Want

Somebody will get hurt.

I am falling in love again.

In my mind, I try him on like an expensive new coat; taking him from the hanger, placing him back upon it, sliding my hands along the silk lining of his shoulders and unfolding his panels around me. I run my finger over buttons, linings, threads, feeling for how he has been made. I think about him when it is quiet; not fantasies of us together, or what we might do, hand in hand; just his face, his body, the way he stands. Unblinking.

He is always wearing the same thing. He is not saying anything or doing anything. He just is. Thinking about him involves the clarity of him looking at me. His look has a purity that reminds me of statues – cold, big marble gods that stride, fixed, eternal from stone.

Sometimes he is smiling. Sometimes he is concentrating with his head at an angle and his sleeves rolled up. He has hairy arms, thick bursts of dark hair that, I imagine, are like a comfort blanket to touch. I don’t normally like hairy men.

This is what he does to me. (Oh! What he could do to me!)

There is no plot to our imagined encounters, there is no ‘this happens, then this happens, then this happens’.  We are not getting anywhere. There is no main event. We pass the time of day. We laugh. Occasionally we sit side by side and say something about the lives we have led and the things we hope for. Have hoped for. Piecemeal and forgotten like the insides of a vacuum bag, sucked in, forgotten, promises already made to another and no intention of breaking them, unless I want to go to a hell.

The mind is a lonely place, full of words: unsuitable.

The words are: I am not happy in my marriage. I am thinking endlessly about another man. I don’t want anything to happen. I just want to be near him, sometimes. And fill my mind with his face, and his look. And to hear him laugh. Make him laugh. Touch him gently.

I paint my lips and my nails. I brush my hair until it gleams bright like camera flashes on water, like chestnuts on display at a Christmas fayre, like ribbons.

I won’t say anything about this feeling. It is irrelevant to know whether he feels the same, although the thought that he might – he might! – makes me squeeze my fingers into a fist and count to ten, like my child climbing the stairs with her daddy.

I am a bad person.

I have known this since I formulated my first sentence with newly found words. Since new.

Sometimes I think the wish to be close to him is the same wish a child has to crawl back into its mother’s womb. An embrace that gives life to hope and meaning and one thought: I am alive!

There is nowhere for this to go, and yet when others talk to him I glare at them over my glasses and hate them for stealing him. I want him to climb inside my skin and find me, to hold the palm of my hand in his vision and put his forehead upon my cheek.

I try to remember that I shouldn’t feel this, hopefully the shame of how wrong I am will counteract this bloom of feeling.

But this is different.

The best kind of adultery would be with someone you can’t stand. There would be a simplicty to it. A transaction. One less person to worry about in the shove of feelings that push us to and away from each other. Someone faintly good looking, but not too good looking. Kindness is not an issue. (He is kind and it makes me want to cry). This is why I imagine it. It cannot be real. I feel things that I thought I could not feel, but I feel them. In theory, I would need a cardboard cut-out man, someone I don’t think of unless I am in bed with him, and even then he would need to be clean and unblinking. Someone whose needs are few, whose emotions I don’t know; whose sense of self does not rely on me, even in fraction.

Instead I find him with his arm against mine. For someone who hasn’t been touched, for so long, I want to sit here all day, all-ever, with his forearm and my forearm touching. I want this to be my life. Just this. This moment when our skin touches and it doesn’t have to mean anything, but could mean everything.

Imagine.