The Beginning
To me you are smoky hair and train tracks,
Red-lined lips and beer bottle ashtrays.
A sparrow, a crow – something, anything free.
You exist on fence posts, sitting cross-legged with a shy smile.
Other times you are destructive, waking up with tangled hair and eyeliner smudges trailing your face like tears, bruises and hickeys lining your breasts and thighs. You expose yourself in bars and let girls fuck you on your bedroom floor.
I bet you didn't know I think of you like this, or at all.
I do my best thinking in the early morning, usually with the sun-drenched mountains as the backdrop, flying down 1-90 with the sun at my back, the jagged green all around and the promise of the city before me.
I do my best loving after a night of slippery bliss, gazing into the morning hours, those nights where we get three hours sleep because we just can't close our eyes yet. Those moments when I imagine you above me, within me, throughout me. . .the delicacy of your shoulders and the softness of your neck the beginning of my constant rapture with you.
I do my best writing when I fear it will make no sense, when bits and pieces invade and force me to pull over, to jot it all down, writing furiously while trying to hold the wheel, seeing every mom-and-pop restaurant from here to the mountains as a challenge, a place to conquer myself. When I allow my thoughts to linger on one tiny aspect - the grey flecks of a stranger's eyes; the images I create based on your words - they unfold like golden butterflies dipped in stardust, an excursion of fantasy, the threat and promise of completion.
I do my best impressions of you when I am bleeding, when my heart overextends itself and light spills forth from my fingertips. Only then can I evoke an ounce of the beauty you maintain within that perfect frame.
Erin Dorsey is a 30-something semi-feminist, anti-complacent, boat-rocking poly mom, with a penchant for writing and too much time on her hands. Her writing can be found at Let's Eat Cake, which began as a way to help people navigate their understanding of polyamory and openness from the inside out.
