🦋— a improv scene with my oc, theo
In the silence, my hand traces up the underside of her shirt, pressing gently against her lower back. Her skin is smooth as I slowly glide upwards, feeling the curvature of her side.
I know my touch is rough against it. I know she can feel it, the way the coarse surface of my fingers faintly scrape against her. Like brittle leaves against soft stone.
Even without saying it, my hands leave who I am exposed. I know my skin like I've known whole lives, different ones that have flown through my veins and are now remembered by my bones alone.
Like my soul—my hands are forged of timeless things that I can't forget.
I wonder if she can read the edges of them by feel alone. It scares me that she could—she has always been too perceptive when around me.
Yet, something even more frightening haunts me. That I might want her to unravel those clues. To see what's really behind the exterior. To know who's really here, holding her while she sleeps.
So I continue brushing along her back. Tracing shapes like a canvas. Something Iearmed from previous encounters. Ones that taught me that to touch is to be present.
She does it too whenever she gets bored. To make something out of nothing for her is a solace.
A blank, discarded piece of paper. A cold window pane with smudges. The surface of a table—it becomes her sanctuary whenever her mind wanders. When it gets just a little too quiet.
But I'm not bored here. And I found that she finds comfort in it.
So now, I do it.
And while I do, I wonder whether she'll pull me apart, surfacing things that were plunged in waters so deep that I don't even recognize it anymore.
Or maybe, I will be another canvas. Something she creates from nothing.
Either option seems like a complete collapse. An unbridled remaking. A kind of repense for an existence that's never really been my own.
I've had to do this countless times already. Not in the name of finding myself, but becoming things that others could extract from me. Like peeling off and dressing in new skin.
To wear different faces, and bear the dreams of others. To soldier battles, or call other places home.
Yet this wouldn't be anything like before. No. It would be something purer and far more fear-inducing than I could ever imagine. Like facing an angel's light.
By giving pieces of myself to her, it would be a reclaim to myself.
I might let her do anything she wanted anyway.