So we were sober.  And I was swimming away from you in the Indian Ocean, because you’d asked me to meet your soft lips without shouting into the end of a bottle first.  And we raced  around those tides, until you caught up to my hand like a shark and held it, asking me to just tread water with you. Breathe, motherfucker. Kick, but kick in place. Not away from me. I think you thought it was all a game until you saw the streams of the sunset didn’t settle into the darkness of my eyes.  They were just pools of the bottom of the ocean, that place no light returns from.

And then, I could see it, you were just like ‘what the everliving fuck?’. Seconds ago I was shaking off parts of my soul on the sandy beaches. I was letting the sand shave off parts of my shuttered heart as we rolled amongst it.  It had all the trappings of lust. There on that secluded beach,

You’re just a hideaway, you’re just a feeling
You let my heart escape beyond the meaning
Not even I can find a way to stop the storm
Oh, baby, it’s out of my control, what’s going on?

That was the crisis, the red alert. I don’t know when it became pattern. When it became routine. When it became necessary. If my brain wasn’t coasting on a chemical to the little space where my head would lie in the crux of your armpit, intimately–I didn’t know how to be there. I didn’t want to be there. But I don’t remember the last time I dueled in the sheets any other way.

Still, you held me there, in place. You no longer saw these little gasps as anticipation to kiss. They were bubbles of panic pouncing from my lungs. Lungs that were already starting to drown. So you held me close to you, turning me into a jellyfish. Weak.  Paralyzed, you swam for my legs, and you thought you could tell,

I’m holding it back,
Just wanna shout out,
“Give me more.”

Let me be a hideaway, here in the sea of your emotions.  And I said, let me drop, down down down.  It’s natural for me not to breathe. Break me free from the net you’ve cast.

You can start over, you can run free
You can find other fish in the sea

And I kicked your shin. I shot myself forward, I started to get sea legs. I was going to make it, away from you. I wasn’t ready for this. Let me down a few shots, give me an eight ball so I could hold the eight ball up against a mirror and our fortune would read ‘definitely happening tonight’.  But the blood was already in the water, and I was always shitty at swimming, so you caught up and your kisses went for the jugular.

It’s like we can’t stop, we’re enemies
But [we’ll] get along when I’m inside you

No. Fuck yes. Fuck, I don’t know. I like that your mouth has got my heart pumping again. I don’t even mind that all my lifeblood is spilling out into the sea, mixing with all those feelings.  Almost made me forget I was present as I stared at the horizon, long enough for you to drag me to shore by the power of your charisma and the shark jaw you’d planted in my heart.

Baby, I’m preying on you tonight
Hunt you down eat you alive
Maybe you think that you can hide
I can smell your scent for miles
Just like animals, animals

Was this romance? Lying back here–how do they say it–and thinking of Jakarta? The trappings of lust had just become a trap.  I didn’t have any other way to interpret it. I was being forced to interpret it for the first time in years. But ‘love’ just spoke tongues in my ears, and I didn’t share in its spiritual power. Drugs, my shield all these years; but love is the real drug, and it’s killing me.

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