Total. Vocal. Rest.

Because I am not thinking about it; 

Because I have not gone to Office Max to get some kind of lanyard or pouch to hang it on; 

Because the edible has kicked in and the room has gone creamy; 

Because I’ve been terrible about keeping it with me, always sending him scurrying to retrieve it from the counter so we can talk; 

Because my skin is bouncing and skittering like pop rocks;

Because I don’t want to talk, never want to talk, hate above all else having to talk when I’m fucking;

Because my body is awake and singing from the weed; 

Because my mind is the inside of a snowglobe (nowhere to go, my thoughts are glittering, furious)—what if I never sing again, what if I never sing again, what will I do, what will I do, what will I do, what will I do;

Because I am bright like a Christmas tree, and insistent;

Because we haven’t had sex for weeks;

For all this, when I go into the bedroom to find him, I do not bring my pen and paper.

~~

When we kissed for the first time, in the parking lot outside of a speakeasy, the world had truly spun. 

He’s futzing around with some bullshit in the bedroom. Rearranging the books on his dresser. I don’t care. I stand him up, kiss him;

But sexless marriages grow, somehow, into being,

He is a big man, 6’5”;

So when his mother died and we didn’t have sex for six months, 

Broad, and large; 

And then we had sex once,

Fat;

And then we didn’t have sex for another five months, it was remarkable, but not that remarkable.

He knows I like to be undressed, so walks me backward toward the bed, lifting my shirt up and off of me, and it puts me off balance, which I like;

And I have been cocooning into myself lately, 

My bra is off, and then I am naked;

Because I’ve hurt myself, grievously; after singing for hours and hours, day after day, pushing my voice as hard as it could go, one afternoon I yawned at the wrong angle and the pain had opened up exquisitely, high and cold.

And he is still clothed;

And now I can’t laugh, can’t speak, can’t hum, nothing,

And I love that I am naked and that he is clothed, the narrative of it. He pushes me down onto the bed, and, lying on my back, I watch him move from one corner to the other, taking out the cuff for my left wrist, buckling it;

And I need to sing. Because I’m just a wife now, because I got laid off at the wrong time and my career is over, or at least it feels like that, 

The noise of the velcro and the tugging;

And I’ve been thinking about The Little Mermaid,

The cuff for my left ankle, and him buckling it;

And I joke with people, in my mind: I’m not a trad wife, I’m just a failure,

And I will not help him restrain me;

Julie Andrews never sang again,

Because restraining me is his job, and I want him to do it;

And I’m not Julie Andrews but, God, I don’t see how I could survive that.

I wrap my fingers against the cords, pulling against them, and I can’t move my arms together, and everything is right with the world;

And the doctor said it will be months,

And now my ankles;

So now I walk around with the fear high against my sternum, because who knows, the edge case, the horror story, the one-half-of-one-percent of cases,

And I’m spread-eagled on the bed and so happy, because even though he knows I want this, the restraints stay under the bed, unused, and when we’re kissing and when we’re fucking the urge to ask him to use them sits beneath my tongue, dissolving;

And I can’t communicate. The problem is timing—I write things down with my pad and paper, but the rhythm is off, and by the time I’ve written what I have to say the conversation has moved on, so I throw the page away, 

He is scratching the insides of my thighs;

And it’s only been a few weeks but already my mind is buckling,

I set my jaw, because I can’t make noise;

And now when I’m shopping, and when I’m getting coffee, and when someone talks to me on the street, I freeze for a moment, make a calculation as to whether what I want to say is worth making them wait,

His cock is erect, and he digs his fingers into my skin, dragging them over my hip, my abdomen;

And people assume I’m deaf, 

He is placing his fingers at the edges of my labia;

And my mind is stuffed with thoughts, and howling,

He is moving them up, and down;

And once I had to run outside, hand over my mouth, to stand beneath a tree and hum three times, stomach high and tight, the noises illicit, ill-advised, dangerous, necessary: ‘hmm, hmmm, hmmmm’.

And although he has stopped scratching me my memory has gone sticky, and bouncy, and I feel the scratches again, layered over the feeling of his fingers: the strange, razor-wire sweetness, calling all my attention to it, making me sweat;

And sex, when it does happen, has been an oasis,

And for once I am not worried that he will finish just as I am starting to enjoy myself;

Because in sex there is no expectation of conversation,

A sweep against the back wall of my vagina;

Because, moving our bodies, we are back on equal footing,

And Ursula is singing “Poor Unfortunate Souls”,

And it has been so lonely. I have been so lonely,

A curling, and a straightening, and a curling, and a straightening;

And I am praying he doesn’t know how often I’m getting high, how much I need it now, all the time,

And Ursula spreads her octopus body—raucous, predatory, triumphant, she calls out “Body language, ha!”

