Yum

@ and & met in a room, shades half-drawn. Blue dusk colored the world. Their bodies took on a velvet softness in the light as they fumbled through disrobing. Their mouths pushed together, breaking only for increasingly labored breath. They spilled onto the bed, entwined, a gravity pulling them toward something inescapable. They each breathed in the smell of the other, fingers curling in hair.

They came apart to stare at each other. All was darkening shades of blue. @’s lips parted with the need of a kiss, but & would not return it yet. & moved its mouth down @’s neck, scraping its teeth on shuddering flesh. A hand on a throat, gentle, but with the promise of mastery.

@ raised its arms above its head, arching its back. Pillows fell from the bed. Vanilla and salt on the tongue. @ could not move. The explosion inside was burning through its cracks, shutting it down. “Let go,” & whispered.  @ forced itself to release, unclenching its muscles. The furnace burning inside raged. The pounding of blood in their ears filled their heads, and the scent of sorrow-turned-hunger stained the bed.

“Trust me.” & unhinged its jaws. It wrapped its hands around @’s thighs and bit deep into its hip. @ moaned, feeling like it was pierced with sugar and silk. @ licked its lips as & swallowed the flesh and moved upwards. Sticky sweetness welled up in the teeth marks and slicked the sheets, as blue as all the rest. At @’s side, & stopped to wipe its mouth. For @, there was no feeling of separation, no incompleteness. It was whole but collocated, lying in bed and burning inside &’s throat.

& returned to chewing its way up @’s core, breathing heavily through its nose, taking in all of @. Having consumed up to the breast, & started biting into the neck. “Breathe,” & said. @ complied, now too overwhelmed to be able to rely on instinct to control necessary functions.

They pulled each other close as flesh gave way. A surge from @’s chest took root in &’s and the bodies bridged. Separation slowly eroded. Pockets of individuation sparked and were dissolved into unity. Their foreheads pressed together trying to, by physical force alone, manifest pure, unclouded understanding. They were sinking into the morass of each other, held by an unshakeable certainty of need. Pressing their final kiss into each other’s lips, their mouths shattered into one, each breaking bone a scream of joy.

At the end, they were compressed under the weight of their longing. Having become singular, they lost form and substance, ending in blackness.

As the red light of dawn painted the room, their eyes locked. Whole, separate, defined, they knew aching again.

“I don't think sex can ever actually be portrayed – the sensations and the emotions are... beyond language. If you only describe the mechanics, the effect is either clinical or pornographic, and if you try to describe intimacy instead, you wind up with abstractions.” Alice Elliott Dark – “In the Gloaming”

Some of the best sex I have ever read is from Clive Barker’s Imajica, because there is no pretense of realism. This is an attempt of mine to concretize the abstract so as to avoid entirely the mechanistic boredom of the act of sex. The act is immaterial – it is only the emotional that is valuable. To turn the emotional into the tangible without the limits of space, anatomy, and causality is the only way to begin to touch what sex truly is. Sex doesn’t need gender, and it doesn’t need identity. It needs you.

Sedona

There were a lot of factors that led us to Sedona and that informed what happened there. We had been in Mountain Rest, South Carolina, a nowhere little place near Walhalla, a slightly larger nowhere place. It was my junior year of high school.

Both my mom and I had been diagnosed, accurately or not, with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In either case, it could as easily have been depression. My mom wouldn’t leave her bed for days except to sneak to the bathroom when no one was looking. When she did interact with us, it was in short, emotionally unhinged bursts. She mixed up her words constantly, I ended up being her translator.

 I was allowed a medical leave from school, during which I spent about six hours a week with a teacher who gave me my assignments and tried to tutor me as well as possible in the short time. Surprisingly, I still managed all A’s and B’s, even in AP courses. The rest of the time, I slept, usually about fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

I didn’t really have friends there, except for my ex-girlfriend Cindy. She was probably the best relationship of my youth, but during the convergence of multiple personal crises, I pushed her away to reduce my dependence on her. It didn’t work.

My step-dad was getting increasingly resentful of the burden of supporting my mother. She became a ghost; a fat, pale, gibberish-spouting mess of a ghost. He was commuting two hours one-way to Greenville for work, and when he got home, mom would be shut up in her room. I’d be left alone with him and his bitterness. Denied the life he thought he would have, he drank. He drank and he yelled while mom hid.

Mom saw psychics. She was so desperate to have some hope, no matter how ephemeral, that she funneled money into the pockets of those egotistical, crazy, or manipulative enough to bill themselves as seers of the future. They saw right through her, that’s true enough. She brought me along, and shit but that made her an easy mark. What do you tell a hopeless woman who is very clearly obsessed with her son? Tell her the son is destined for greatness. Tell her that he’s an angel incarnate, fated to help guide humanity into a new era. She’ll have meaning by proxy, and it’s so much more believable because it doesn’t feel as arrogant. The kid will be just as convinced because he is alienated and suicidal and wants any measure of hope that he might actually matter some day. Win-win, if you can forgive that it’s all bullshit.

It was from one of these psychics that mom first heard the name Sedona, Arizona.”It’s got seven energy vortexes!” she told me, having just learned what vortexes supposedly were. Deeply dissatisfied with life and about to reap the benefits of a class action lawsuit, it was time to move again. My step-dad would stay behind and continue working, sending money to my mom while he slept in his car.

So, with our usual lack of any sort of plan, mom cashed a $10,000 check, put the bulk of our shit in storage, and we got in our truck and headed west. We drove for five days to a place we’d only heard of a few months before, because anything would have been better than where we had been.

