365: 62 – 03.03.09
His voice is almost convincing, “We could always try tantric sex.” Her mind races for a few seconds, failing to place the non sequitor with any current topics of conversation, before discarding the notion altogether. This is very obviously an entirely new discussion. She thinks about the last time she felt beautiful. Once, before, even in this bed. “Where was that question six months ago?” she asks, instantly wary, “I mean it. Where?” He stumbles, reeling, “I… I don’t know.”
In one white wooden drawer are her stockings. Fishnets full of torn holes, seamless black nylons with a back seam of flashing white rhinestones, purple velvet thigh highs that stay up without a garter belt, a pair of red and black vertical stripes with the toes danced out. Electric memories of sweat, ghosts as distant as England, as far as away as reaching out three feet and yanking on a bronze pull shaped like a vacant new moon.
She feels as acutely cold as surgery, like she’s splitting her arms open and only the bright dust of stars is spilling out. “I don’t mean to be insulting, repeating this,” she says, with a feeling akin to tearing off limbs, “but that was precisely the problem in the first place. I would tell you I need mental input more than physical attention.” She taps his forehead, trying not to walk away behind her eyes, wincing that he never once breathed poetry, “And you’d only try to answer with sex.”