap this time.
I walked outside like a champion having conquered the seven seas with a kraken’s stool on my boot. That’s how I imagined myself after a repeat for the very first time I went under her skirt. We’re eight years in and I can still make her laugh and scream.
You must be judging me by now, but the truth is… there isn’t one. I’m shooting blanks so no offspring to fight over the lack of inheritance. At the end of the day, Delilah is all I want and need. Hopefully she feels the same.
I’m fortunate to have Delilah to take care of it, enough to finish me off over the sound of her boss calling from across the floor. I try to get my pants and jump off unseen, but I can’t. So, I slip under her desk that doesn’t resemble one. The shape never seems to register. I’m already navigating through her thighs upwards as She giggles. The warmth inside cures the morning cold out of both of us.
That was a cliché, a sincere one. However, It’s not what’s missing from your life. A day job that supplements a house and a car. Mortgage payments and raises, taxes and the discounts at the local supermarket. Pay for one and get two for free. I would live for that. The only morose part of it is having to advertise a seldom happy of a life, curated in a social media feed with a picturesque smile.
That photo with pencil sharp cheekbones, hanging in the living room as a testament to working hard, in the bedroom that is. It’s always obligatory to be happy in a photo, you’re excused of that burden in real life.
You only need love as an excuse for the noise we make while slamming our flesh against each other, that and for the face you make when you climax.
I never planned this day beforehand, unable to see past what I can remember. I should have been careful of how and with whom. Delilah lasts long enough for me to forget the world on the outside, as I feel her tightening around me, and that is all what I ever needed. I would occasionally have my hand around her neck.
Another breath of air stretches this tale back to my first scream, covered in warm ooze, hanging upside down while they rag me and tag me. In that exact moment, you have no reason to suspect it, that’s where it all started. I will skip many years, past the first step and the first word. Able to walk a distance, until the part where the wholesome family pinches my cheek. The joy drawn on the lower part of their faces as they stretch my face long enough for me to scream in pain.
I will hold on for this moment: embarrassed at my first erection. It was painful and scary, I almost hack it off. I managed to remember what I read, and tried to put it to good use. The thing about holding a book the size of your head, with a rock-hard protrusion in your pants is that you skim through the whole thing fast enough to jump over the when and how.
I got slapped, and locked in my room for what amounted to eternity at the time. I had to learn to ask a lady first before getting under her skirt. The odd thing is that this story is true. There was no Google at the time. Thirteen years old and awkward looking, I had myself buried in books for too long that I forgot how the world smelled like.
Once upon a sunny day, partnered for a history lesson with a classmate. She dropped her pencil, she had bent low enough I could see down her blouse. What seemed like a flash of a sunburst to me, was long enough for her to pick her head up and see the swallowing down my pants. I blushed, she thought I hated her before that exact moment. Meanwhile, I was only confused about was how to actually maintain eye contact with her.
That’s a declaration that I liked her enough to arouse me. What more do you need? Well, a devious look formed on her face.
At the time, while blood was rushing downwards against my wishes, I didn’t know that I could just rely on the mechanics of small talk. Always attempting to disrupt silence with words that don’t necessarily make sense. Until she wrapped her soft lips around me, I loved every second I could remember of that minute.
Starting a conversation is daunting every time, you’re breathing words out of a hole in your face, the air transports a thought to someone else’s mind. It’s the same hole that guides the food into your body’s digestive system. In another sense, the magic of kissing is the meeting of two-hole enclosures that lead directly to where your body stores its waste.
A kiss is the ultimate expression of mutual love. Just keep in mind what you need that for.
“Let me know when you are about to-…” That’s what I think she said. “Aha…yeah” I replied, it doesn’t matter, at the end I exploded in her mouth and all over her face. An electric charge down my body, delivered from tensed muscles and a clenched fist. A deep breath as the whole world turned bright.
The effect lasted for weeks. I didn’t kiss her, nor did I tell her I loved her. I didn’t tell anyone about it, until now.
It wasn’t Delilah.
I discovered that I could get my release on my own. I tried for a while, but only so far to get the poison out. I failed to see the purpose of it. The endeavour lasts short enough before the whole world comes rushing back to you, all while you are scared that someone will find you with your pants down at your ankles. The fuss about it always baffled me.
