Happy Couples. Happy Ex's. At the Bar. Pornographers Dream. Happy Trails.

--A woman and a man, at dusk, with their dog on the sidewalk, laughing, playing. And I think: that’s what I want.

And I think: I’ve already had that.

But those women are gone and the dogs are dead.

--Men always worry, when they have a thing, even a good thing, that if they settle into it completely, all potential dies. They worry in their devotion about what they might miss. This is what caused the Donners and the Reeds to leave good lives Illinois for some imagined and ill defined better thing in California.

--Exercise: say the names of the women you lost.
Or that you gave away.
Or that lost you.
Or that gave you away.
Or however you want to put it.

--The most recent was a liar and a thief, but she was just the right height, and she’d lost her daddy young. In any case, what she was, I helped to make her.

And I have this picture, and in it, we look sort of beautiful together.

And there is the good ex. What is more haunting than that?

And Laurie King, where have you gone? The last time I could find you, you said you’d gotten old and fat and sad.

I don’t believe that, but I believe I want a woman most of her beauty left.

--At the bar, after the happy couple and the happy dog, I bump against somebody that it is perhaps better I try to avoid.

She’s feels pure, and if I’ve learned anything it is that you don’t become pure yourself by partaking of those that are. You can bring her down but she will never lift you up. And we both know this and have known it for months, and so put in the way of our coupling barricades of people or circumstance.

And yet it happens sometimes on a night like this, when the wind is blowing and it really autumn, that we find ourselves bodily intertwined.

Just slightly.

For there are lines I won’t cross with her. It would seem to mean too much but our systems of values are too different to justify any vision of a future beyond the physical one. I’d want to take her to places she’d find obscene. She’d want to cure me of something she must think of as dark.

And yet we stumble into the parking lot and into my car.

I tell myself, Leave your keys in your pocket. No matter what, you do not bring her home.

Hard promise to keep.

As we kiss, I think to myself: She is an archetypal woman, the kind that men want, and I like to be with women that men want. She’s got this perfect ethnic ass, long legs of muscle. There is the flat of her belly, the tautness of the small of her back; the cliché of a perfect chest, and the hard edged collarbones.

She is a pornographers dream. And I am a dreamer.

She is smart and young and full of light. You like those things, I tell myself.

I think to myself, In the end a woman addicts you with her sex. It is the way she feels against you first and foremost. That is what you long for. That is what calls you back. That is what you can’t pull away from. It is three nights in the same bed and the way your skin sort of melds with hers so that to tear away is to open a wound and leave some small part of yourself on her.

It’s tempting to walk down the path. She is absolutely self assured, and that alone is enough of an excuse for me to ignore some responsibility that takes into account anything that goes beyond the moment. But at heart I know that the confidence is a type of innocence. In any case, it’s not just her I’m trying to keep safe. It is just as much a matter of me trying to save myself from the thing in her that will some day react against the bad in me.

I'm going to blog all this, I tell her.
Why?
Self exploration, I say. If you read it, you'll understand it.

Now I'm blogging and I wonder if it can make her understand.

We push it but, not much, staying parked, limited by steering wheel and potential audience. I think of how daring she is, her eyes closed, her face illuminated by the street lamp. I’d never let somebody study me in the way she lets me study her.

She is unashamed.
It’s not that I need a woman who is ashamed.
It’s that I need a woman who will be unashamed no matter what.

--And driving home alone, as I should, feeling slightly guilty, I decide also to celebrate a small victory over the monster in me. Fuck you, he growls. Feed me you bastard, he says.

And it’s late. And there are no couples on the sidewalk. Their dogs sleep beside their beds. And the men dream restless dreams and the women think in their sleep of loss.