Movements

1. In my dream last night, you kissed me. My arms were winding all they way around you (I was holding my own elbows) and then my hands were on your sides and I could feel the cotton of your t-shirt sliding like silk against the pale skin underneath.
2. Your hands were on my back and I couldn’t stop feeling the way I felt through your hands. I didn’t want you not to like it, so I held my breath and tried not to move. Your hands continued to wander like you were memorizing my topography.
3. I tried not to touch your hair; I know you don’t like that. You were kissing me in a corner—good kisses. Slow ones that tease and leave other kisses to the imagination (for now).
4. We were both smiling so wide that it was hard not to laugh at each other. And I held you with my hands clasped behind your back. And we whispered and giggled into each other’s mouths, drunk on wine and affection.
5. I hooked my fingers through your belt loops as though the only way you could ever be close enough would be for you to melt with me (and I was melting).
6. You tried to do the same, but I inched away because feeling is believing and I wanted you to believe that my stomach was smaller than it was. And then I knew it could never work.
7. I could never love me so neither could you. But that wasn’t what this was about.
8. This wasn’t about anything.
9. You saw that I was scared of me and you whispered to my teeth, “I know who you are.” And I thought of a line from a poem I love: I did not want her for her body. And I tried my best to believe that that was what you meant to say. To believe that the author meant it about whomever he wrote it for. To believe that it was possible for anyone to mean.
10. So I pulled you closer still. My shoulder blades were bursting through the wall and the cinder blocks were crumbling around our feet.
11. I touched your hair (sorry, I couldn’t help it) and you kissed my neck and I opened my eyes as wide as I could to vacuum up the view—the opposite wall, the door, the ceiling. And I started to cry.
12. You kissed my cheek, tasted salt and drew back.
13. “What’s wrong?”
14. “Nothing.”
15. “Why are you crying?” your hands moved down my shoulders.
16. “Because nothing has ever not been wrong before.”
17. “Everything is right then?”
18. “No. Everything is just you and me.”
19. And then you cried too, I think, touching your lips to mine, breathing into me and nothing else and we held each other and I felt your breaths leaving and I felt you puling in new ones.
20. I woke up.
21. And when I woke up I thought it was real.
22. And when I realized it wasn’t, I thought maybe I wasn’t either.
23. And when I realized that I most certainly was, it dawned on me. I began to understand that it was indeed happening: I was going to break. I was going to destroy myself in reality to make my dreams the only escape.
24. I took a blue pill and I grabbed a red pen and I wrote all of this down on white paper with blue and red lines and I had to smile at what was left of my youth. How turning time and fresh starts bore no importance to me.
25. Then I think to myself, “Now’s as good a time as any to start dying."
26. Then I say out loud, “Dreams are for the dead."
27. And I will start to look for affection wherever I can find it. And each person I touch will take a piece of me until there is absolutely nothing left.
28. And I will tell myself, “This is what you wanted all along.”