One of the psychics had hooked us up with a woman who would rent us a room until we found a place. Two months sharing a room with my already cloying mother. But we started meeting people and my mom started to do things. Without me. It was great.

I started feeling better, too. Could have been those vortexes (vortices, if you aren’t all New Agey). More likely, I was out of range of my step-dad’s rage and was no longer my mother’s sole emotional connection in the world. I also made a few friends. I had been moving towards the goth scene a bit, but this was before the Internet was big and I didn’t have a lot of role models that I could examine. Pretty much what I had was The Crow and Marilyn Manson until I was able to dive deeper. But I actually met some other people who were going through their own self-discovery and I felt like I kind of fit. Of course I was the new kid like always, but I actually felt like I had more than one friend for the first time in a long time.

We got our own place after a month or two and I was going back to school full-time. Vortexes. Or maybe not wanting to kill myself, which was so surprising as to be a giddy sensation. It didn’t last long.

After about five months or so, shit took a nosedive. My step-dad had continued to work in South Carolina and live in the back of his truck. I hadn’t asked many details as he was a miserable fuck who, almost a continent away, was still too close to my life. He must have hit a wall in his desire to function. He got busted on a DUI and spent a few days in jail. Lost his job because of it, or so he said. He was driving out west.

I stopped eating.

I didn’t eat for the next few months, taking in all of my nutrients with Mt. Dew and caffeine pills that I stole.

The money from the lawsuit was nearly gone and the financial lifeline my step-dad had provided had dried up. Mom hadn’t gotten a job because Reasons. So the bastard joined us and I started unraveling.

Thankfully, I had people I could retreat to. I fled to my friend’s houses when I could. I became a burden, but I couldn't stop myself. I got a job at a TCBY and worked as much as I could while being underage. At 16, I was the only one in my house drawing a paycheck. Food started getting scarce. My mom made me call up my dad to see if I could get my birthday money a few months early so we could pay rent.

My mom got arrested for a bounced check my step-dad wrote.

My step-dad went to my friend Matt, a 16 year-old kid, and asked him if he could borrow $900 dollars to pay off the debt. Matt had been saving for a while at the insistence of his parents, and my step-dad had known about it somehow. Matt gave it to him, unbeknownst to me. I don’t know if his parents knew, either. I couldn’t bring myself to ever ask.

Not long afterwards, I was downstairs reading when my step-dad said, with the nonchalance of a mortician, that I should talk with my mom.

I went upstairs to her bedroom and she was lying in bed – she’d gotten back in the habit pretty hard. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, but she tried to tell me as calmly as possible that she was going to kill herself. She said that she was going to sit in the car in the closed garage and end her life because she couldn’t take the failure any more.

We hadn’t had any food but condiments in the house for a few days. Seeing someone eat peanut butter with a spoon still makes my stomach churn. I hadn’t told anyone that I had started stealing what little food I ate from convenience stores or work. Mom and my step-dad had applied for emergency financial aid and got something like $200 once, but whether they just didn’t know where to go to help or they weren’t eligible for some reason, we had nothing left and mom was giving up.

I panicked. My innate, animal dependency on my parent kicked in and I did whatever I could to save her so she could maybe someday get around to raising me. My step-dad sat on the edge of her bed, saying fuck all, looking more bored than anything. I knew that I was responsible for keeping her alive. I knew that if she died, it would be my fault for not stopping her. I flailed for answers, crying and pleading. “If you kill yourself, I will, too” I lied, hoping that that image would stop her. It eventually did, but I would pay for saying that for years to come.

When we were finally evicted from our apartment, we lived out of our car but were able to crash at a friend’s house for a while. My mom begged her family for help, but no dice.

One day, my step-dad announced that he was leaving. He decided he was going to his mother’s in North Carolina and fucked promptly off. Not quite a “going out for cigarettes” event, but close enough. That was that. Never saw him again, may he rot.

Finally, my aunt Sally came through for us. We had an out. We just had to wait for some funds to sort out and we could go.

I was used to moving and not having more than maybe one person give a shit, so much so that I was completely surprised when my friends threw me a going away party. I tried like hell to not cry the entire time. Matt, Gretchen, Mattie, and Michael – their faces stick out to me profoundly. They were the icons of an era of my life, while I merely wandered through theirs. That is the curse of the new kid – always feeling that you remembered people more than they remembered you. It happened every place I went, all through my childhood up through New College. I was transient, temporary, while they were fixed points in my life.

Today Facebook allows for that slight tethering, just enough for me to be proud of how beautiful and adult and happy they all seem now. Except for Matt. I don’t know what happened to Matt. My asshole parents never paid him back, as far as I know. I don’t know if he is angry or not, or where he is, or anything at all. I’ve been too afraid to ask.

It’s a weird time, between a going away party and the actual going away, especially if that going away keeps getting delayed. Much needed closure almost prohibits further interaction, but I wasn’t really in a fit state to interact. In addition to not eating, I had stopped sleeping but for maybe two to three hours every other day for the last couple of weeks before we left Sedona. The place we were crashing at was like a halfway house for cultists and conspiracy theorists. I met a guy who had been in Heaven’s Gate, but had been kicked out before the mass suicide. He said he felt like he’d missed his one great chance for living a real life. I could relate.

But then we left. We left the most beautiful place I have ever laid eyes on, the place that had hosted one of my greatest trials. We were saved, at least temporarily. That chapter was closed.