The soundtrack of my life? Chet baker. Can you imagine someone writing about you the way he sings about his lovers? I can’t imagine it because no one’s ever written about me that way. I’ve never actually met another writer. I’ve met musicians and blue collar men, ones with no inhibition, situations that drag on until the tail end leaving puddles or pressure. I’ve written everything I can until the drug in my cup runs sober. And for all those nights I never got a single love letter in return. I was never going to expect that from them. These men are faceless to whoever’s eyes moisten the lines of my projects. The internal world I process differently, and it’s the core holding my center of gravity. I can’t live without writing.
There’s a farmer who lives nearby. He never shows his face or gives out his real name, just a blank giant, clean cut, thirty eight, two miles away. Have you ever seen me ride my bike? I asked curiously, in a way I thought it was flirting. I wondered how he’d pick me up if he were to drive past me. He never admitted to seeing so.
We met at a reservoir in his Mercury. Carplay in a beater. To my disappointment, he was not what I expected him to look like nor was the intimacy. I didn’t blame him for being touch starved for a year. And then we kissed, that was the best part. He wasn’t my type, but something about straddling an man older than me, playing into fantasies I would never oblige gave me an ultimate high I took into consideration for a moment. It was unrealistic. As intimate as it felt to kiss him, the spark died when he was in the midnight of the county and unidentified. Still I yearn.
There’s a guy, my age, I talked to before when he was in college. When I found out he moved to the next city over, I laid my hand out. He never rescheduled the date; I usually leave in up to the canceller. It wasn’t actually a date, but the initial conversation was semi-flirtatious and inviting. He looks cuter than one of my formers— and better. He’s less vapid too. But I want a fire, not just a flame. Sometimes he’ll send me pictures and videos and I wonder if I’m just on a list of contacts he wants to keep in touch with, much like that former, already making me feel ordinary on the basis of assumption nonetheless. I felt too afraid to ask him about a rain check.
I wanted to take my last [redacted] then buy more but I’m on a budget. I felt nostalgia on the borderline comfortably knowing I wouldn’t cross it ever again. But I messaged my first hookup, and while I don’t want a long term relationship, I thought about entertaining it for a night. I can’t afford a relationship. Not many people want a companion who lives with his parents closer to fifty than birth and them close to retirement and retired. But I want thousands of dollars and three books to my name before I’m thirty. I can’t say I’d really fancy a boyfriend who lives with his parents either. Meeting parents isn’t a slow burn, that’s engulfing in flames. Contradicting, but I refer to my own rulebook.
Isn’t it nice? Our parents supporting us. I like to think my mother enjoys my company because she would be alone in the house nor would she socialize with my grandmother.
Added to my pamphlet about me for partners to reference:
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Flame: desire, descriptive, also lowest amount, temporary, little warmth, artificial scents
Burn: heated desire on the rising of future love and present connection
Warmth: secure, home, needs/wants (basic)
Flame: everything listed above, watch carefully…
Fire: limerent, survival, want, danger, though successful if pyrokintetic
How can I even differentiate?
PaleDeerPoetry 