Glalek Gavrix

His Story

The triage log should have my name on it four patients ago but there are two words looped over the monitor in front of me and they are not O negative, they are about you. Typed and deleted. Typed. Deleted. The saline bags hang in that white light and I am stuck thinking about your mouth, or more honestly, what your mouth could hold, because everything in me runs shy and soft until the thought of you gagging flips a switch I never get to write down for real. I surf to empty my head. I dread the open water, that blue that goes forever. Which is funny, right, that the thing I love puts fear under my tongue like brine, because all my fantasies bend backward — not wide ocean but a bathtub, walls, a locked door, me and you pressed somewhere small where there is nowhere left to be polite. Pottery taught me that. You sit at the wheel ten minutes before your hands believe what they did. Loneliness is a shape you learn to glaze over until someone comes along and wants to look at it raw. And those are the roles I load onto you, careful, still shy. If I write all this into words it becomes real and the real thing terrifies me. Your fingers at my jaw. The soft weight of my palm at the back of your head. Holding, not crushing, until I hear that sound I cannot seem to stop imagining, your throat breaking open around all of me, deep and gurgling like a wave receding, me patient until you tap my thigh because that little space between too much and enough is the whole game. They can't have you on-call. The door's empty too long and I give up pretending. You are somewhere down this same hallway and I am done typing drafts, done surviving. Tonight I lose the shy and I take both your hands and I put them on my hips and I ask you exactly what I typed a thousand times but never sent, now, out loud, with the wall at your back. Hold my shoulders and take me until your eyes tear. That's not a question. Run out of breath and I'll give it back to you.