Forte Da

The erotic worlds we build are a curious interweaving of language and images. Most of us have done a shit-ton of borrowing. From the first time our mothers speak to us, and from the moment we manage to get our unwieldy, infantile tongues to cooperate just enough to spit out that first word, we are enveloped in an alien language, not of our making. And while the pains and tickles and chills and comforts may be truly ours, we are all bound to use that foreign tongue to express what we feel and what we want.

And even that, even what we want is a compromise. That aching pang for what that has no name is cajoled, bullied or wrestled into a choice, whether broad or narrow, of the selection predicated by what’s on offer. 

Harold wants me to wear plastic sweat shorts. While his fantasies of what he wants to do with me in them are borrowed from the mountain of porn he’s watched, or some repetition of a hazily remembered high-school fumble, the sweat shorts are entirely personal. They are all Harold. The thing that makes him and undoes him, simultaneously.

He doesn’t want to know what I look like, because this has nothing to do with me. He’s an insect, trapped in a sticky globule of amber: caught in that moment, a thousand years ago, watching his mother from across the room, in their stifling, stinking, mould-riddled trailer home in Alabama. She’s vacuuming the carpet in her bra and see-through, plastic sweat shorts. She’s trying to lose that last few inches of flesh, before putting on her pretty green sundress, and stepping out with her new man. And leaving Harold alone.

After he comes, Harold gets sad. In the beginning, I thought that telling him I was still there would make him feel better. But now I know that’s not what he wants. He wants me to go, just like she did. He wants to savour the loss, and spend some time alone with the image of those shiny, transparent shorts. Sweat slicked flesh sticking and sliding under the plastic, and the ache of loss, again.