The Games We Play

But he objectified me as surely as if I were a pretty little doll plucked from a fancy store window. He’d caught a glimpse of me fairly skipping down my street and he held it in his mind for months slowly turning it over like a piece of candy that one’s tongue probes repeatedly, savoring its sweetness. Of course he’d embellished things too – I wasn't really skipping, I was walking and my black belted coat became a dress in his mind, my hips swaying with assurance. I knew all this because he would recount it numerous times; describing my walk, my look, my attire and never accurately - the picture was always airbrushed for effect. It was as if I was more vivid in his fantasy than in reality. And he was never so amorous and desiring as when I was at distance from him, I’d wake up to ardent text messages describing his impulse to kiss every inch of my body, to lay his lips in my thighs, to taste my skin.

As for my part, I relished the fantastical element of it all. For we were alike in some ways. Two overgrown children heading toward middle age – indulgent and lazy, desiring a life of little responsibility; worshiping the fleeting high of momentary pleasure and likewise deploring the stodginess of propriety. How little we both cared for rules, and the delight we took in our frivolous role playing. We lost ourselves in each other sexually - indulging in each other’s bodies hungrily, hedonistically. We were greedy the way addicts are greedy – we could never get enough, we lived in constant anxiety of the last drop of our ill-earned pleasure drying up and escaping us. I don’t know about him but I can say I hated the prosaic reality of the day – to – day and I scorned any conversation or behavior which hinted at convention rather than what I believed to be a pure expression of intellect or passion. For his part, like most men, he lived in perpetual dread of ‘labeling’ our relationship and of my probing questions when I attempted to discern his feelings for me. Certainly, we were both arrogant and intent upon indulging ourselves. Yet there was true tenderness there, I could feel it in the way he held me and touched me, it emanated out of me accidentally - in the looks I gave him, in the way I kissed him.