~v~

I love her. I love her. The words, even mouthed silently in the quiet of my room, angle my jaw in ways I am unused to. I try the more familiar. I want her. I want Spencer. That’s an undeniable fact. I want her. She wants me too, this much I know. Another fact. These are the building blocks, the simple rules of attraction.

I have been here before. The want. The desire. The heady beginning with all the usual symptoms of physical infatuation; sweaty palms, the purely Pavlovian reaction to every sound my cellphone makes, and all those looks exchanged, burning us with a hungry fire. This has all happened before. I know how to medicate myself through lust. The steps are familiar: the onset of fever, the full-blown case of the affliction, and then the speedy reconvalescence into full mental health – and on to another adventure.

And yet, despite the familiar signs, none of this is the same. I’m in love with her. I have been speaking the language of Lust for so long and so eloquently, I have learned the short-hand of it by heart. It was always the condensed version with me; a night, a week, and then a plain, final goodbye. Cliff’s Notes of relationships. Simple. Small words, short sentences, quick pay-off. Now I have been rendered mute by this new dialect my stubborn heart is insisting upon, all the short words made unintelligible, the message changed. I want her. True. And, yet, the meaning is not the same anymore. Lust is love. Love is…

I would laugh at myself if I weren’t afraid it would turn slightly hysterical. All these maudlin thoughts thrum inside my head, all these trite poetics, but when I open my mouth to say something, say anything to her, nonsense comes out. I love these fucking brownies, for god’s sake? I have been rendered mute, tongue tied into a Gordian knot in my mouth, but all these new words, unknown and strangely shaped, keep knocking into my clenched teeth, wanting out.