inside my bones

No feeling is final;
I’m not sure whether that terrifies or comforts me.

Would it just be best if there was a real kind of neutral, an in between the two extremes, the highs and the lows, in a constant state of push and pull.

There were places in here, inside me, this me, where I haven’t yet been;
places I know I probably shouldn’t go but at the same time am drawn too, places I crave to know, places I need to know.

A door at the end of this corridor in half-light staring out from uneven shadows wills me closer:
just walk, one step then another, come closer, closer, touch, feel it grab me, turn the handle, cold brass against my perspiring palm, push it open, more, a little more, step inside, I can do it, just one step through the opening and I’m there, in;
I know inside my  bones I must, I should.

Bare feet, bare legs, bare soul, alone in the hallway, so little left to hide, an emotional stripping of layers and of who is me, all teased away;
did our bodies just jump hand in hand onto flesh softer than the sky?
The scent of rose lifting the curtains, thorns snagging the netting leaving tiny tears in the gauze.

The dressing gown I wore, a couple of sizes too big, hung loose looking clumsy, barely clinging to my small shoulders awkwardly slipping from one in slow motion.

Inside the room, a silence fed by a cacophony of words unspoken lifted from the pages of every book old and new on every shelf, some pages yellowing, others thumbed and dog-eared all smelling of age and time and collective memory:
(here lies the savage air of secrets)
a sanity unkempt running one finger along each spine they seemed to wince edging longingly beneath my hesitant touch and back, back into the shadows.

Unfolding a piece of paper I was feeling like a thief;
an intruder, spy, trapped now in the palpable risk of being caught: I wanted to be caught.

Desperation reacting with anticipation forcing me to stay: I want to be caught, trapped. to discover once again that choice is not an option, not anymore.

An untidy scrawl read like string, “… don’t look now but you’re in deep, too far from the shore….”.

And suddenly it all made sense.

We’d all been burning through this desire, the veiled threats, the watered promises of a tomorrow that never comes: shards of glass in lungs. I was searching for all the pretty places in me just for him, a stranger, total stranger, an anyone to hold, but how would he, whoever he would be or is, discover what me, this hopeless finder of things, can’t manage too for fear of learning too much?

But I think…
I think he will have done it all. He will hold, taste and take control of all what’s mine and it will be written with his lips on my wrists, with his fingertips on the small of my back, through his breath travelling along my spine.

Now here I stood feeling like a handful of glow bracelets just wanting to lick all the filthy words he uses off his skin and swallow such genius and rub his art all over the inside of my bones.

We are like paper flowers that exist forever or until there’s a hellfire that burns us up or a storm that dissolves us like we never were:
here I stand hoping as long as I walk to the end of this corridor and turn that cold, brass handle on that anonymous heavy door, swallow my apprehension, I will find yet more places where I haven’t been… yet.

Such secrets in runes, in teasers, for his delight, for mine, my slow unveiling when he will unveil another layer of me, forcibly if he must while keeping those machete butterflies alive in my stomach.

I tell him we are always brushing earth from our bare knees;
he tells me we make promises only skin can keep.

© Emmaleela