Because the secrecy feels like a ravine I can tumble down into,

He is whipping up a tang in the deep, low center of me;

But terror has made me selfish, and the weed has made me confident, and confidence has made me demanding, and this has unlocked something inside of him,

And after this I am going to get fucked;

And it occurs to me that that has been our problem this whole time,

And after this I am going to get fucked;

That I want to be taken, 

And still after this I am going to get fucked;

While he wants only to give.

And I am settling into the black velvet spread of my mind that happens when I’m as high as I’m going to get;

And this has put us on opposite sides of a divide, though we are both saying the same thing: 

I am thinking shove, and push, push and shove;

“Here, 

And I am rising into orgasm;

“This is what I have,

And I see a cartoon version of myself, naked, wearing a viking helmet;

“It is yours, 

And I focus on the bigness of her eyes, and I am thinking of all the cartoon women in all the bad porn in the world, with their bambi faces, and I am thinking of Hello Kitty, with her red bow and her no mouth, and I feel angry;

“Please,

And the orgasm is cresting, and rolling;

“Take it.’

And I go limp. 

And sometimes, pleasure and gratitude 

And sometimes, pleasure and gratitude 

are the same thing.

are the same thing.

~~

He removes his fingers, puts on the lube, having some difficulty with the cap, as usual, and fucks me, and I am quiet, not because I am small, or young, or meek or injured or uncritical but because I am sated. 

He undoes the restraints on my legs and moves my legs over his shoulders, and I am like the tide, in its first breath of receding. 

And I am thinking of a song. 

It is breathy, and silvery. 

I watch it moving, lying on my back, like it’s a cloud. 

And he is still fucking me. And it is as if I remember I am still having sex—drifting back down into my ankles, into the weight of my head against the pillow. There is sweat caught in the pattern of his chest hair. I am pinned; I am outside of the usual contour of my body against the mattress; I am lifted by my hips, and scooted forward, back. 

I feel generous, and open. There is a grunting at the very back of his throat. I squeeze my legs, pushing him down by his shoulders when he’s at the apex of his thrusts, and this bounces him back up into me just a little harder, making a little engine, and we come, not at the same time, but together.

~~

He has rolled over, facing away, and I have laid the length of myself against him. His eyes are closed.

The rest of the bedroom begins to exist again. The lamp by his side of the bed, still on, and the ceiling, and the ceiling fan. I can feel the dampness of our bodies. 

Soon, he will want to talk to me. This charmed space, our mutual wordlessness, is ending. 

I pull the sheet over myself, but leave it off of him. He will be too hot for it. These little details of consideration have built up, after ten years. They make up so much of our day, now, a constant humming of actions taken without thought: I love you, I love you, I love you. 

I want to tell him this. 

And because I’ve been terrible about keeping it with me, always sending him scurrying to retrieve it so we can talk, I do not have my pen and paper. 

I pantomime writing little love notes to him with a quill pen.

“What’s that, love?” He says. His face is neutral, anticipatory, but blank. He is holding open a door.

Hard to say what you do, on instinct—what innate twitch your body does to make you better understood. 

He waits, not understanding.

“I’ll go get your pad,” he says, and he stands up.  And I smile, because, though I’m coming down, I’m still high, I am thinking of a show. It’s set in Victorian England, and it follows upper middle class English people. They send each other love letters, and are scribbling their letters furiously, breaking pen nibs and declaiming and falling into heaps, and the ferociousness of their desires is paired with the mildness of their language, their pushing against the restrained, Victorian idiom. And to my high mind this is funny, this is so funny, and laughter is pushing its way out my nose, and I’m gripping onto silence with the muscles in my abdomen and my jaw, and it’s difficult, and the air along my trachea and he’s turned back at me and is looking at me gently, quizzically. 

And it occurs to me what the name of the show would be, so close to whispering sweet nothings, and it’s exactly what I’m doing now, what I will be doing once I have my pen and paper, and the coincidence of it, the serendipity, and I can’t stand this loneliness anymore. And so against my disaster-brainedness, against the horror story, against the one-half-of-one-percent of cases and Julie Andrews and how much I need to sing again, I also need to be with him now. I need to share this space with him. I have a joke, and I want to tell it, and the timing of the pen and paper is wrong, has already ruined it, but the longer I wait the less I will want to tell it, and the joke will fade away, like so many of the things I’ve wanted to say to everyone, this whole time. I want to say this thing out loud. I am going to say it out loud. I make a decision. 

As to what I had been doing, I was

“Scribbling sweet nothings,” I say.