Can't Help It

She is hurriedly pulling her pants up after glancing back at me with a soft, questioning look. My face was firm. She’d fully planned on ditching yoga and lunch with the girls to lounge naked in bed here with me, but I insisted, quite carefully, of course. She looks back, long and deep this time, I cannot understand why she so enjoys staring when she doesn’t see. She has to know that she is blind by now. Something uncomfortably hot is radiating through my arms and before it gets to my fingertips I realize I’m actually angry with her for all of this. I really am insane, and she looks so beautiful with her clothes on, she should have been born in jeans and a t-shirt, maybe it’s her virtue I find so attractive. Perhaps it’s not insanity, but evil.
I watch the sunlight streaming so bright through the windows that the sheets and duvet have the ultra white brilliance of fresh snow at noon. It is a color only a woman can achieve, nothing at my place is ever that white. I look around at the bright picture frames and personal touches that let you know so much about her. She, like so many of the rest of them, are expressive in ways I cannot begin to be in their space. She has arranged everything so that you know the smell of her neck just below her earlobe when you look around, or at least the intimacy of it. It’s intimacy I cannot afford at first glance, she is so much more courageous than I. Blind courage is little more than stupidity though. I try to take everything in, as if it’s the time I’ll see it, and yet I know it’s not. She will leave the door unlocked and I will push my way in again a few more times. What the hell is wrong with me? I have patiently waited long enough, I’m sure she is gone and hasn’t forgotten her keys, or wallet, or any of the other myriad items she can never seem to keep in that duffel bag of a purse. It’s safe for me to shower. She hates when I shower right after, she says it’s like I’m washing her off, trying to cleanse myself of her. No amount of informing her of how often she showers afterward, or how unpleasant walking around sticky-dicked is, has been able to convince her that it’s just a shower, nothing more. So I guess she can see, she just doesn’t want to, I suppose that isn’t blindness so much as stupidity.
I turn the shower on and with the water comes the truth. I shouldn’t have slept with her again. I was ready to end it and she knew it was coming and as wrong as it is, that kept me from it. When she’s sad and expecting it I can’t do it, I need to catch her off guard. This will crush her, I will crush her. Why am I doing this? I feel so sorry, it’s a heavy sorry, too thick for the water to wash away, and yet I guess I’m not sorry enough not to. This isn’t my first time and it won’t be my last. I’m not even done with her yet, it’s beginning in a sense. I will break up with her, she will ask a hundred unanswerable questions and a thousand she already knows the answers to. She’ll fall apart and put herself back together, though not quite right. She’ll throw herself into her work and back into church and build ten foot walls around herself and I will break them down again just a few more times so that I know she isn’t really the one, or that I’m not alone, or that I’ve still got it, or all of them. I’ve heard all the psychology all the doctrine, I know why, insecurity, hatred of women, love of women, lust, my mother, whatever I’ve heard it all before and it still doesn’t stop me, and yet I love her. I love her and not enough to stop me, and I’ll be somewhere between a romantic proposal down on one knee, the kind that moves her friends to tears when they hear it, and smoking slowly watching her heart break til it beats no more, for months maybe a year. I know it’s wrong, I do, but I can’t help it, because this is what love is to me, and God damn me to hell, but if she doesn’t cry like my mother did for my father, or cling to me, the way my mother did because I was all she had left, then I just don’t feel loved. Thankfully, before I can reach the thought of what my mother would say if she really knew, I hear the loud drone of my cell phone vibrating on the porcelain of the sink. It is a stupid place to put your phone and I have learned that the hard way more than once, but someday she might want to see, and my phone details would certainly be an eye-opener. Today is the day for saving something sweet to come back to later, she has to miss me, it isn’t the day for confrontation and reserving a table at her place to eat shit for it later.
The other one is calling, she looks like the girl next door with a real wild streak, which she uses to hide her neediness. It’s so cute how she thinks she can handle me. She’s more turned on by my worst moments, she’s fun and intoxicating and I could never love her, but will make sure that she loves me. I am amazed how quickly my guilt gives way to excitement and lust for mischief.
I hop out of the shower, begin to get dressed and suddenly I can’t wait for night and am loving my black leather jacket and am feeling more heartthrob than asshole. I take one last look before I leave hoping, that if I memorize it all, I won’t come back, I won’t hurt her, but no objects register, it’s a blur. As I close the door I’m knocked back by an immense wave of regret, self-hatred & a longing for death that weakens my legs and forces me to take the elevator instead of the five flights I usually jump down. By the time the doors open I am alive and part of the city, powerful, miserable, grimy, sophisticated, lonely, and on top of the world.

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