Almost As One

Another entry for the Steal From Yourself, using an old old poem, from four years ago. 

Bodies Woven Together

You can take a look at it here

Then read on for a story I wrote from it...

...

We had been two wandering stars, lost in the twilight of lonely lives deprived of passion. Passion and lust, a love that commandeers all and everything.

Then, as chance and fate and by the will of a higher power than our hungry loins, we met. It was not just love at first sight, more lust by the end of the first night as we began conversing at the bar. My hands ached to slip into hers, to pull her to me, but I waited and tempered the raging storm inside me.

At the little Italian eatery along the promenade overlooking the troubled sea, it was her who bridged the gap and slid her hand under mine, offered it to hold and caress. As my fingers did follow the lines of her palm and trace new pathways to her wrist, my thumbnail left little embedded pathways on her skin. There was an eruption from both our hearts as we exchanged our hopes, our dreams, our joy and our sadness.

Her tears flowed as we spoke of death and the emptiness it leaves us with, the spirit-sapping strength and vigour of grief without hope.

In that moment, silently, as we breached the table separating us and my warm, firm lips met her soft pillows, we continued our conversation, our putting the world to rights without words, but actions. Of tongues and lips, mouths and saliva. I felt her hand reach for me under the table as I held her left hand above with my right, and my left hand reached underneath to slide across her knees.

As we shared dessert and I tasted the tart raspberry and vanilla from her mouth, we bridged the aching void between us by candlelight atop my bedspread and I did divine the making of her, and the breaking of her and she of me.

At rest, as fate had directed us, I felt her lay down against me, her body impaled on mine, as our heartbeats drummed out in time and our breathing hitched and dropped perfectly in sync. I realised on that dark summery night that this was something more, something special.

Soon, one night written for our stars, where we perfectly aligned, became days and nights, nights and days of losing ourselves in one another's thoughts, thighs and beings.

Days and nights, nights and days became weeks and soon months. Despite our best efforts to drain one another, our bodies still hungered, as did our minds, for one another.

When our daily lives interfered and conspired against our unity, her work deeper in the city as an assistant to an accountant and mine as an artist of sorts, we felt the pain of separation. The longing held mastery over us. When she was not at work, hard in labour for another, she had become my sole muse.

My Ophelia, my Aphrodite. I carved in stone her coaxing curves, I painted in vain her eyes and soft lines that drew me in every time. That smile that arched, her chest that rose and rested, when concentration had ignored the work at hand, of my hands.

In all portraits and works bearing her likeness, a small and painfully inadequate rendering of her sensuality and fiery femininity, there was something missing.

Incomplete busts and unfinished paintings and sketches.

By candlelight on the fifth, a mere ten months since our tryst began in much haste, I wrote upon my parchment an ode of sensual adoration for the truest of loves I ever did know.

As I lay her naked on the ottoman, legs akimbo, with want in her eyes and need within, I did, with a shy but noble heart, share my penned prose to try and create tangible the inconceivable power her very being operates over me.

Bodies woven together

Bound tightly forever

Where one ends

The other begins

Interconnecting

*

The air is thick and our scents combine like some putrid alchemist's experiment gone wrong. The hazy wafts of vaginal fluids and semen blend with the sweat, the sprinkles of blood splatter and the disrobed flesh that offers itself to the night and the parasites that would dig deep and feast as we had done with lust and lost ourselves. Lost sense of selves.

Writhing and slithering

Fervently quivering

Muted noises

Breathing voices

Harmonising

*

By night, we quickened our hearts, full with the youthful vigour of lust's fire. Through the dark of this city, as most truly indifferent to true love's allure sleep, we stepped quickly across the broken bottles and emptied needles to the black and ominous doorway of our desires' future.

