Just one more

... or I could go on ... 'forever'? 'Forever' is such a very long time (actually, it isn't, as eternity is beyond time), so how about 'for as long as I live'?

Yes, for as long as I live.

There are so many things to say about every single woman in the world, about every single one of you, that I will never finish, nor ever plumb the depths. It's not that there isn't no end to the women in the world (there isn't), because that's just superficial ... 'oh, I could go on forever just naming names.'

Do you know somebody, just by hearing their name? And go no farther than that?

It's that there's no end to the depth, of even just and only one person. I will never 'complete' with a person: knowing them.

When that happens, they are dead to me. I hope I die before I kill anybody off like that.

I have died a thousand deaths. At least.

So I keep bringing stuff up. The same stuff? I don't think so. I think different stuff, or the same stuff, but I hope I'm carried forward, even just a little bit, in bringing up my shit, and hers, and saying, okay, what happened here? What did I do? Who was I being here?

And do I succeed? Well, the funny thing about life is ... that it is a game, and I can keep playing the same game until I win, that is learn from it to play a bigger game with me in my life, or I can keep playing this one. Life doesn't care. Life is life. What's left is my choices, and how I choose to be while choosing them.

So.

So Saga asks me: "What are you going to be writing about me when you leave me?"

Saga's smart, dummy that she is, and she knows me better than I know me.

Because ... because in all my relationships, I was the one who left.

I was the one who left, all of them. They all recognized in me something that they needed, something that they saw in me that they had never seen before in anybody else in their lives, and they clung to me, all of them, so desperately, trying to keep me, even as I was in their arms in bed, they clung so desperately, the desperate women I've left and left and left.

Because I've loved them, but I am not strong, as I try to pretend to be, and I feel ... what? Them pulling me down, or ...

Let's get on with this.

There are the relationships that we parted mutually. We both went into the relationship looking for something, and we both left, satisfied. I'm not talking about those, because ... well, really: those weren't relationships, those were both me and her satisfying our own needs and moving along, even if those needs were for intimacy, or good conversation and companionship, or ... or a good, hard fuck. Or two. Or three. Or more. And tender holdings afterwards, so maybe that's what I was looking for really, and the animal, the panther in me needed to be satiated first, fully tamed, before I would allow myself to hold and to be held?

I don't know. I look in the mirror every day, but I still shy away from most everything I see in my eyes.

And there was one relationship ... well.

Well, Julia left me. Julia was strong enough to get away from me before I dragged her down to my level.

Heh. 'My level.' How low is 'down'? Every time I hit the bottom, the bottom drops out.

So Julia left me, and found happiness. Julia is smart, smart enough to see where her happiness lay ... and where it didn't.

Saga isn't that smart, or doesn't care. And I'm so grateful for that, and so sad for her, clinging to me, cleaving to me, really, even though she sees me better than I do, and, okay is so blind as to see the good in me and ...

Okay, getting carried away here.

So Saga's not going to leave me, and she does see the trail of skeletons in my wake, and has read my stuff, and she is clairvoyant in that she can connect the dots and can look, clearly and with a level head, into the future.

And still hope for today.

So this is what I write, Saga, about my exes. This is what I write about you.

I am a writer: I write what I write. I see what I see.

And what I see is this: human beings, flawed, striving human beings, so desperate, so hopeful. So loving, so spiteful.

So, you've seen me love a person you've all hated: Traci. Now, what do I have to say about ... Brenda, now.

Brenda.

You know what? Brenda so desperately wanted me, all the time, in our relationship. I don't know what I was to her. I don't know if she does, or even if she asked herself the question. Was I to be her husband that died in the Gulf? Was I to be her daughter that she never had? Both? How did her son feel about this? And she wooed me, and played with me, and touched me and kissed me and held me and held onto me as a woman does: desperately, but despairingly, knowing that she'd have to let me go, someday, when I left her, so she held all the more tightly.

And she taught me the art of spooning, and the strap on. Do you think Julia and I made that discovery in ultra-Puritanical Connecticut? No, it was the college position for us, and I sometimes, now, wonder if the sex wasn't ... fulfilling for her and that's why she left me?

But of course, that really wasn't the issue at all. The issue with Julia was that I was there, but I wasn't there, I was in an intense relationship with myself and my precision and perfection and my failings that instead of reaching out to her for help, I shut her down (by shutting down) and shut her out.

