When a Certain Violence Blooms

It's been one year. Something has grown.

I hold the pink beneath my tongue. Feel the chalk-dryness lubricate in my saliva, softening the round shape until I roll it between my teeth. My pulse is heavy at the back of my throat while I grind the pink down into a paste and then swallow it. It clings to my molars before I rub the clumps free, wanting to absorb as much of it as possible. I contemplate taking another as I lay back against my bed's cool, glossy surface, yet quickly decide against it, as I already feel the fuzziness of its effects, it’s lovely... Sinking into the slippery embrace of fizzling unconsciousness threatening to coat my current thoughts. Love. To love—but you don’t, you don’t love him

It's here, I ask, don't I? 

The warmth melting through me turns my joints to butter and swirls my vision in brimming blues as light as the sky, pinks as alluring as a growing blush, matching the glow in my cheeks, which soon becomes a sweltering rash. I rub the puffiness from my face with a flat palm and puff the air from my lips, turning my face to the pillow, imagining the soft curve as his pectoral, going to twist the cover between my fingertips as if it were his shirt. Don't I? 

There's a growing coldness in my stomach cavity, heavy and dark, the pit of a seed, spiked and mean, nestling deeper in the delicate tissue and growing its branches through my veins. Replacing my blood with its fluid, which I imagine to be black and stringy, almost brown like old blood, purple and tender like rot. This seed was there before, implanted in me long before his fingers ever sunk into it, but then it spread open for him. Sprouted, and now it was growing. I felt it the first time, the first plunge, the impact, the recoiled spasm of my muscle around it, the twisting, the struggle, the acceptance, the way it wanted him deeper. I could feel it growing fat in me, a leech suckling at him and growing hungrier, greedier the longer he fed it. 

The ache in me was growing, yet no longer the fear that often accompanied the thought of it. The swirling perfume of pastel blink sweltered like a blister, filling with blood, with a violence tender, delicate, and needy as a fresh bruise, then popped. Spraying this carmine red everywhere, spilling over me and dripping down my face, running down my body, until the red smeared over my skin, and I scooped coagulating cherry clot from my heavy lashes, the sheets coiling around my legs like snakes before submerging me in the red. Don't I? 

My dreams are all of him, the way a sacrificial lamb would dream of the knife, the tightening of the rope, the way prey fantasizes of the heavy clamping of its predator's teeth down to the bone, how it would feel to be trapped in such a desperate, demanding embrace.

How could I wish to eat him, desperately ache to devour him, and simultaneously devote myself to the preparation of being consumed by him and not love him? To be loved is to be consumed, isn't it? To be tasted, relished, savored, to be hungered for? To enjoy the other teeth and tongue on a silver platter, digging your hands in and spreading them wide, feeling them spill over around you, swallowing you whole as you tear into them and cover yourself in their filth? My gums throb at the tease of such indulgence. So, in my hunger for him, in my desire to be hungered for by him, and in my devotion to his tongue, his smell, his gaze, in luring those cravings out, don't I practice love, love through these senses, the way a lamb must love its wolf, the way the butcher has a favorite knife? A favorite cut? Don't I love in the way a dog loves its owner? I know the commands: sit, heel, stay, wait, come; I obey his presence with the same loyalty and need as one, also. I could pick him out in a crowd by scent alone.  

I feel the chilled breeze of early autumn kiss my bare skin from the open window just before the warm, almost cozy scent of honey and orange comes through the earthy crispness of decaying foliage. In this haze, the same way that an untouched doe might lay amongst the dew of the morning and enjoy its gentleness, I reach my foot back, imagining taunting the jaws of a rusted metal trap with my toes amongst the damp grass until his sinewy, long fingers clutch my ankle, my foot becoming swallowed by the trap as skin slices open and bone splinters beneath the pressure. As soon as the pain erupts, seizing my entire body with a throbbing insistence, it melts away, and I look down to see that each place he's touched me with this brutality now blooms. Flowers and their stems tangling together, I can see the sticky webbing of that seed in me feeding it. Still, bright colors come from this darkness in an array of bouquets much more beautiful than I could have imagined in any other state of mind, soon covering my entire body as his body buries me. I sink into the dark soil, into him, my own grave, and plant the flowers for whatever grief will follow in preparation so whoever might pluck them will know of my awareness of this passion. His hand clamps down again, pulling me closer, and the sound is like a shovel slashing through rock. 

Bones soften and turn to powder, the same that dissolved under my tongue, and I become something new through him. That's love. Isn't it? 

It begins with a knife. I hold it to myself, my hands covering his, urging him to push deeper and cut into me. Damage me. Change me, mutilate me, my skin peeling open like lips to him, desperate for a kiss. Like metal and glass rippling back at the force of impact upon a crash, twisting into one another, wires tangling, metal molding, steel curving, leather tearing, foam smushing, rubber burning, so much cutting and slicing and scraping, until the knife is fully sheathed, the engines are ignited, this passion flickers and smokes, it bleeds and gushes. I remove my stained hands and clutch at him, my body responding to the intrusion with a guttural moan, my organs widening further with each tug. And then his teeth are in me.

The crunch of cartilage follows squealing gulps. Another tug and something deeper slips free. He's buried in the flowers, emerging with dust and petals in his chocolate-brown hair, sticking to the blood and glossy white covering his mouth and cheeks. Images pass through one another, indistinguishable and indiscernible from one another, a blinding flash of one liquefying into another until I recollect which was last. I can see glimmers of light passing through the darkness, poking in from my grave, crumbling from the loose rock, the wounds in me having grown teeth. And just as he enveloped me in his embrace, all-consuming, sinking into me, I possessed him little by little until, like steel and rubber and leather, we twisted, inverting in on this love, becoming not one but new, mangled and mutilated by one another, so grotesque that no one else would have us. 

I do love. I do, but I love with an appetite that knows no difference between creation and destruction. A love that has known my own destruction from the beginning, one that flowers open like a wound and grows teeth fat with the venom of infection, clamping down around him so he feels the severity of this love, one that proves my devotion through my own mutilation. It’s not my fault, nor my choice that it’s him I love, but I doubt you would understand love, even if it bit you because you've never known the true depravity. I, however, welcomed the vicious caress on my knees with a relieved, salted smile, and I continue to welcome it with each day it chooses me. I welcome it with blood on my mouth, a hand around my throat, black and blue kisses, and caught glances. I welcome it tender and open, shaking and small, at his feet for each day he wants me. Even those he doesn’t.

And when I wake the following day, mouth cottony, lids crusted, hair tangled and limbs sluggish, joints stiff from the heaviness of sleep, I slowly look down at my body to see the markings of love, a stolen love, secret, and therefore pure. His love. As another breeze flutters the curtains like butterfly wings away from the window, I swallow against a dry throat, still tasting the hint of blood, and wonder if he can still taste me, too, or will still find perhaps a single petal left caught in his hair the next time he pets the curls.