Sometimes you get what you want

It’s mid-July and my skin is a sun-kissed gold, my hair has grown longer and it too is changed by the sun. At night when my skin is still damp from nights filled with reggae I let him touch this body which scarcely resembles my own. I let him kiss me, and it feels good, but I never look into his face. Maybe because he’s more afraid of letting someone in than I am. Suddenly I find the scent of cigarettes, campfire, and alcohol more than appealing. I have an urge to be close enough that in the morning my new found golden hair smells of the night before. I want to be let in, but in the same moment let someone in. In this moment we both need each other. I need warm hands on my hip bones in the middle of the night and he needs me to ask “why the distance?”
And at that moment I think about love. I know that I will never love this man. And I know that 3,000 miles away there is a man who pines for me, who spends long afternoons looking at baristas in small artsy glasses and big scarves while thinking about me. At the same moment I’m serving a morning macchiato to the man I sometimes share a bed with – while I wear my small artsy glasses and think about my favorite scarves packed away in boxes just begging to be let out. I try not to think about that boy. I wish I was wearing my favorite green, silk, scarf from Delhi, and I hope that the afternoon will be filled with sun for lazy cat naps. I concentrate on all the Italian words around me and try to will the courage into him to speak to me before he’s had his third pint. I finally have a warm body next to me but sometimes it comes at the price of silence. I decide that maybe the warm body isn’t enough. Perhaps I need a warm heart too – even if I have no intention of loving it any more than I do the rest of this sacred humanity.
I want to cure fear rather than inspire it. I want warm arms around me at this moment, dark eyes peering over my shoulder as I write these lines, and a Milanese accent asking why he can’t read what I’ve written about him. Maybe I would let him see. Maybe he would find courage in these words, find some assurance in my desire to understand another’s humanity, for both of us to find something of ourselves in another person, and know that maybe the gain of allowing someone to glimpse a piece of your soul outweighs the risk of getting hurt. And maybe in trying to teach this lesson I’d be able to learn it myself.
I know I will never love this man, not because he is unworthy of being loved but because he is incapable of being loved. And even with this knowledge I still want him to lead me in a dance to an old Rat Pack song, to invite me back to his bed that is thousands of degrees warmer than mine will ever be, to kiss my stomach as the notes of a smoky jazz singer fill the unavoidable silence. I want him to quietly rouse me as he heads out in the morning. I see only his body in bed next to me and a soul behind looked doors of steel, below the head I lay on his chest. I realize at this moment I’ve gotten exactly what I asked for, but maybe it wasn’t what I needed.