So when Brenda, sweet, motherly Brenda, attached the straps to me ("This is weird," I thought) and eased me into the bed with her and put me behind her and slid the dildo I was wearing into her, I was like, what is going on here?

I felt dislocated, confused. Was I supposed to be a man? Was I ... I don't know but then she wrapped my arms around her and she put my hand over her tummy, pressing her hand into mine into her, and she asked, "Do you feel that?"

And I did.

And she said, "That's you, filling me."

And suddenly, it wasn't a belt with a foreign object attached, it was me. It was me, and I was in her. And I started thrusting, much harder, and she moaned, and cried out and begged me to fuck her, her pressing her hand into mine into her, and she came rather quickly after that, and I ...

And I became possessed, needing to fill her, needing to pleasure her, and I took her, and then I came, o, God, did I cum when I was pounding on top of her now, her legs locking me into her as I thrust with my strength, wanting to, no: being in her.

And afterwards, she held me, and caressed me, and cooed over me, as I panted, a girl-child-man, on top of her, and she rolled me off to her side, and said, "Sleep now, sweetheart; I will hold you." And she held me, me still in her, and I could even feel her squeezing me? Is that possible? I felt it.

And I didn't have the courage to ask if I could suckle at her breast. I didn't have the courage to ask myself that I could ask her. I was so lost from my loss of Julia, and so lost in what I was to Brenda, I didn't have ...

I didn't have the strength to know who or what I was, even just for myself, or to be okay that I could be Brenda's baby, suckling at her breast, and let her love me, with motherly love, and hold me to her breast, and hold the whole world at bay as she held me, her baby.

How could I be her baby daughter, when I was just now her 'husband'?

And you know what, `phfina?

No, ... what, `pfhina?

Maybe that was exactly what she wanted, and she was too shy to offer herself to me that way, too? But maybe if I had asked, maybe she would have gladly surrendered, offering herself that way, and held me to her, and maybe she would have cum again, so hard, with my lips latched onto her breast and my fingers playing, probing, plunging into her pussy that she might have screamed instead of moaning and whispering, "Oh, God!" as I pounded into her with the strap-on?

Or maybe not. Maybe she would have said, "Melissa! That's too weird! What would my best friend, your mother, say if she found out I was nursing you!"

As if me fucking her with a strap-on was ... okay?

I don't know.

I do know this. All that. And all I have written.

And.

And she took me in. She took heart-broken me, and yes, she took something for herself and her needs from all this, yes, she doggedly and determinedly seduced (very not unwilling) me, but she did take me in, and loved me, and cared for me, when ...

When nobody else did. And she cooked me meals, and she took me to a JazzFest, and she waited for me over a cooling supper and then when I walked in, two hours late, she wasn't (too) angry, but when finding my car ran out of gas miles away, got her gas can, drove me to my car, and we drove back to her place, and she took me in her arms. And she held me, as long as I let her hold me, for days and weeks, and when I left her, she let me go, and ... wrote, and looked for me, and that freaked me out, so I ran hard, changing names and States, and her last note was a sad, 'I hope you are happy and in a loving relationship' delivered right to the sbux where I was working, under a pseudonym. She could have walked right in, I suppose, but she didn't.

Brenda wanted to love, and be loved in return.

When she found this little girl, this broken little girl, she loved me, with all her might and all her strength and all her heart, and she held me, so tenderly, just reveling in it, savoring each moment we were together: me in her arms, and in her, her, holding me, feeling my weight press down on her, my sweat mingling with hers, my breath lifting her arm up and down, like a ship riding the waves on the ocean.

Brenda was too much for me. Brenda was too good for me. She gave me all of her, she took what she could from me, what I could give, and was happy with that and the moments we had together.

Saga, what will I write about you, when I've left you?

I'm not as clearsighted as you? Nor as ... practical about life? Or the present? Or me? I can't see that future.

So, let's pretend. Let's pretend this is that future.

Saga, I love you. I treasure the moments we had together. I savor them. I remember them. I remember you and how good you were to me, and I wish I could have been a person that was good enough to make the world and its concerns not matter and never matter, but I'm not good enough for that, or for me to be worthy enough to be good enough for you.

Saga, I'm sorry I was not ... Saga, I'm sorry. I love you and I want you to be happy.

Do you see how irrelevant the future is? Do you see the now is all we have in what I say to you in that pretend future, of what I say to you now?

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

e.e. cummings

&mdash `phfina commentary:

I put the analysis before the poem. I hope you don't mind.