(part one of three)

I am the tingling on your scalp, running over the crest of your shoulders and the outside of your palms as you walk through your kitchen to your back porch, seeing your two men talking. Tommy with his back to you, and the other man, facing Tommy.

I am that which pushes every noise away, every noise but this one, this one tingling in your limbs and on your scalp as you walk to your porch and ask “What’s going on?” (knowing of course all the while that what your tingling scalp leaves unsaid is true—that the truth or the facts or maybe even maybe the details have been opened to the wind and shattered loose like this shattering tingle blowing over you.)

Tommy is looking off, shivering or laughing as your other man says over and over ‘Why don’t you just hit me man, c’mon- why can’t you just hit me?’ And I am there, tingling, as you wait for Tommy to hit you as you watch him shuddering to laugh.

And as all the swirling of this one two three sided angle stops—as you try in this angle to look about you, past its lines and sharp points, and you feel, inside it, that it’s stopping directly over you, over and all around you—Tommy turns around and takes a breath as he steps towards you, telling you to leave.

“But what’s going on?” you hear from your politely smiling lips as you ask it, as you look at your other man and almost widen your smile, almost shout aloud Hurah! for all the finally-at-last-it’s-all-over tingling all over you.

And as Tommy raises his hand to you, gripping firmly at your chin, saying

–Do you want to stay or to go?

you look at him, at his eyes that say nothing in volumes to you.

And as you say “I don’t know” you see your other man grow immense in the corner of your eye, as if he will choose for you now, as if he is the only one big enough on this porch to choose. But Tommy’s hand grips your chin and pulls your eyes completely into his and he cusses and he says

-NO. No more of that. No more of this not knowing. Make up your fucking mind Lilly and tell me what you want. Do you want to stay or to go?

And as he speaks to you, his mouth forming these words in you, you don’t know anymore. You turn around and go back inside to get a cigarette.

*

As you walk through your kitchen you hear your other man say ‘Well what about all those girls you fucked man she told me about them she told me how you fuckin’ cheated on her man…’

And as Tommy answers whatever he answers you feel me return, that tingle, as you light up your little bit of time and pull it into your body without feeling it, feeling only me as I admit to you what he did, as I remind you of all that he put you through, all of the pain and the hurt and the falling-all-apart-insanity. And you see how small and weak he is and how wrong and how you expected—

But you don’t expect anything now. You don’t feel any notion of right or should anymore, just this breathing in of time and smoke, just this turning around as the air blows across you all the fragments of your side of your Us, your heavy heavy sharp side of your Us that isn’t anything to you now as you approach the porch again and sit.

And you, oh so lovely in this loveless hurrah!, you hear the words fucking and all those girls and what do you want? what do you want? tumble around your head as you look up to the now absolutely shivering Tommy as he shudders and his posture fails him and he sucks heavily distracted on his cigarette. And he looks like the wind to you, he looks like all of his windy untrustableness to you as you say unflinching “I knew you wanted her I knew it I could see it in your eyes and you didn’t even try to hide it you just pushed me away night after night leaving me all alone without even your voice or your hands or anything but pushing all your shit on me and all over my house taking advantage of my space giving me no space like I’m your fucking housekeeper but I’m not Tommy I am not your fucking doll this is not your fucking dollhouse.”

And as it all siphons out from under you, you look at your Tommy and he looks like he’s dancing, he’s shivering so hard and not saying anything, saying nothing and volumes of nothing as he almost cowers or contorts with a cramp or a thorn or a sharp sharp edge of something coming back to him cutting him in his side as he fumbles for and fondles through another cigarette. He looks up at you with his squinted eyes squinting through the wind and through the wine and through the tingling veil I’ve placed over you so that when he comes over and collapses on your lap you can look off and not have to feel him fall apart.

And maybe you smile. Maybe you smile a razor-sharp smile as his head lays in your lap and his hands clinch into themselves next to your tingling and distant thighs.

And as he looks up at you, you can’t barely see his eyes at all— his eyes are blotted out because they just now remind you of your other man who comes to the doorway from wherever.

And as Tommy stands, you stand inside him, you blink out because you taste something like sympathy for me and you think “I was around when he fucked all those girls I was around him like a house like a room as he began smashing apart all of my stuff and all of his beautiful words he gave me, smashing apart all of Us with his deeds and his cheats and his sharp betraying answers to my questions of his love— I was around, but where was he? He was far and so distant as I was nearing my other who would hold me without wanting me to figure out how to hold him, who could be a lover when my lover became an untouchable, distant, turned away no-man.” And as you taste into me you think “I have done nothing wrong except maybe feel sympathy too much too impossibly for Tommy.”

And maybe you smile as you wait for someone to make up your mind or make Tommy leave or break all this with a blunt it’s-all-over smashing against the wind overcoming this porch overwhelming this skin-tingling scene with all its impossible hurrah!

Maybe you want him to break or rebuild you don’t know. But he doesn’t do either, he just tells the other man to leave and turns away to face the windy night.

()

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