The 24hr Lover

Creative piece part of a university assignment inspired by Opie’s Self-Portrait Cutting

I want to bury you in affection. A shovel in quivering hands. Your eyes dilated like you’re high on this, like you’ve snorted uneven white lines on the desk I’ve never studied on, next to the branded pens we’d indulged our pockets with, strutting, care-free through the university fairs. We’ll never be this young again, you said, with that slow profoundness. An exaggerated thoughtfulness like you hadn’t extracted your ‘gems of wisdom’ from stale social media pages, droll and repetitive, yet seemingly followed by half the world.

You have that. That numbing addictive quality, I’ve heard it all before and I’m still hooked. You’re like the same day in bright different coloured wrappers and inside is you, always the same and I never tire. You, with that self-importance dribbling into your slurred speech, unintentional, embarrassing but you’re oblivious. No one’s ever felt love like ours.

You say these things, painfully cliché, banal phrases. I’ll say it, you’re a walking trope, that’s what makes me comfortable around you, this predictability like the same song, the same rhythm, pulsating endlessly in my ears.

I stroke a cold finger on your lips, dark pink staining sandy coloured skin, and suddenly my mind is back there, in my room, your porcelain hand on my face, your pink lips on my ear, glitteringly blue eyes, you’re an ocean of pleasure and I’m gasping for breath in this silence-

Tina. It feels musical, the way you say my name, but you shrug off my outstretched arm, and I become suddenly conscious of where we are, the stale alcohol breath on my neck and the push of the queue at the bar. It’s jarring, this crowd, when all I crave is you.

I lean forward, my arms becoming wet from drinks topped up way too far, being clumsily balanced away. I forget this. I forget our love only exists in darkened dorm rooms encased by wafer thin walls which demand hushed whispers and breathless words.

You only want me when we’re like this. I’d said in a toilet cubicle with your hands around my waist, trying to be heard over the sound of fists playfully colliding into the door with suggestive laughter and the trills of drunken conversation.

You winced at the stroke of my hand, offended that I had assumed this was only skin deep.

Skin deep?

No.

But you failed to mention that your love lay in the glass crevice of an empty bottle of rosé, that it only existed in the intimate moments in my bedroom, when you look at me like you adore me, with the room basked in amber light.

In the moments where you’re drunkenly smoking cigarettes, my candle lid an ash tray, shaking on the duvet and I don’t mind the taint you leave on my sheets, on my skin, the remnants of your perfume, your strands of hair and your earrings which I find the next day.

But I know you’re waiting. You’re waiting for boyish hands to fumble the entrapment of gold on your finger, an encasement for an oath you can’t bear to hear from another woman’s lips.

And you say, I’m scared to fall in love with you.

I wish you had mentioned that because I don’t know if I would have poured the first drink, bright, criminally red in champagne glasses, which I’ve never had an occasion to use before you, because now I’m in too deep.

These nights, they start and end the same.

I watch men we don’t know, their lips on your neck. I remember them in segments, isolated features, menacing, a masculine mouth, coarse hands, gruff voices in your ear, words concealed from me like secrets scrawled on and passed to you on scrunched up paper. You should have fun too, you say.

Shot glasses twinkle in strobic lights and my emotions, they spin at your words. You’re kaleidoscopic, everywhere and nowhere all at once, because every woman becomes you, I can taste their sweetness on my lips, lingering like powdered sweetener, their hands in my hair and you watch impassive like it doesn’t faze you.

But I know you’re capturing these moments, like bugs under a glass jar. I imagine you doing that, swiftly and unfazed, holding on to these pixelated images taken by the club photographer. Those glasses, you’ll line them up on the cusp of my desk at the end of the night, a uniform row of mason jars and with me trapped inside, trying to squirm from underneath it. A row of sinners to your priest.

And that’s why I can’t be with you. You would say. But did you not tell me to do that?

I’m looking at you through the misted glass of the club windows, thinking how you taste like menthol cigarettes, an innocent poison. You say you like him and him and him, but you end the night with me.

You burn through the memories of the night, you roll them, and smoke over the candle lid, but they’re imprinted on your skin, that bruise on your neck, discolouring like a fallen leaf. And the night burns into me, hardening the memories like burning music on a CD.

Where am I going wrong? I’m in love with you. And you’re in love with the idea of who you’re supposed to be.

We turn on the record player when we’re in bed and our conversations are fragmented, repetitive like a scratched vinyl. Your words are melodic, saying all the right things, but staccato by the gasps of your breath. We argue and makeup and argue and make up. The scrape of my nails is like a broken stylus, interrupting your words as they tear into your back. I long to endlessly carve the figures of us into your skin, to have drying blood, coarse under my nails, like hardened acrylics. I want to endlessly draw your hand in mine, nothing but us, a sun, a cloud, a dream and I want it frozen in time, a photographic oeuvre, while we listen to the record of us as it keeps spinning and spinning.

But not tonight.

We stumble, our shadows merging in the blinkering light seeping in from the hallway into my bedroom, your silhouette becomes mine, a void I lose myself in. So, while you’re reaching for me, I’m finding myself, your fingers cold against my thighs. Then it happens all at once. I’m on top of you, a pillow in my hand and you’re struggling for breath.

I’m burying you in my affection tonight.