I thought I was a loose thing too
Article by Esbella George Art by Teddy Doggett
I don’t get along very well with other people's dogs. Until I practically lived at someone else’s house, with a dog who wasn’t mine. The hosts exposed this guest’s un-adorable traits and my un-cuddleable tendencies. This dog was practically human, big, an orange-ish brown, and on the leash extending to the most contagious boyish curls I have ever seen. The dog was Soil he had dumped all over me. I organically composed myself, complimenting the dog's beauty and then energy. I liked this one in a way that wasn’t “I like your dog because you like it and what kind of loser doesn’t like most dogs?” I’d grown fond of something I was not initially provoked by. I liked something that jumped on me initially.
Outside of Mathias, he circles me. A helicopter, squinting at the contents on a sheet of paper, I’ll go and say hi to her, his size circling the width of my body too. He was once a scene partner, someone I had a great impression of. A tall blonde with unwashed curls and big glasses you could not steer away from, wondering if he gives the most intense eye contact in the world or if these glasses just widen his eyes about three times their normal size. He is looking at me, eyeing me closely. I wonder why but stop thinking about it.
I am getting back into climbing after a week spent hunched over my computer during fifth block. Ritt is not the slightest bit packed. It’s a blessing, I won’t bump into anyone. I’m climbing something on the easier side and toward the top, I hear my name. He has a silly voice, one I am dying to make an impression of for you, yet I can't with only a piece of writing.
He is right below me, I look down, and if I’d fallen, it would have been on him, knocking those spectacles to the ground is what I imagined feeling the worst for, not for the weight nor gravity of the crush. While I climb, he is holding a conversation with me, asking if I come here often, saying he didn’t think of me as someone who’d do this. What I didn’t know is that maybe it was erotic, I can’t tell, I’ve never thought of the sport in this way.
I guess I am also enthusiastic about a senior boy paying attention to me while I assess his awkward nature. I really did not take much of any time thinking about him and who he was. It wasn’t until he was everywhere for me during the daytime, and eventually, I would be everywhere to him, seeping into his sleep.
And then I met his roommate.
It’s not the physical tease, because we got to do that on the first night after watching a film from 1911. There is an inferno of reasons to tread carefully around the well of giving myself to someone. I’ve never questioned the impulse, to be fair.
We told dirty jokes about the film, your arm was around me before it was around anything else. My feelings were the negative space. My laughter was what I was pronouncing. Reddit told us afterward that this was the first film to show a man’s penis.
We traveled through the circles of hell quickly enough to become fully undone in front of each other. I found it funny that after sitting in class for nearly three weeks, the first thing I loved about you may have been the beanie you wore. Now where was it, I asked myself, grinning. I may have laughed at the thought audibly. Something you always asked me about, no matter where your hands were on my body.
What’s so funny?
I’m the one known to be too embarrassed to request that we should just keep kissing for a while. Right?
Am I taking too long to let things escalate? Does he also want to kiss for this long? I guess I’d never known an answer before.
Delightfully compliant. So am I calling myself easy? When we made plans to watch the movie together for class, I wasn’t aware of our sexual chemistry, which you were soon to make clear. I wanted it to be you for the first time in so long. And I still want it to be only you if I could make all my wishes come true.
Do you see what I mean? I need someone to point it out to me. I need to know that I am worthy enough to be desired. There is no tease, no build-up when I am considering the physicality of attraction. I need to know about it or else I won’t believe it. Things are real when they’re spoken, identified, or finally grabbed after a while for that exact reason.
I still haven’t learned better, that what is erotic to me is what other people want from me. When he called me hot during our first time together, I didn’t know when to stop saying thank you. You feel housed in your body for the first time, greeted by the guest inside. A friend spending the night. Making use of the blankets that were merely decorations days ago. Is this what it means then, to be turned on?
I had my body, but it wasn’t made mine until this. I never thought things belonged to me until someone tried to take them away.
Was I a conversation during lunch the following day, saying we already did it and she was cool with it and didn’t even mind staying overnight?
“We drank coffee in the morning and I think I’ve just about figured her out.”
These are hypotheticals yet things I fear you have certainly said.
“She left later than I would have wished, but I still wanted to try something with her in the morning.” It would be okay with me if you told anyone, it’d probably make it feel more real. I have no secrets, only the ones I keep from you now.
Two years ago, what you wanted from me was what I’d wanted to be known for. There was no such thing as “my business.”
