Desire's silhouette

28 July 2011 02:03 PM Categories: Writing prompts

He told me he watched me sometimes, or at least once. It was during a long weekend in October, or over Thanksgiving, or maybe that three-week space between his fall and spring semesters. He biked past the house, saw the light was on, peeked through the glass, and decided not to knock. “It didn’t look like you. Your hair was different,” D told me later as we lay naked on my twin bed in forced togetherness, forced love. This was in the spring. I hadn’t seen him since August and his presence next to me, the confirmation that he sought me out months before, told me that I was good, that he had contained me in his mind even in my absence. I existed.

Other people watched, too, like that guy in C-town who befriended my roommate and me, said he spied on us, that he used to take binoculars and set himself at a window in the house across the street, could see our nubile forms through the loose weave of the curtains. He told us about watching girls in the daylight, too, girls lying out by the pool in their string bikinis or one pieces with plunging necklines. He loved the beauty of young flesh, the fantasy of his hands on it.

This was being wanted. In the first case, the want was amorphous. Did D come in search of sex, for a bit of warmth, to see his face reflected in my eyes, all adoration, my sense of self shaped by his choice to be there? I tell myself now, practically thirty years later (oh aging, oh early introduction to sex) that he liked something about me beyond the thrust. We certainly moved past those early days, got deep enough for me to break his heart.

In the case of the peeping Tom, my value came from being a desirable object. Yes, it was creepy that he sat in the crepuscular fading of day to watch us undress or walk around naked or pick our noses or whatever he could witness through greened tree limbs and curtains and evening glow. But I had been taught that to be desirable to men, to be pretty and thin and – above all – yielding was not only proper but the way to see myself, the thing that men wanted to grasp, to kiss, to fuck. It was validation, a measurement of worth.

Darkness allows the stare through bedroom curtains, the ramping up of desire, desire of something, the warmth of another human being, the opening of legs and a mouth panting for acceptance, for the entry. We all want to be desired, we keep our baser needs in the dark, too, the shame of the unfulfilled self. The key is to get a sense of self from within, to accept the desire by others as an extra, the bit of honey in the coffee, the icing on the brownie, that soupçon of want that we separate from our self worth.

From the prompt "Black." This is something I wrote before 6:00 a.m. and returned to after getting home from a therapy appointment, the type of appointment that left an ache in my chest and a sense that the day has been bifurcated into distinct moods: before the appointment and after the appointment. It's a good ache, or a kind of good ache, but, damn, I wish it would go away now. It's affecting my ability to think. It's affecting my ability to be effective. It's affecting me.

I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This is a 12-minute prompt with a bit of editing,

Image by Smedenborn.

Tags: Round Robin, desire, A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, writing prompt, love, boyfriends, peeping Toms

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