Luster

I was sixteen. I could not have been a mother. The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers. This is not so much a judgment as a fact.

But from the outside, the loneliness is palpable, and I think, She is too young.

He was afraid of her like I would one day be afraid of him, because children, like dogs, are attuned to the signs of an impending storm.

I was pretending not to
worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

I didn’t tell him I was a virgin because I could not bear to be treated tenderly. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted it to be over with. So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany

It is like I really need him. Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve.

“It makes me want you more,” I say, wondering if I’m beginning to say too much, if it was a mistake to tell him that he is the only one.

I mean, with one half degree of difference, everything I want could be mine. I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.

But sometimes I look at her and wonder if the problem isn’t her, but me. Maybe the problem is that I am weak and overly sensitive.