A False Start

How many times had I seen him at the bar, next to a friend, hanging around, a loose smile, eyes staring at nothing distinctly, seeing me, but not really? So it didn’t have to matter. I knew in a moment that it wouldn’t matter.

I can’t remember if we drank. That’s the only hazy part. I assume we did. I remember everything else afterwards shamefully well. We took a cab his house - a mess, dirty dishes and scraps and filth smeared in gobs from one corner to the other. We walked past it quickly to the bedroom, where we laid down on his mattress on the floor. We should have fallen asleep, that would have been more honest, but I was young, and so was he, and I was careless and vigorous, and he seemed fundamentally dispirited because of his contact with the world. His eyes yawned at me that nothing would have changed, had he never been born. What a dull thing it was, to have been born. But then my mouth was against his neck, and when I looked back up, his eyes were suddenly fearfully aware that he had indeed been born, and there was some danger here.

I gently, but deliberately, made it clear that I intended to leave the marks of my lips on his body. He didn’t want me to. A lover past had held those marks as a private distinction and remembered me fondly for them. I thought that lover, while I was pressing my lips to this creature that didn’t want them. He didn't stop me, but he was steadfast in his caution. When I reached a limit that he could recognize, he pushed me away from it, and though I created new and intimate strategies to touch those borders, still he resisted. Otherwise, he didn’t seem to care, not for me, himself, or anything at all.

It ended quickly, dispassionately. It was an end for me. It was a false start for him. I can’t remember if I fell asleep next to him; it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. But at some point, there was the soft morning light, the recognition that I had anywhere but there to be. I departed quickly, feeling like I’d left something there that had no right being there, and no right to be left by me. Whatever that thing was, what was left in its place was a heavy, enduring feeling of regret. The regret I would feel a few weeks later at the same bar, seeing him again, seeing him look at me like a deer in headlights, seeing him shrink away like a man caught fishing illegally for the sea monster that was to devour him, and being asked a question that he never thought to ask himself, but was of vital importance: why on earth are you here?