Confessional with Cassye
Confessional with Cassye
There was some confusion about how to pay for my dinner, our drinks, but soon
all was settled and we had our beers and my burrito, seated towards the entrance amid the college crowd.
It wasn’t school, actually – merely busy, a lot of work. But then began the
real reasons why the sickness and the stress: one Arthur, a known when last I saw her, a source of great allure, had become the cause of her recurring ressentiment,
turning, nearly, back upon herself, aided by the tools of years before.
It was a circuitous sentence that led her to admit she’d been a cutter, and I
pointed to the skin below my rolled up sleeves, revealing a similar experience from a similar cause. She saw my
index fingers but not the scars.
“Don’t,” I say feebly, nearly begging, keeping in check my own
dark draw to the wound before the blood, looking at the lips
(a smile? a frown?) slowly opening before the
inevitable tongue starts flapping about, tracing its contemplative path down the forearm,
knowing how hard it is to know better when the choice is there and
you want to make a mistake.
We conclude, as independently of one another we have before, that she shouldn’t have to feel what he’s making her feel, but
fuck,
there’s physical attraction, can all this really be reduced to that? I mean every time I’m near him, every time -
So interesting and open it remains, as the
source of their relation visits soon, propelling them both into close proximity, inviting the
possibility of so many things (sharing a bad anew, creative mutilations, dialogues with a streaky mirror),
but, as it is, my burrito is gone
and our beers as well,
so we choose our next adventure, the bar to which
we were initially supposed to go
(where twice she was asked if her name was her name),
before we ended up back at her place, and
before the closed interstate placed me back on Pine Street,
where after hydrating and seeing new photos of her quartet, with quick arms around each other,
we had originally bid farewell.