Slowly tightening our grip

Not letting it slip

Away from us

Away from them

Synergising

*

I brought the gold I had kept aside for marriage, for what good would marriage or good be if I had not met my one most dearest? I paid the man, with thick eyebrows and a telling face. Butchers and surgeons alike dance with death and understand the inner workings of the pale blandness of our corporeal bodies. We thought nothing of his eagerness for debauchery, for the ritual, the theatre he sought with his tools and darkened mind. We longed in desperation to feel complete, and damn the consequences.

The sweat, the heat

The taste, so sweet

Wanting more

Needing more

Mesmerising

Intoxicating

Uncontrollably arousing

I took her to bed as he had instructed and, as I pushed deep inside her wanton body, he pushed his poisons that fought to still us and help us sleep, pressed together, almost as one.

Almost.

As we slept in the dim light of the surgeon's den, I dreamed of her warmth, her waters flowing like a river, coating me and caressing my muscles of the heaviest of burdens, the weights of a world primed for war. When we two only wanted to love one another. I nightmare-visioned the ritual failing and our bonding unsuccessful, leaving us inconsolable.

Sharp pains of pleasure rippled through my body to hers as her heartbeat, her pulse, awoke me from slumber. Her eyes, those dark and deep looks of darkened green, were a welcome relief. I lay there, on her, between her legs, for minutes until she woke, feeling her shifting body arousing in me that need once more.

Then came the flashes of lightning pain down my left side as I shuffled gently atop her, then the smell of blood and ammonia.

Her light, gently lulling, slumberous moans transformed to screams as I tried to steady myself and stroked her brow.

The stitches were fresh and our flesh was red with more than just passion. With no way of truly moving as two, I slid my right hand under her arm and we tried to move as one off the surgical block.

Sutures had been woven from hip to hip along our bodies, from the left side of mine to the right of hers. As I slid free from her sensual prison, I stood gently on my feet as she moved off the block to join our shameful display, a beautiful homage to our lust and our love. I searched and found in the corner a white robe, and we took our first tentative steps as one. Carefully travelling across the surgeon's den.

I feared the sutures might fail, but they felt strong and robust, made to the highest specification, I recall the surgeon explaining.

It was painful. Each step we made brought new agony, noises that should have given us cause to worry. But alas, we were still lost in our lust as we each took an end of the robe and covered our bodies. The warmth of her breath on my chest soothed me as the shifting weight of our bodies, as we walked through the doorway into the night, bit at us.

Perhaps out of sheer steely determination, obnoxious obstinance or a marriage of both, we persisted on our twilight journey back home. Despite, or more aptly, in spite of, being inspired by the pain taking us hostage, my one truest love gave in to giggles and I could feel her hand searching to hold me, to remind herself of what the great lengths and sacrifices we had gone to were for.

It was almost dusk by the time we had crept inside our humble abode, the stench of our lust on our bed barely diluting the deathly taste in the air of the abomination we had become.

For her need had grown as we trekked across the city. She beckoned me towards the ottoman again and requested I take her and claim her in celebration of our union proper.

We ignored the flaying of flesh from our conjoined torsos as we writhed in agonised ecstasy, driven by carnal powers of old, the blood dripping and pooling beneath our bodies as the sutures remained intact, becoming like lubricant for our bodies. Fever ripped through our bodies as our wounds lay open to the invisible parasites that lay in wait across the ruined skin.

Inflammation was slow but steady in its capture. But still we played it off as a meaningless symptom of love's clawing nature.

As the fluids of our shared wounds seeped and exchanged as we wrestled, bodies woven together, entwined, we were too far gone. Too deep in the  thick in lust's heady, hazy fog as we held onto one another, tears and joy, lips colliding desperately to fight off the pain and torture we were enduring. No sacrifice was too much, as we had sealed our fates before we had no choice but to embrace and remain so, as the cruel irony of life and death, of passion and lust, love and the art of warding off loneliness was too much for our feeble bodies of flesh, of blood and bone, as Death reaped another victim in her and I wept as she lay lifeless beneath before the Reaper took me.

*

Thanks for reading!