The tease to me was the dreams you allude to. The hope everyone has given me since meeting their eyes. The security I was enticed with, a claw machine of candy teeth, a lollipop with a scorpion in it. You dried me up and tried to make something beautiful of the exterior, leaving everything else dried and buried inside. Plastic flowers on a grave, vandalizing the gorgeous mural. A fountain of euphemisms for dying young. A delight for people to relish in now. I perform and am approached by people with things to gain from loser's luck.
April 23, 2023
you had a dream where I stopped talking to you
my reasoning:
the brevity of what we had
in that same morning (only 20 minutes apart)
you mention we’d make a great old couple
I ask for you to repeat the thing I heard
(I can almost never hear your mumble)
I like to imagine your mumble
usually, I'm spot-on
brevity
time
it doesn’t seem to matter
but we do allude to never being together again
And that’s why your confessions only exist in a mumble which I am much too afraid to have you repeat, for the podium this time.
I experienced luck and lost it. You are teasing me now, just by existing…existing without me, parallel to me. A maze that was just a parking lot, I’d passed my car minutes ago thinking there was a catch.
You exist without me and I am reminded of it in conversations. Shooting pool. Sitting in an audience.
You still take off your shirt every day.
Making coffee for yourself first. Sharing your toothbrush with nobody. Finding new words. Having new socks. Purchasing trinkets without another opinion.
Running out of things to say, I was reading the menu in an angry tone. Trying on accents for only yourself this time, or the new friends.
I buy minced garlic now, to avoid mincing it myself, which you once taught me.
The tease is how I never got to finish my sentences on the other side of the phone. Making faces at it. Sticking to speakerphone, rising and pacing, coming back to the phone when I’ve calmed myself down. I guess you could say our relationship was between myself and the meaning of calm and security. Those concepts exist to restrict us and mimic us. Much like your existence to me now.
I was teasing myself thinking you’d change. You were playing along. I was participating in sex that I thought meant absolving each other’s inclination to disappearance. The longer you panted, the longer I’d thought the memories would have remained for you.
What’s a tease is being preoccupied by something that timelines are unwilling to address: the human spirit.
My body doesn’t recognize hope, but my nervous system recognizes the feeling of wanting someone to stay.
I miss who I fell for
Kinder eyes
Hidden behind wisps on twig
It didn’t bother me
Scruff
Your tumbleweed tower mounts my lips
And it’s shielding me
I miss the tickle
An indivisible tapestry sewn
Between the quaint rubble
Of your sheets, my clothes, oh, there’s my gold card!
I like how bound I was
Amongst your loose things
(I was a loose thing too)
You could have kept me pinned there practically
Though I grew so nauseous in your shower
Each time I turned my back
I looked back
And you were too, I almost always caught you
And now we don’t call each other back like taking you all in for one last glance
I walk you to the water
you freeze and you’re cold
I can’t stand your blue lips
your face is so brittle
Without its manly layers.
I could crack your smile a little more like a chestnut then
But we’re not as messy, our deep autumnal drifts
A summer plunge.
When we meet now
Your scruff is somehow softer
Than the memory of our first touch
Everything is a meadow, draped over your wrinkling baggage eyes
I used to reach my hand to prevent it like a bandage
Your relentless scratching
now you scratch at the only surface I ever thought I’d maintain autonomy over.
My future and dignity
My relationship with my body. Who on Earth does it belong to if not myself?
I’m alone in deciding where I want to go from here
I have no advocate, no sides to grief
But that’s too easy
A friend of mine spoke wisdom into me
When I said you’re always somehow right in the end about how things with you are destined to go
He said
Maybe it’s because he knows his patterns
You’re not an exemplary intuitive
Nor a relationship expert
Tragically, you know all too well your fatal faltering
And pathological deception
My boyfriend tells me one day — we’re not dating yet but we are dating. We were in love before I realized there was a word for it, that kind of standing — his roommate with the boyish curls had a series of sexual dreams about me before I had even known my boyfriend.
He immediately regrets telling me, having not wanted to “let it get to my head.” I did what anyone would do, I acted as if something like that was disgusting and vulgar — I didn’t want to hear it. But I did. I cared to hear something like that. I hope I hear those things more, from someone I hadn’t ever considered before.
The way I responded to the comment from the guy I was having sleepovers with every night, who was letting me choose which pillow first, who didn’t mind my request for a soft t-shirt to wear to bed, even after my shirt had been taken off by him moments before, was actual curiosity and pleasure.
I know, pleasure is an awkward word to apply to this situation. But I was disarmed, even charmed as well. I thought about someone people wanted, wanting me in their subconscious, and how I had never returned the favor consciously nor the opposite. I had sat opposite him many nights over a movie or a bowl of cereal in the morning; he even drove me to class. But I did not know the tension on my end had gone unanswered.