Want.

She said:
When you want something badly enough, you forget its flaws. In fact, the deceit of desire lies in its ability to make you think that nothing else matters and nothing else exists. By the time you open up your legs to be its whore, you're not using protection.


By the time he got to me, neither was I.


I wanted him. I wanted him bad. I wanted him to complete the holes I thought I couldn't fill inside my soul, so there were no barricades whatsoever when he knocked on the door of my heart, laughing, and entered with no resistance. No guards to stop him. No alarm to warn me. No 911 that I felt the need to call.


I thought he was breathtaking blue sky and the flight of an eagle's wing on a thermal rolled into one. I thought his kisses tasted like a soury-sweet lemon flavoured gummy bear, because when he would kiss me, he would bite my lip; then pull, gently first then harder, the line just before it crossed into pain, and I would dance with him on that edge when my pulse was racing and he held me teetering over the abyss of him.


But that was an abyss I did not know or see or understand - an abyss I romanticized for the sake of my preconceived notions and motions of relationships and what I thought heartspeak should be but wasn't. A darkness I chose without knowing its blackness and its all-consuming need.


I did not know. And because I didn't bother to fully examine the whys and hows of what I craved with abandon, desire desired me - and had me.

tSN

I hate work emails.

How much do I hate work emails? Let me count the ways.
I hate that little notification
That tells me it's time to man the work station
and all that that little beep entails.
I hate that I have to keep looking at it and refreshing it all day
Sitting in fear and consternation
Side by side with my impostor syndrome situation
That whispers to me 'What's your boss gonna say
When he finds out the truth - that you're a fake?
That you have no idea what you're doing most of the time?
Do you have any idea what's at stake??'
You try and quiet these voices, all the while
Trying to figure out rent, follow your dream and take
a fancy pants vacation to a far away isle...
Man that sounds sublime.
Man I hate that chime.

tSN

adapted loosely from this poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Truth

When I people watch, I'm usually trying to decide if people are happy. No making up elaborate stories about their inheritances or sex lives, unless they have a super obvious pointer to either, but whether they have contentment. Whether the chubby mother running after her chubby baby really wanted said baby, or if in the still of the night, sometimes, quietly, in words she never speaks and thoughts she never finishes - whether she wishes she could let him run out into the street and be a coroner's problem. But only because she's so.

Very.

Tired.

It wouldn't even be her f- but she won't complete that sentence to the ending of the story in her mind. Because she loves her child. Of course. All mothers do. Her mother told her, not showed her, but what her mother SAYS must be true.



My mother told me otherwise.



Now I'm watching the girl in braids with a shifty look who looks like she's trying to look excited about being at Junction with her prettier friend. Where are they going? To watch a movie with boys from school who tried to touch them last week. Tell the teacher for what? So that he tries to too? Not that it mattered. Because they don't try to touch her nearly as much as they try with CC. CC is popular and pretty. Pretty means has boobs and will let the guys do stuff. At the movies, they're going to do stuff. She's going to sit - uncomfortable. Waiting for the inevitable inching of his hand to her arse. She'll pretend to like it. She won't.



She's not happy either.



The smell of his Fanta Passion is making me slightly nauseous and nostalgic at the same time. Remember Fanta Pineapple? I used to love that soda. It was too sweet and too tangy. It used to cut my tongue and I would willingly let it. The sugar would seep into summer days and colour them with what I think now is perfection. Perfection and simplicity. Not like now. Though I guess the past is like Fanta Passion. It makes you want to gag and wish you were there at the same time.



If I were there, I wouldn't be...here. Where I am now. Watching other people's faces to try and understand my own...to try and understand whether I'm the post-partum partially depressed mom or the desperately unhappy teenager craving real affection - trying to see what we have in common other than our sadnesses and the children growing within us who we don't want - which is what we were, when sugar seeped into our summer days and then turned into the dry dust of the lonely summer nights.


tSN