FCBK

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30.11.10

forty-seven

23:42:07

I'm sleepless in Beirut.

Simultaneously, I receive a "BonZour" and "Hey! Ssup bad gul :p"

A collaborative resurrection. A coffin lid that slid an inch and expelled the smell of skeletons and withered, stiff forget-me-nots. 

The dead eyeballs roll forward again and looked at me accusingly, why have you forgotten us?

Leon and Hugg, a man and a half, two characters that I let settle to the bottom of my list of people I wanted to be connected to. There was something about them that just didn't fit.That smell of fish in the middle of the Gobi, that empty highway at rush hour, that sound of a stray firework weeks after New Year's - that something that made you turn around and head the other way.

Both were certified. Leon, reliably endorsed by being a friend of a friend of a friend and Hugg, (to be yet) legally declared insane.

I met Leon through work. What was to be a professional meeting for coffee, stretched into a drive to the mall, a shopping spree for a lamp for my home and a dinner by the sea.

His body was a paragraph of triceps, biceps, deltoids, pectorals, abdominals, latissimus dorsi, adductors and laterals written with roaring, ripping rhyme and rhythm and its poetry touched me like only a primal awakening could. He was the physical definition of man. His skin was tanned and rough looking, his cheeks chiseled to perfection, his lips thin and firm, his arms hairy, his face clean-shaven, but at the ready to sprout at any given moment and his nose tip dipped, recalling the shape of a pair of well-loaded Speedos. But his eyes spoke of something opposite. They were almond-shaped, deep wells of dark brown chocolate, laced with lashes that called for a two page spread mascara ad. They softened his menacing jaw-line, they looked at me softly and the twenty years between us evaporated as did the formality that we had swallowed along with our first cup of coffee.

He would always ask about my cat and give her love and affection the few times he had come over. I was soon classified under the feline species, "How are my two cats doing?" he'd message me. He lacked the royal mane of a lion, but he fit right in the serengeti of my imagination. I could picture him lying in a strategic spot, his body pertched up by an elbow resting on the ground and his other arm resting like a stamp of ownership on his bent knee, the horizon stretching out before him in four clean lines over which the satin bed sheets draped and spilled...the fantasies came easy.

It didn't take long to succumb to the primal laws of the savage plains. The fragile ecosystem depended on either one of us to win, to fight it out like only prey and predator could, to have the battle end in shreds and shrieks and a satisfaction of a prehistoric craving. But our roles were interlaced and we spoke in meows and purrs lacerated with what could only be pleasure and we fell back into the fitting curves of our bodies with a heaviness of a blackout.

But that was the only fit. Like two puzzle pieces that come together in perfect contour, but one a piece of sky and the other a piece of ocean. The way he..., the way it..., the way... I could not pin it down, I could not name why I felt uneasy about the two of us, so I blamed his few grammatical mistakes for my sudden aversion...even though I knew he had an iPhone and that his fingers were too large for the tiny keyboard.

Hugg was more didactical. Our relationship grew from him preaching to me his sci-fi dogmas and me listening to them avidly. I was eager to interact on what he called the third level of communication, to discuss abstract concepts and ideas, rather than who ate where and who did what. Cruising round the Corniche, we escaped reality, he encouraged me to dig deeper into my spiritual wells, to let go of social bullshit...

only so we could later show up, hot and gorgeous, at some drunk n' bass party. It didn't fit, even if we left early, even if we knew that we were above all that stuff, even if we dicussed how pointless, how absurd...and then we'd go back again the next weekend.

Our journey started as a platonic friendship. The blindiness of beautiful theory!

"I am looking for a friend. I need a friend right now. I want us to become best friends. I want to share everything with you."

Does everything include kisses and hugs and cuddles and caresses and moans and sighs?

It did. And I could never let go of the initial theory sold to me, because I am that person that gets caught up in details and finds difficulty in letting go of the story even when the book is over. He didn't practice what he preached. He was a walking paradox.

Flutterby messaged me last night: I got a restraining order on my ex-boyfriend - apparently I was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.

Come to think of it, I think I was too. Hugg was abusive. He'd play me hard: raise me up and then tear me down. It's a cunning game and it works. You are trained to love your abuser. Hugg was a dog person and he wanted me to be his dog or even l'ombre de son chien. Within a month or so, I felt a cloud of bad energy begin to build up. I didn't feel good most of the time and I'd go looking for that better in Hugg. And he played me. The morning I walked out on him when he was still asleep, was the best move I had done for myself. It was checkmate.

But it didn't come with the pride and glory of a strong woman, I have to admit. I called on Botticelli. He had just come back from vacation. I wanted the safety of his arms and the safety of his appartment, far away from this street and this world that I really didn't belong in. I was already parked beneath his window when we spoke on the phone. He didn't know, but the invitation never came. I hung up, swallowed everything and drove off into the rising sun.

So don't supp bad gul me. Because I'll say hey. Because I'm too weak to send you away for good.

1 comment:

  1. It is truly absurd how we are always trained to love our abusers!

    ReplyDelete