A Letter To The Asshole Who Doesn’t Believe In Monogamy

By

You tell me about a new favorite song and I cringe as you hit play — not because I don’t want to hear it — but because I don’t need another reminder of you floating about the world. I watch as a silent spectator while the music consumes you and I listen as you explain with eyes closed why the track is worthy of your passion…and I’m jealous of a song. And you’re giddy and uncharacteristically open and I can sense your usual, carefully crafted façade fading. This is your version of intimacy, isn’t it? All I can do is watch as you unravel to a beat, stoic in my observation of this rare occasion. And it makes me wonder — do you ever feel like I do? Like you might explode at any moment for lack of expression or too much expression or just being inside your own brain? Can I tell you those parts of myself? I keep my cards just as hidden as you do and the result is two people who don’t know enough, who take too much, who pretend to see. Two people who will never be together because of their quiet pride, but who will stay intertwined in their mutual addiction to a physical bond.

There are days I swear I’ll never speak to you again…caffeine-ridden days that I wander and write and create and feel okay without telling you my every thought for the sole reason that my voice sounds better when echoing off of you. And then come the alcohol-reigning nights when I drift back to the right side of your bed with your body next to me taking up so much more space in the world than mine. And your bigness in life overwhelms me and hushes me and seduces me. I adore you next to me. I crave you. Greedily you’ve dived into me…giving yourself but taking more; hastily grasping at pleasure or closeness or amour propre at eliciting the dig of my fingernails a little deeper into your freckled back. I let you because I want that for you, I want anything for you that you want for yourself. I want to give to you. I want all of this despite the fact that I will fall asleep next to your snoring shell — the only way I know you. When it all comes down, whether awake or asleep, you are the same unreachably mystical person that I’ll never have.

And it’s sad to only be acquainted with a man while he’s lying to you or lying on top of you.