Junior high school was over with me getting off to a far, as far as it could get from home to high school.
It’s also the age where everyone around you has something to tell you. And you are ought to listen. Advice on life is a concealed threat of epic proportions that ultimately fails to capture my imagination.
But none of them have a secret bite-size recipe for how not to get shot.
I daydream about the emptiness that silence captures, before it shatters at the sound of Delilah from a screen in front of me. A very narrow set of contradicting characters we are to each other, she has ambitions and promiscuous plans to achieve them. Mine ends with finding a partner that would indulge my copious misanthropy.
Just before the thrust chokes me back to a vacuum that fades upon the release. A second moment passes while lost in a relentless loop, this ritual is the sacrament of worship to an imaginative figure cramming the back of my head with desire to only release.
Nothing really remains to you after you die, just like marriage, it’s only for life. A distraction from the life you are not having, the instinct of survival by filling the world with more of the same genetic mark. They would look like half as you, and the other half like the one occupying the other side of bed.
I whisper an honest lie down her ear, in case you were wondering. She breathes hers down mine as I thrust in. Her gasps jump starts my heartbeat every time as she stares into my soul. That’s how you do it. That’s what I learned in high school. This time, it’s my teacher. Not born out of the fantasy of doing your teacher, but as close as you can hope.
I liked her tiny face and small proportioned breasts, her diminutive figure contained an immense commanding voice in the classroom, that softens as the light dims and cushions are involved. I didn’t have to undress her, she took the lead and I followed with a hard on. You can imagine my surprise to find that my uptight teacher was a vixen in bed. And as a sixteen-year-old with a tumescent with a click of a button, I was way over my head. She did things to me that still gets me hard in the pants for the joy they brought.
I wasn’t a playboy in high school, I only managed to act the part. That wasn’t the case one afternoon. One warming up exercise before gym class. I saw Delilah with her friends. I was supposed to run in circles for the blood to flow, but I ran into a tadpole as the glare from her ash blond hair blinded me. You don’t see it, but I kept on staring the moment I laid eyes on her. I was knocked out of conscience for ten minutes.
That’s what happens to you when a smile captures you in a moment.
I wasn’t the top of class as a jogger, remember, I was the bookworm. I knew the rules of every game we practiced. The eventual success is just like regular fornication, it only diminishes performance anxiety.
The teacher saw the whole thing, he was watching me the whole time. He laughed his ass off at me that day. I paid for what happened every time I had class.
I got her attention, the infamous head against the pole was my ice breaker. The down to earth smile hooked me right in, with the usual push and pull games that we used to play. Until one day long after a walk I slip a kiss to her cheek, and she blushes.
She also slapped me.
The classes extended past their runtime for the awful joy we could have. The deal I had with my teacher, was that I would attend her class and keep my mouth shut. I would fill the hole no plastic toy could ever warm up, and I would get the grade. These were the terms of the deal I made. I thought she singled me out for some reason, however; It turned out that she had a similar arrangement whenever she had an itch she couldn’t scratch on her own.
I didn’t affect me like you would think. I was grateful for the chance to learn. She was my tutor, the only best any teenager could ever hope for, next to a raunchy online video. A woman that knew what she wanted and how she wanted it, there was no pillow talk. I told her about Delilah, I got every tip I could put to good use from her.
I’m drawing perfect women out of my imagination with a pencil. They are abstract studies of the ones I’ve been with. I’m locked in a moment for what amounts to an eternity, focused on details that make sense in all the wrong places.
I would like to inform you that I got slapped more than enough to know how to drive women mad. And I managed to make couple of exes mad during cuddle time. I was booted out of a room with nothing but my underpants, in a household of girls who laughed me out the house at the sight of me begging for my clothes.
Until they took pity and let me inside, it was raining.
Everyone should cuddle and hug the cold away. Don’t take my words for it. Now that I’m cold I would like a cuddle or soup.
I barely managed to graduate from high school, it was time to move to another city. Delilah would have to wait for another year before joining me. And the following is how I spent my time.
The new city smelled fresh and welcoming, coffee brew in the morning with the smell of wet dirt in the autumn. I got to hang with older and more mature looking people. I even let myself loose for couple of new experiences that tasted raw in the flesh.
