72
Lillian
It’s snowing outside my bedroom window.
It’s a few days after we let our secret out, a few after I asked to go upstairs with Sasha, meaning everything I could think of. Thoughts that have only grown. Sasha does that to me.
There are times like yesterday, when the band was watching gorgeously sensual, ragingly queer performance clips from one of our favorite musicians. Sasha said queerness is when all the rules and definitions lose meaning until you’re free to create your own meaning. You’re free to discover what’s constantly shifting or what’s always been there.
They said.
“There are a thousand things that count as sex now that no one’s telling me what counts and what doesn’t. We get to make it and name it ourselves.”
What’s sexier than a revolution?
Now my house is empty. This snowstorm has Jasper stuck out of town at a basketball tournament. My mom’s at her office working toward the late night while she waits for the worst of it to die down and the plows to start clearing.
A snowstorm and an empty house and Sasha here and beautiful and I want them so desperately. But even more desperately, I want to be here like they are. I’m tired of glancing at my guitar.
Because once, when I took it apart, I hid something inside and closed the guitar up again. So it’d be surgery to get it back out. So the love would be underneath my right hand while I played every note.
It’s the paper Emelia and I wrote on before our first kiss. I took the string of words and folded it away beneath my pickguard. Even Emelia doesn’t know it’s there.
I wonder if I should dismantle Butler again to rip it out. Crumple it up, recycle it, use it for fire starter. The thought exhausts me. It feels like keeping it is clinging on but throwing it out is pretending I haven’t loved before. Or pretending the past doesn’t catch up.
I need something to be true. I wish I knew what.
There’s the shift of the mattress as Sasha moves even closer to me. We kiss again, deeper, and it turns out the truth is hungry in me. Sasha said I made them feel like they were in a storm, everything changing and uncertain, wanting to dance and be scattered.
Something true is that I want to scatter them.
All the rest of the noise slips away when I take off their dress and leave it crumped on the floor beside my bed. Flowers amidst a mess of black cables.