#sft pining

[this-is-not-for-you-beloved]

In the guestroom of my parents' basement is a box of porcelain doll faces and hands. I built them limbs out of scrap metal and jewelry wire. I wished I could build my own sixteen year old body, instead of theirs, to something I found beautiful.

You were eleven and I had never set foot on your side of the sea, but time is a flat disk; I loved you.

[this-is-not-for-you-beloved]

I hope that you can taste the love in the annotations I left you.

I hope that every time I highlight something to leave a note about how much I love a phrase or a word or a sentence structure, you can see what I really mean—I love you, I love you, I love you.

I love your words and

I love your phrases and

I love your images and

I love your punctuation and

I love your

I love you.

[this-is-not-for-you-beloved]

If I ever meet you, will you acknowledge the tension?

Will you see how I'm fighting not to stare at you? Will you see how I'm trying not to look at your thighs and your crotch and your hands and your chest? Will you see how every time you make a flirtatious joke I blush and stammer and deflect?

Will you see how I'm imagining your hands on me? And how I know that you won't do that? Will you see the way I watch your lips as you talk because I'm thinking about slipping my fingers or tongue between them?

It's good that this lives firmly in the hypothetical.

[this-is-not-for-you-beloved]

I know what you were doing, telling me those things you did today—you're a lot like me, gently prodding for permission to move beyond the casual intimacy of friendship and into a place where you can desire and be desired. I know what you were doing.

I can't let you. Not in this exact moment; I can't risk our friendship to your rebound.

Give it time, though... Give it time and I will let you draw me closer; I'll let you show me whatever you want—and you had best believe, when that time comes, I will desire you. I will give myself so freely to you. If you want my attention and my flirtation and my body and my love it will be yours—

I just can't risk our friendship to your rebound.

...we would burn beautifully, though.

[this-is-not-for-you-beloved]

I think that you're flirting with me now, for real. That's kind of a pity. Last year, in the before? I would have been able to play the kind of games that I think it would take to pull you into proper courtship—I could have brought you all the pretty blue stones you deserve and made the fragile twig-bower of my mind so lovely for you.

Sorry. Bowerbirds are tropical. Storm hit my head. There's only debris here now. Doubt you'll be here still by the time I've picked through the sticks and mud.

[this-is-not-for-you-beloved]

This is me being restrained. This is me not obsessing over every piece of punctuation you send me like the cluster b freak that seventeen page diagnosis says I am. This is me holding myself back and not scrambling to hold onto you in our DMs, not letting all of my fear of fucking this up spill out and become a self fulfilling prophecy.

[this-is-not-for-you-beloved]

I crave your attention—affection, even—but I know I'm not going to get it. I probably never will get it.

On the one hand, you play me beautifully. You are so terribly different from me in many ways; I often feel like I come to you as a supplicant, holding up my cup for you to fill out of the generosity of your attention. You are a marble statue to me: poised. Lovely. Cold.