In Reminiscence, I Don’t Remember

Meanwhile, I sit in a busy coffee shop on the Mexicali border. Outside, locals busy themselves as they dart to and fro past the dusty glass front of the cafe. The wafting aroma of seared taco meat and wilting vegetables are mixed with the smells of belching car exhausts. The chatter of a million Mexicans are lost in the baneful tune crackling out of the broken rockola.

I set pen to paper and reminisce about when I was nineteen years old...

Hair gathers on the bedroom floor and clumps together in the shape of a Ducati. I suddenly recall those motorcycle evenings with him. My hair would always be in midnight disarray, playing catch in the wind for firefly light. The moon doesn’t reflect as marvelously on the marina at any other hour. Ah and cigarette smoke. I used to convince myself I was quitting, but I loved the taste it leaves in his mouth. The burnt iron that tided with every breath. Those nights were mine. When we left the bed and decided to honor the night for a while. Honor it through other things besides fucking and quivering at the entrails of ecstasy. Those nights, as an unspoken covenant, were exclusively for me: belonged, owned, enslaved. Mine alone.

With the bike parked, he would prop me up and settle in his usual place between my legs and stand still. Soft hair feather-slipping between my fingers. His stubble against my cheek, my lips, my naked adoration. He’d have a hard-on of course, but during those hours I was the goddess of the moon, and he would have to strain in his jeans all night long if I decided he should. I relished the part where I take off his shirt and run my hands across the expanse of his torso. And that part where he moaned under little pinches, noises and my tender nibbling.

My nightcap was a final embrace. I would hold him and rest my head on his chest and he would indulge this necessity. In reminiscence, I don’t remember what made me love him so or what makes me love him still. It fell into place. Like the ground, I was simply there. Like the sky, he simply covered me. There were, of course, other things more important than my midnight evenings bathed in moonlight. But they are drowned. Own and be owned, the tender mourning.