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OK. Here we go. I have absolutely no clue what I am doing here, trying to build a blog, but I’m doing it anyway. Huzzah!

I’d like to start by posting some of the poems that were inspired by my most recent online lover, R. He really got under my skin. I fell in love with him, I think. Anyway, he is married and lives in another country in another part of the world, so you may start to get a bit of perspective on your writer as these unfold.

Here’s the first one I wrote for him, on January 4:

Calm and excited
Wise and wild
You come to me with your sweetness dripping from your lips
And my lips wet with your sweetness.
My mind soars, my body at rest and furiously awake
A ray of light beams from your eyes
And pierces my soul.
Being with you is joy and sadness colliding,
Flowers blooming, trees brittle with ice and snow,
A perfect orb of orange plucked from a tree
Feeding it to you, you lovingly bite my fingers and taste my blood.
Coursing through my veins, squeezing each beat out of my aching heart
You thrill and still me, dear one.

As you may surmise, this is when we had already started getting into daily conversations where we both opened up and drank up each other’s souls. He is internal, introspective, and calm, with a wild animal buried deep inside that yearns to come out, which is why he found himself in the chat rooms. I think that with me he felt like he could relax, play, get curious. And me? I felt safe, comforted, eased – yet also charged, electrified, activated, every time I chatted with him. The sex chats evolved into romantic, urgent proclamations of how much we loved each other. Ah, sweet dear man. I still love him, but my boundaries have been fortified. I simply couldn’t stay engaged in that way with someone who would never, ever be mine.

Here’s another one, from January 11:

I’ll be close
But not close enough.
Close enough means crawling inside your skin,
Sharing your heart,
Mingling rivers of blood.
My scent is your scent
When you itch, I scratch,
Licking your fingers as we eat,
As they explore
Your multitudes and mine.
My head forever fused with your shoulder,
Lips open and waiting
To share words, gentle kisses,
Mouthfuls of your being.

I felt inspired, alive, wanted. I raced home to be there in time to get his messages. These poems were just coming tumbling out of me when I spoke to him.

Dated January 15:

The door is ajar…but just a crack.
The jar has a crack…
Leaking its sweet contents,
Apricot jam, crafted from the trees in my aunt’s backyard,
Oozing amber that makes my fingers sticky and yearning to be licked clean.
The amber is sticky…
Capturing the tiny creature, insect all gangly legs and hollow iridescent eyes, in eternity.
Why do their delicate, hairlike appendages last forever, stuck in time and place,
When time and place feel so tenuous to me?
A gust of wind could blow it all away.

This really feels like I was reflecting on how the liminal space I’ve been in these past few months as I’ve been separated from my husband was making me feel: untethered, afloat, and yet weighted down.

January 16 – I still felt really connected to R here, obviously, strong and united:

And now, you’ll see on February 2, that things were unraveling for me. Being intimate with him was feeling confusing. I KNEW it was real – the illusion was still so well woven that it was just so painful when I experienced the loosening.

Why must you be tethered
To a life that holds you with unraveling strings?
Ropes must be tightly wound to withstand the pushes and pulls, the lifting, holding, connecting,
And I see yours fraying, wearing thin, like the silver strands of your hair and mine.
Or, perhaps the ropes connecting you are more robust than I wish them to be.
I want to lasso you with mine,
My vocal cords, the sinews of my muscles, my dense and tightly woven curls,
But yours are tied more tightly than I wish to make a clean breast.
Your mouth on my breast is only connected through the wires of my whimsy,
The icicles of my imagination.
When they melt, will they nourish a budding tree, or simply evaporate?

Finally, February 9th – 10th, after other attempts of staying away for stretches of time, then coming back to him over and over again, I steeled myself.

Is it enough
To be loved through the ether,
Stirred only by written words on backlit glass?
Letters, combined into words, organized into sentiments,
Can pierce the heart and nourish the soul,
But can they compare to inhaling the earthy scent of my beloved, the coarseness of his beard scratching my face, the tenderness in his fingers as he caresses?
I’ll never know, because all of those sensations are just imagined, never actually felt.
Are his hands soft, or is his skin calloused and work-worn?
Are his fingers stained with the dust of fine-pointed pencils?
What is the weight of him against my body as we become one?
Do we twist and bend like tree boughs, or flow together like melting streams?
Does his hair fold through my fingers like wispy feathers or like fistfuls of silver wires?
There are no feet to step on, arms to be caught in, no nose to kiss, no sounds to vibrate my delicate drums.
It’s all a haunting, yearning melody,
A quickening heartbeat rhythm…
A well-played groove in a mental record
With a skipping needle signaling the end, or another beginning.

On the 10th, a stream of consciousness ramble of reality…not so much a poem as a rant…

I miss what I never had.
I knew it all along and I still got swept up in it.
I kept believing when he said he was learning from me…
And he did learn.
He learned that what he has is enough…that a glimmer of something else can remain a glimmer and still illuminate a dark place.
The glimmer was enough for him.
The sparkle, the shiny object catching his eye,
Moments of brightness, a gift to unwrap without examining inside the box.
I never wanted to be a glimmer…
I wanted to be a radiant beam, cutting through the darkness, changing it into a new day.
He didn’t want a new day.
He wanted a break from the sameness.
Well, now it’s back to the same for him, and yet I feel changed.
Duped? Tricked? No.
But heavy, weighted down, shackled to the fantasy that I created.
I felt fine all day. Now I am back in the dark.

When we meet again, I will give you, dear reader: context.