in Summer of the Whore
She'd sworn she would never do it. But still, she could feel the wanting inside her, an aching void that felt dress-shaped when she was in her apartment but which had nothing to do with the damn dress, not really, and she knew that. The wanting was for the way she felt on their wedding day. It was for the world they'd been building together, for all of the things that would never happen now or if they did happen would be different than she'd thought they'd be. And inside her head she knew that different was not the same as bad but inside the rest of her the wanting sometimes grew so huge, so intense, that she had to stop wanting and have something. Anything: a martini, a matinee, an eggroll. But none of it—none of it—was more than a jagged, broken pebble in the ocean of her wanting.
She looked harder. She reached for more. Sometimes more came wearing a faded t-shirt and vintage sneakers. Sometimes more had broad shoulders and guitar-calloused fingers and sometimes it whispered obscene suggestions in her ear and she said yes, yes because when your insides were an empty void, when you were hollow and filled only with wanting, what was left? Were you real? Were you alive? Was it wrong to want to feel skin under your hands, breath against your cheek, a heartbeat against yours? Someday she knew she would land on dry ground but now she was drowning, and she did not begrudge herself a moment's rest on a piece of driftwood. Even if it was splintered, rotten, waterlogged—even if it was sinking—
Kelly Braffet :: www.kellybraffet.com