Running a hot bath, I get undressed in the middle of a cold gray afternoon, observe my body in the mirror. It didn’t snow but walking through the city you might have thought that at any moment soft flakes would begin to fall. The clouds were that swollen, thick, and low. The air was frozen with that strange sort of tension between patience and anticipation. Strolling over the cobblestone streets felt like moving through a romantic movie scene.
The skin on my thighs turns rosy pink when I sink into the water, that pleasurable sting when you warm your body right after coming in from the cold. I sip my wine and listen to the new Lana Del Rey. I know not everybody does, but I find her kind of glamorous romantic melancholy to be seductive and haunting. Love as tragedy, sex as a hopeful kind of destruction. Desire like a drowning you prayed for all your life.
The mirror over the sink fogs full of steam. Out the high window I can see the purple evening sky begin to simmer and glow with the tiny piercings of star light. I fantasize about biting and sucking on your nipple ring. Sliding my soft tongue along its steel hardness, making you moan at the sensual torture and press against my hips seeking friction, needing release. I touch myself and give my breasts a delicious squeeze.
Massaging the fancy shampoo into my hair, the price of which was something obscene but I was so taken by the sultry charms of the salon owner that I couldn’t resist the splurge, I imagine all my little inconsequential sins piling up like a snowdrift blown against a gravestone under the tall naked trees. I wonder if any of our choices really matter that much in the end or if seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is really enough to call it living.
If you had the chance to do it all over again, would you do it differently? Would you do better because you know better or is ‘better’ just another trap. Just another way out of reality and into a place that feels so safe you grow numb to the danger of dividing yourself into two. Del Rey sings like a siren about being left behind by her big strong man. Short skirts and full lips. Sadness as entertainment. Loneliness a sadistic kind of turn on.
Dizzy with the flush of steamy heat and Sauvignon Blanc, I rise from the tub, pull the plug from the drain and wrap myself in a warm white towel. Somewhere downstairs he is stoking a roaring fire in the old stone fireplace. Not a lot going on at the moment. It’s just that something in me wants to tell you about it anyway because if these small moments can’t be made to come alive then I don’t know what we’re gonna do but go completely out of our minds.
Allison Marie Conway 