A gnarly knot of need that lives in my bones

A gnarly knot of need that lives in my bones or Obsession or How I wrote you then

Part I:

A knot. 

The knot in my throat is stitched together with yarn made of you, but I’ve never learned how to sew. My cells are made up of the parts of you & me that made us an “us”. I’ve been a co-owner of my own organs, stomach, and bones for all this time. But I am a fool, because I’ve known from the start, that just like my body, you and I were never built to last.

There was a time when I told you, “Your soul is my soul,” and I actually meant it.

Yikes.

I’ve never been good at untying knots. I’ll try and try, play and play with the fabric until it frays. Like with most things, eventually, I’ll give up, deciding, I’ll just live this way instead.

So I enter a waiting game. In 7 years, my cells will be reborn. It’ll be as though you never touched me. Never lived inside of me. I’ll just be me.

Me in the absence of you.

Part II:

The need. 

      The need is a want, a yearn, a desire. A magnetic pull to a refrigerator made of steel. I search and search to put my black strip of energy against a wall where I belong. Is need a desperation? Or does it just feel like one? To be “desperate” is so pathetic, unless it’s to gasp for air in the middle of a shark infested sea. I am a minnow, and I am fucked.

      I knead the knot like sourdough bread, my knuckles pressing into the dough. Fuck it, how much deeper can I get? Is it so bad to need? Sometimes it feels like strength. Strength is admirable no matter what kind it is – people love to be strong even if it means they kill with the same knuckles full of need/knead.

I’m more afraid for you if I untie, unravel, undo the knot, than I am for me. The truths I might say.

Like I loved you most when I didn’t know you at all.

or

That I should have left before I needed you.

Part III:

My bones.

      Isn’t it wild how tiny the bones are in your ankles and toes that carry you around all day? How the smallest makings of construction can take such a beating? If I got an x-ray, I wonder if they’d even be able to see through my flesh. If my bones would appear transparent, or if I’d be an empty vessel full of longing, full of scraps. Remnants and ashes of all that once was.

      I don’t know how many bones I have, but I know I’ve been missing one from you. (LOL sex joke). My body is nothing more than a complex machine that instead of nurturing, I lug around as if I am dead already, a bag of bones, absent of life if not attached to you.

      Sometimes the only proof that I am still here living is my active attempt to erase the contours of my skeletal structure. The hold you keep deep within me lessens and expands without warning like the breath within a baby’s belly, before they learn to be self-conscious, to hold their muscles in all day.

      I run, sprint, lift, spin, relying on the cartilage within my bones to protect me. To absorb the shock, provide a cushion. A thankless, invisible, hidden job. I store the stress next to the loneliness in my body, deep within my bones. I’m getting away with it now, but the cartilage will gradually deteriorate over time, wearing, giving me away. Revealing my bones, my pain, like an expose.

Irreparable, I’ll learn to live with the consequence of my own doing until there is nothing left of my bones. Nothing left of the knot, nothing left for me to need.

      To be needless is my collateral damage.

      It will be your favorite version of me.