sex, and notebooks

[helenic]

I’m in Iain’s room, sitting crosslegged in his armchair with the keyboard in my lap, desperately trying to finish this essay while he's at lectures. It’s already half a day late and I haven’t got past 1, 227 words yet. Every essay here is a crisis. We had to change the sheets on the bed last night and couldn’t find a spare, so the mattress is wrapped in a blue and black cannabis-print throw. I like it; all sheets should have narcotic repeating patterns in tie-dye. The bed is more eye-catching and attractive, and it's kind of illicit.

I don’t want to write about sex in here because people read it who have met him, and those are mental pictures I don’t want in their heads. If I was writing alone, and all my friends online were people I’d never met, I would; you can indulge yourself a lot more when real life and on screen are kept entirely separate. Unfortunately, I can’t be that extravagant. So I tell it to my notebooks instead, fill pages with it in the early hours of the morning, finally get down in words how beautiful it all is, how unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I don’t go in for collage and sketching and sticking in my notebooks; it’s just words, spilling over naked pages, as Freudian as you please. Notebooks have a sexuality all of their own, you know. Virginal and untouched at first, then gradually accepting the imprint you make on them; at times resisting you, and taunting you with your inability to fill them; then extending across whole tracts of time until, sorrowfully, you end it, and they sit on shelves holding onto parts of you no-one else will ever see. Telling the story of your endless battle between head and heart. As soon as you start thinking about it you can extend the metaphors forever – except that notebooks always have to end, and I still cling in spite of everything to the thought that, somehow, there exists a form of love that’s eternal.

Of course I try not to think about that these days. I've always looked ahead too much, so much sometimes the present gets neglected. But this I can't second-guess; I only know I prefer spending time with him to anything else, that this is someone I simply want to be with. In a way it's so easy it sometimes doesn't quite seem real. But then I look at him, and he's so beautiful I forget everything else and just watch him, awed, unable to believe he's really mine. I need to let myself just enjoy it, and for once in my life put aside my usual nervous habits of analysis and speculation. I don't think I could do it if he didn't blow my mind every time he walks into a room - but I suppose if he didn't, I wouldn't need to try.