Desire's filament
20 December 2011 05:52 AM Categories: Writing prompts
Desire requires distance, the gap, two separate beings looking to conquer, to discover. The smaller the gap, the more desire is likely to be choked out by the soft supple hands of familiarity, blundering in their closeness, not knowing their strength, the damage they can do when they wrap themselves around desire’s surprisingly slender neck.
Keep him at arm’s length until you can’t stand it anymore. Flirt across subway cars, in cubicles with rectangular desks and masses of electronics between the two of you, letting the images develop in your mind. Get too close on elevators, at parties, and then let the distance roll out, a filament of connection, of want, of the never-extinguished, until you meet as embodied souls, or souls embodied, electric and tangible.
Try to extinguish it. Try your best. Savor the marks left behind, the way your scents intermingle, as you sit on the subway, hair tousled, shirt askew. You are going away, going away, you dash from the scene, revel in your singularity, the apartment, the old couch, the plants that have followed you since college. The familiar. A place to sink back and sleep and ponder him, across town, ensconced in his separate life. Deliciously unknown. Maybe unknowable.
You don’t know whether it will happen again. You’re not sure what you think of the whole business. You run your hands through your still-tousled hair and flashes of the moment of two bodies meeting run through your mind.
The conflagration begins. The dance starts, the filament unscrolls and lengthens. You want to tug on it, to wake him from his sleep with thoughts of you, with want, of the immortality of the chase.
Everything comes to an end. Desire burns out. Death extinguishes life. Savor the moments when desire rises up. Let it remind you that you are still here, with a strong heart and impatient lips.
A new take on the prompt "My mouth." I've been feeling a need to write lately, but haven't wanted to go where my mind goes naturally (does anyone really need to read about how to sit with loneliness? or, really, do I need to focus on sitting with loneliness when the act of writing about it makes it more like "obsessing about loneliness" or "wallowing in loneliness"?). Hence the return to old prompts.
I had a practically uninterrupted night of sleep last night for the first time in months, though I woke up at 4:59 a.m. in the middle of a dream about statues coming to life and the fight against evil.
Image by Vivian Chen.
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