You Can Go Crazy With Thoughts And Supposes
In what may quickly become a more familiar scene now, I am driving and Emily Gilmore is in the passenger seat. We’ve just left one of a multitude of home craft shows that populate nearly every weekend in
She’s peppering me with questions about The Outlaw. The previous evening I had chosen him over her, choosing Indian food and a naked Friday soak in the hot tub instead of a cultural outing to a Mark Twain play production. I know she’s more than curious about this new paramour.
If she wasn’t now living here, just down the road, so close that we can now spend time far more frequently together, this interrogation wouldn’t even be happening, of course. She does, it is, and so I try to breathe and answer her questions without compromising The Outlaw’s integrity nor my own.
He was married. He is no longer. He was Mormon. He is no longer. He wrangles the crazy from midnight until dawn.
“Are you going to be his next project?” she asks in her completely serious way.
I laugh loudly, share that all my friends, bar none, have asked the exact same question and then I quickly change the subject to bread pans. I just can’t talk this crazy talk anymore.
There Are Shapes, There Are Rhythms, There Are Signs That We Can Learn
My friends, my real
I’ve told them nothing, really, about him. Other than that he exists. Their immediate response was, “But is he Nakedjen worthy?” and that made me smile inside as well as out. Nakedjen worthy, indeed.
They’re asking where he is, is he coming and, as I’m uncertain, since this relationship is still so not very certain at all, I am explaining how he said he would be coming, but you know, I don’t know if he actually will when, as if completely on cue, the Outlaw strolls through the door.
I hug him, inhale him, the familiarity of his lips brushing mine, the whispered hello making me breathe more easily. He keeps his promises. Of that much, I am certain.
I worry, just a bit, about the unwrapping of this present. Of sharing him with my world. If the pulling off the paper might unravel all the strings to a point where we can no longer just hide beneath the covers, just be us two.
The conversation never falters, the bonds of friendship buoy all of us along, the laughter is quick and easy and often and plentiful. I already knew it. He is Nakedjen worthy.
Your Hands Are Warm and My Body Is Wide
There’s something truly decadent about being in bed at 2:00 p.m. on a Monday afternoon when you’re neither sick nor tired, but instead just wrapped and entangled naked, uncertain which body part is yours and which is his.
This is a small snapshot of my current life. I am astounded that it is really mine.
