In Bed
BY ALEXANDRIA MOORE
I.
I am sitting across from him on his futon, keenly aware that we have been talking about the book on his desk for a little too long. After we’ve exhausted the conversation, he suddenly leans forward, pulls my face towards his and kisses me. In recent years I’ve learned how much can be said with a kiss. You can taste someone’s truths when you kiss them. The last person I kissed tasted like cold, gold-plated opulence. The person before that tasted like Cobalt 5 gum masking deceit. When I last kissed that boy, I think I tasted like a question. I think I tasted like pleading. Or maybe I just tasted like heartbreak. In this moment, however, I am not thinking about what emotion I taste like. Instead, I am only thinking about this boy’s lips on mine. My insides melt into simple syrup and there are liquified sugar crystals shooting through each artery, capillary, and vein. He kisses me for so long that my lungs should be giving out by now, but they continue to expand, filling with a sweetness more life-giving than oxygen. He pulls on the string holding up my romper and I come undone, starting at the nape of my neck where I still feel his fingers, then all the way down my spine, skimming across the bare skin of my back. * He asks me if I want to stay, and surprising myself, I say that I do. He tucks me into his arms. Our bodies fit snugly together and his torso transforms into a shell encasing my soft self. We whisper goodnights into the darkness, except I am not done with him yet. I tell him to wait, turn my face towards his, and kiss him again. He kisses me back, deeper than before. We fill the night with laughter and sighs once again until we are ready to settle into the darkness, settle into each other, settle into sleep. The air in the narrow room is saturated with salt now, humming with conductivity. My body is humming too and we drift off in an electromagnetic tangle of limbs. II. In my entire collegiate career, I have never allowed a partner to sleep in my bed. There was one boy who slept in my bed at my parent’s house the summer after I graduated high school, but it was hot, sticky, and uncomfortable. I rolled away from him every time he tried to hold me. This bed, the bed in my dorm room, is smaller than the one I grew up in. I have spent so much time in this bed that if it were not for the memory foam, there would be a permanent indentation in the shape of my body in the mattress. This bed has slowly become a cave that I retreat to when the silver lady called Depression beckons me to her. She places her lips on my ear and breathes heaviness into my body, anchoring me in place as every cubic inch of me slowly fills with mercury. I have spent entire days in my bed because of her. She has turned my bed into a place with no room for anyone else. Or perhaps that was me. This boy will change that. We’ve been seeing each other for a few weeks and I get him a Create-a-Face pancake from IHOP as an excuse to see him. He is sitting with me in my bed and I am reading poetry out loud from my favorite contemporary collection. Words about love and rum and eating artichokes stick to my bedroom ceiling like self-adhesive glow in the dark stars. He doesn’t particularly like poetry, but later he will tell me, “It’s really soothing when you read poetry. I feel like you could read poetry for a living.” There are stars illuminating his face too, except these ones are made of colored light from the spinning projector I keep on my windowsill. “Years from now, do you think you’ll remember this moment?” he asks. I think about the words on my ceiling and the stars on his skin. I think about the feeling of falling asleep next to him. I think about waking up next to him. I think about where we are sitting and where he will sleep tonight. Yes, I say to myself. Every time I kiss him, I wonder if he can tell. I wonder if he can taste the recapitulation of everything I feel soaked into my lips like a sweet balm. My lips have been dry and parched for a long time, but he tastes like the bubbling spring that I did not know I was looking for-- the spring that exists to revive me. His mouth is bigger than mine, hungrier. I relish in this hunger. I relish in being consumed by this primal thing. Although my insides are filled with that sweet liquid sugar, this hunger still pumps through me the same way blood does. I did not know that fire, early man’s best tool, could burn and glow at the same time. With this fire we consume each other into the early hours of the morning and spending the night is no longer a question. We fall asleep in the same electric tangle and my bed becomes a warmer place tonight. III. The silver lady has poured her mercury inside of me today. For the first time in a while, I am weighed down, slowly sinking into my mattress. I tell him this and he comes. He climbs into bed with me and it feels different than it has before. Just a week ago, he had been here with me in this same place, tracing his fingertips in lazy circles on the bare skin of my upper back. He had told me that I had an interesting shoulder blade. Flat, like a planet. Perhaps the pads of his fingers were not the first astronauts to land on the planet that is my body, but they were the first to make a home out of it. That day of planetary exploration feels so far away now. We lie awake in my bed until 3:00 am. When he he gets up to look at the time and registers how many nights in the past few months we’ve sacrificed sleep, he exhales loudly. “We can’t keep doing this,” he says. I immediately drop six inches further into my mattress. Maybe I’ve made a mistake. I have let this boy into my bed, body, and self, yet his voice is painted with exasperation. “I don’t want to be a burden.” He realizes the weight of his words and gets back into bed. When he tries to wrap his arms around me, I scoot away from him towards the edge of the twin sized bed. “I didn’t ask you to come here.” “I know. I want to be here.” Once we fall asleep, my bones begin to lighten and return to their normal weight as metal crystallizes back into sweetness. Coda. The morning after that first night I slept in his bed, the night filled with sugared blood and salted air, I awake still enveloped in his embrace. His bare skin is warm against mine. I absorb his body heat and although it is gray and rainy outside, I can feel myself photosynthesizing. Across from me is a small digital alarm clock. I don’t know it yet, but I will spend many mornings waking up in front of this clock. I don’t know that we will spend entire afternoons in bed together. I don’t know that there will be weeks where we sleep with each other more than we sleep by ourselves. I don’t know that I will spend so many months kissing him good morning and goodnight that I will begin to taste like love. I do not know much on this first morning together, but I do know this: even though this bed is foreign territory, I feel tethered to this place. Suddenly, he stirs slightly, and I wonder if he will ask me to go, but instead he squeezes me and pulls me closer. |