Flaw Salad

It was a love letter of sorts, and I didn’t know until long after he was gone. He wrote to me how we needed sex and violence to remind ourselves we exist, or we might start operating as if we didn’t. He was generous with his prose, offering delicious morsels of reverie and provocation. He bent over keyboards and typed ideas to me, long careful theories to me, and I took his words for granted. I thought how charming, these clever texts, but I never felt honored, never felt chosen, to be the audience of his bleeding, bursting heart. “Underfed feelings in overwrought language,” he wrote. “Pathetic.” I abandoned him.

He was compact and bullish, and I was too languid for him. He needed to collide and strive and fight against, against, against, but I needed flow. His bumping vexed me, and his aggression felt foreign. I beheld him as a creature, a pup, and I wondered how someone so small could contain such multitudes of feeling and rhetoric and pain. I smiled at his pain. I pet his arm and placed my hand in his and said things like, “This is nice.” His present was a clanging thundercloud of all his past and impending aches, and mine was the moment. I lay beside him, content.

He was content with me once. On a June morning, the sun and city floating through my window, he felt open and generous and free. I saw a change in his face, and for the first time he was soft. I pulled him toward me and wrapped long arms around him. It was the final affection before I turned from him and his inherent angst.

When I left him, his prose erupted. He yearned across paragraphs and railed at an injustice he scarcely understood. He lavished me with admiration and admonition, laying volumes at my feet.

Detached, I watched with envy. I longed to experience the magnitude of his emotion, to desire anything as much as he desired me. A fascinating creature, I thought. I was never the audience he deserved.