HFM

A Troubling Stereotype

I sat there on that rock.  I saw myself as I was before I had these words made up of curly letters stained across my chest.  I was sixteen and he was in my life.  While I worshipped him then, I didn’t understand how wrong he was, perched there on top of his ivory tower and the moral tight rope he took pride balancing upon. 

I wanted him to cum inside of me and he wagged his finger at me, saying with manipulative words that I just hung all over that it wasn’t right, that God would disapprove.  I lacked the capacity to lead him into contradiction, and he would lack the capacity to understand the contradiction even if I led him into it.

I sat there, despondent on the rock, poring over this ambiguous dream I had about those times (but I guess they’re all that way).  I looked down at my wrist and at my ankle and at my elbow and at my knuckles and the tears began to come but I choked them back because the tears were over him and I was done crying over him a long time ago. 

His hair would be chaotic and my face would be within it and then I would put my ear to his chest and not listen to the words he was saying but the bass and hum that the sounds he was emitting made inside of his body.  He would be talking about the strangeness of joints and how we are like puppets, consistently snapped together in assembly line fashion, and all I would hear was his heart’s beat growing faster while my ear buzzed with sex and the vibrations of his voice.

I couldn’t move from the rock.  A boy sat down next to me.
“What is the matter with you,” he asked.
“I did not ask you for comfort,” I replied.
“I did not come here to comfort you,” he said.
“Then why would you come and sit here next to someone that looks like me?”
“I needed a rock to sit upon and I have found one.”
And I said that I would share my rock with him despite there being many empty rocks surrounding us.  And I already began to feel better.

That was so long ago.  Now I’m carrying the burden of the consequence of indifference and sharing my rock with a stranger.  I know how to stand up for myself now and chase away strangers, but I’ve become isolated within myself, I know no one.  I trust no one.  I am alone, a wanderer with an anchor that I mistake for the wind.

That ambiguous dream I had was no doubt caused by some residue of remembrance of him.  He was standing there, naked, sleeping, but staring at something over my shoulder.  I was dizzy because the world was spinning around us, but he seemed content and calm and unphased by the rapid movement of everything.  He would not look at me.  I fell because he pushed me and didn’t look back.  And then I looked down and there was the ink, stained on my disgraced body, it was everywhere, moving like mercury beneath my skin.  Every movement I made disturbed it and made it run down my limbs and back up again.

Then I awoke and here I remain on my rock, despairing.  False hopes make it alright sometimes.