Relationships

My thigh is creamy and very white. Splattered with pinkish, brownish dots that must be my hair follicles. At least twenty very obviously freckles or maybe moles are interspersed with probably a hundred baby pecks of light brown. My hair is short, nicked by a razor a least a week ago. I'm soft to the touch, although the hair prickles. And if I grab her I can get almost an inch of thick grip between my thumb and fingers that jiggles into place for a few seconds after I release it. I think about my thighs every single day. About their girth, about how the world sees them as I strut down the street in a skirt, as I dance, as I run in Carolina. Do they think cellulite, fat, sexiness, normality? Do my thighs draw attention? Do they please your eyes? Do they hurt your eyes? My relationship with my thighs consists more in gauging the petty relationship between my thighs and you. I'm never satisfied with that relationship. You should always be more pleased, I scold.
And then today, I looked at you, at me, and I love you, just because I can. Because I can choose to love you or to scold you. Didn't I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder? And my eyes they streamed tears because they beheld the beauty and the power to behold. And the insanity of relinquishing this power, of living in fear, in self-loathing, just because these eyes can't see what they have the power to see.
I look at my thighs and I see them as my own. My own to love or despise, and though you may love them or despise them, never yours. I want to love mine. Because loving them makes me cry, makes me feel, inspires me. Because when I love them I know I want to love them. And when I hate them I can't even know that I know nothing at all.

Only to find her again

Sometimes I lose my life, only to find her again in a bar, in a conversation, in a completed task, or in a run through the park. She's mine because she has a will, energy, and direction. When she walks in the sand she leaves footprints and they're often crooked, stepping to a jazz that she listens to on her own. The rest of the time I leave scarcely a toe print-jutting off the edge of the communal impression where my shapen foot doesn't quite jive with yours and yours and yours. Its our path I suppose, but we possess it soulessly, without contemplation, with a murky purpose. And all the while phantom ways dance inside my head, leaving vanishing toe prints on my play dough brain and I feel them as something that could be, that could have been. But nothing more. The impulses fade before I can shift even a little toe. To translate a potential into action, imagine the neural pathways that must be run. So we walk, trod, plod, as indicated, aware of a settling unease and oblivious, just oblivious to a source, an escape, to ourselves marching to no end. And then I feel a peck on the neck or forearm and warmth spreads down my spine, into my soles and into my soul. A peck from full lips, anxious and loving, reincarnated upon meeting my molting skin. She's my life. Today I found her in the restaurants and bars of quito, as I shuddered and extended an arm and bent in a demi-plie, listening to myself dancing on my brain. And she grabbed me tight in a sprawling waltz as a stranger laid his life before my eyes. Because I saw how much deeper my feet sink with her and how good the sand feels between my toes and how much happier the course. So me and my life, I think we might shine for a while now. I think we might laugh loudly, and I think we might hope not to get lost again.