SO YOU KNOW:

Yes, I hear you. And I appreciate your concern. But this time, as I proceed waywardly, I want you to know: there won’t be a struggle: a breaking away and a breaking within. There will be no soft shatter now.

I shall let him in. I shall smile at him. I shall speak to him with dizzying quickness, so my words camouflage the emptiness of my interludes. I shall tell him everything: about the things I do: the window I half-opened, for instance, to let a grey cloud spill in, or the story I re-read today about a woman who won a man and lost him to a game. And I shall exult inwardly, yes exult, that not once does he translate staid verbs into nouns, or, acts into thoughts: that he never probes: stops and questions and probes- the colour of this cloud that slides against my wall, or halts to ask, if I, like some modern-day tragedy’s protagonist, have stooped low enough to play a game. We won’t play games. Instead, we’ll laugh, one with tenderness, the other with relief, as he advises me to close the window if it starts to pour or tells me that I read too many peculiar things.

So I’ll listen as reads me something: a poem perhaps that I’ve read before, or ten lines I fear for their intrinsic unease, and I shall hear him as he utters them perfectly: without the voice breaking as one phrase gets consumed by another, without the page shivering, for only an instant, as the hand trembles: perfectly, so for the first time, I can walk up to him, without feeling as though I’ve been swept by a delinquent whirlwind, and put my arms around him, and sense him, as his fingers slip through my shirt or brush against my throat. I shall feel glad, yes glad, that even as my skin yields to his caresses, he can’t touch me.

Let him love me: I long to be immune.