I don’t know what or even if there is word for the space between seconds, particularly the ones between sleeping and waking, but you insinuate yourself in to it with your fragments of memory, tossing them around all hot and enticing.
It started with James today. Do you remember James? Gorgeous, Gorgeous man. He sat in the Herman Miller cubicle next to you. He was one of a long line of substitutes, or, at least, attempts to substitute. The ‘Methadonies’. I suspect I hoped you’d be jealous, but that was not an emotion you showed any sign of experiencing. You who gave yourself so freely at every opportunity.
I expect he told you about the night at the hotel. Conversational currency for you lads in the 80s was who you’d shagged, cars and football.
“You’re very good at this”, he told me.
Of course I was, you’d shown me, taught me, but he didn’t know what to do for me and neither did the ones that followed. All fumbles, tentative prodding, wetted fingers, awkward, furtive forays, painful nipple tweaks while actually only waiting for the moment I’d open my legs and let them in and they could thrust and grunt and say ‘that was great’. For them maybe.
Us, we, we roamed every inch of our bodies, with hands and tongues and fingers and lips. Outside, inside. Sweat and heat and ‘Yes, there, ‘More’, ‘How does that feel?’ ‘Harder’, ‘Slower’, Move here, on top, behind…’. Contorted, impossible positions. Laughing. Loud, messy, wine and fag scented sex, no rules, no holding back. ‘Come here’, come, come, coming. It was fucking wonderful. But no-one else could do that, no-one. There’s fingerprints on my ribcage, tattoos in my cunt, the old heat runs in a second set of veins. There is a scientific theory called fetal microchimerism where during pregnancy, a baby’s cells cross the placenta and enter the mother’s bloodstream, migrating round her body, everywhere, her brain. They can persist for decades or even a lifetime, these chimeric cells going undetected but ever present. Some essence of you crossed in to me and lies there periodically sending out messages to my brain, a memory chimera, emotions grafted on to the present.
And, on so many days the burn is there heating my body and the memories you scattered are a constant buzz and I can’t get rid of them no matter how I try.
Spellbound and Swallowed 