BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 10

TUESDAY
05.11.1996
ISAIAH

               If my muscles didn't love to parody granite and my stamina wasn't as awful as it is, I would be pacing right now. Frenzied laps back and forth in front of my poetry wall with fingers rooted in my locs, desperately sucking a cigarette as I spit out insipid arguments for why I should go through with this and cogent ones to call it off.

For one, I don't bring people here. I might have had sex with a third of the student body at Oxford but never in my bed — a fact obvious to anyone who enters the room and finds it pressed against the wall. The queen-sized mattress doesn't have a frame or a headboard but even that is a monumental upgrade from the one on the floor I slept on until last year.

Second, this is Dorian. There's no version of tonight that flows into a regret-free morning. After six years of rehearsing loathing, why do I face him with a chest I've torn open myself and say here, destroy me all over again?

Third, this is Dorian. He's not a stranger who'll be sated with any body. He comes with four suitcases of reveries and 'remember when's that will go off like a smoke alarm when I head for the path of least resistance, which is actually the path of forgetting myself and getting it over with. He'll know when I'm faking, and worse yet, when I'm sincere.

And what if I can't live up to Isaiah-from-six-years-ago? Memory has a tendency to embellish, like a translator who rewrites a novel to their taste and is never caught until someone else who also speaks both languages and happened to read both versions comes along and exclaims but these don't even resemble each other! Dorian might have a divine version of me he expects me to perform but how can I if I'm not given a character brief?

As though summoned, Dorian appears in the door frame. He holds his towel, not at the waist like most men, but around his shoulders so he'd be naked from the navel down if I hadn't splurged in bath sheets twice the size of an average towel to make the plunge from the shower to the arctic air beyond it less fatal.

I drop my gaze to the carpet between my socks and don't move from the edge of the bed. I still buy unscented cleaners — hand soap, body wash, shampoo, and detergent, all free from perfumes. It'd be perfidious to think he didn't notice.

I want to assert it's not because of him but the protest is exactly what will confirm that as the sole reason; a criminal caught red-handed blurts, 'it wasn't me!'

I still buy unscented soaps and it's entirely because of him. Just as the five packets of camomile tea hidden out of my sight on the top shelf of my pantry are entirely because of him, because when I go to the shops a degree too tired, my hand reaches for it on its own. Because of him or for him? What's the difference?

Dorian's bare feet scuff the wooden threshold. 'Is the mood over?'

'What mood?' I ask without looking up.

'Um... the mood?' It comes out as a question. 'Americans are always talking about "setting the mood".'

I drag my palms down my face. 'Dorian... my attraction to you isn't some pendulum controlled by fate. There is no mood.'

Despite the statement, I don't look at him, not even when he sits next to me and I sense him studying the poetry taped onto the wall across the bed. It's not the same poetry I had in my bedroom in Halsett — not that he ever saw my bedroom in Halsett.

'Did you write these?'

It's an easy mistake to make: each poem is in my handwriting. I transcribe them from library books to have copies I can annotate and the author names are jumbled into my notes.