It was once a night and a drink too many I feel a hand down my pants. I played along for the excitement of a new sensation. The experience amounted to blurry recollection of what happened.
I never spoke of it to anyone. I walked off the room dressing myself. I didn’t know what to feel. I took a warm shower at three o’clock in the morning, slept in my bed for a week. He was drunk out of his mind, but I still remember that night.
The next few weeks were weary, I was numb and unable to sit properly. I found a classmate staring at me, after a lecture I stepped in introducing myself. We shared meals, walks and even class time. Took us a while until we shared a bed. I knew what to do and how to do it, but this time I simply couldn’t. The memory of the time with the guy latched on me long enough to turn me off. I got scared for a second.
She tried to calm an anger that wasn’t in me, I failed to communicate what really happened.
The first time I lied to Delilah was because of what happened. She called me once a night, asking how I was doing. I had stopped the daily checking up with her for Camelia. She managed to figure out that I was seeing someone else all on her own.
I thought I should just call and try to have the awkward conversation, and talk my way out of it. I did promise myself that I wouldn’t do that to her, she is yet to push me out of the room naked. I’m miles away. I was under the weather with things to work with.
Camelia was mature and refreshing, anchored in the world in a way that made me feel childish in her presence. Delilah would entertain my outlandish thoughts and theories, Camelia would strike them down.
In case you were wondering how this is related to the gun shot at the beginning you have to wait.
Camelia’s disposition made me weary every time we met, a motheresque manner to the way she handles her day. A long way to drag her to my room. I didn’t think beyond the time we had spent together. It didn’t add much to me in any way. I turned to Delilah for comfort and support on every turn of events, that safety net I always jerked around.
Delilah’s big brown eyes singling me out into a reflection that stares back at me. I don’t have a soul anymore as she traps me in her thoughts for the remainder of our lives together.
I didn’t want to escape anymore.
I was living alone. Delilah had a fight with her roommates, and they kicked her out. That’s how we got to spend the first full night together. I don’t remember much of it, I was down with fever and the flu. I only have remnants and her own telling of the night.
We had a fight the day before. She called me the next day with her voice shaking. “I have no place to go” she said.
My apartment had two rooms, she could have taken the other and make herself comfortable. There was food in the fridge, and running hot water. I went to my room and fell face first to bed. That’s all what I remember.
She called for me twice before she opened the door, and found me already off sweating like a pig. I had a king-size bed, don’t ask why.
I don’t know if pigs sweat.
Delilah cooked dinner, and cleaned the kitchen. She had dragged me to a proper position to sleep leaving me fully dressed. It was eleven o’clock when I woke up dizzy. I thought I had dreamed the whole event. I walked outside my room only to find her getting out of the shower, wearing a purple bathrobe. I stared at her wondering whether I was still dreaming.
She utters something, but I don’t remember it. I walked back to my room, she followed in with medicine and food, and stayed the night on the other side of bed. I woke up soaked in sweat. After a shower, I made her my special pancakes for breakfast.
That was a beautiful morning, an impossible blue sky on a lazy Sunday. We spent it watching movies and cuddling. A day to forget the hardship that awaits her as she has to find a place to live.
Don’t ask why she can’t stay.
She stayed for a while, during which I memorized the curvature of her body, the incense of her sweat and the taste of her flesh. This story already sounds like a popcorn romantic comedy, these are the truths of the clichés we despise.
It’s a desolate feeling I get from my memory of her, fading to the first time we touched. I still remember it; the stretch of a moment that long coalesces into a figure of my imagination. And I’m not talking about Delilah.
I tend to idolize women in my life to the moment where they crystalize. I’m afraid that I wasn’t lying when I said that you will have to be patient.
I was susceptible to anguish at the moment’s notice long before the gunshot blew my chest. Now, this is my attempt to consolidate what did happen, pieces of shattered monologue accommodating what resembles a story in my mind. The dark necessities of it are part of a design.
My life’s story of how I died. I’m gagging up blood mixed with contents of my dinner, the gore of it all fades to black as the sound slows down to a crawl. I’m shut inside for the duration of what remains of this tale. It began once a cold autumn day, that got little bright with the smell of cologne, and it ends now.
