This little piece was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a diverse, exclusive online club consisting of writers, philosophers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, etc. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. The theme for the upcoming June issue is “Romance.” If you are a strange soul who writes or creates, learn more about joining the STSC here.
Time has been limited as of late, so this is more a springboard to something longer, deeper and more fleshed out. Consider this a fewer-than-500-word-appetizer of creeping.
If you yawn, then I will yawn. This is the empathetic reflex of romance. The yawn is the response but the observation is the romance because at its core, romance is “being attentive to”. . . .being attentive to the setting of the sun or the yawning of a lover.
How quickly the skill of attentiveness can expand its embracing reach to become the patient act of tracking. Some would call this stalking, but if you grew up following your father into the woods to the Deer Stand that you obstinately called a Tree House, then you can call yourself a tracker and leave the “stalking” language to the authorities who will never catch you anyway.
“From afar” is the G-spot of passion because it is a well-known aphorism that “whenever something increases in scale, or decreases in distance, a bit of romance is diminished.” If I introduce myself to you, then the magic will be all but gone, but from my remote place in the bushes across the street, you are a dream.
You snort in the cold mist of morning, my arrow aching for muscle.
You run between trees with the sinewy engine of spinning limbs, never seeing me.
I could continue to compare you to a deer, but I washed my bloody gloves of the carnal years ago. What others seek in the flesh, I find in my binoculars.
Our romance is better in the breath, the pneuma of rising dough. No need for our skin to mingle, for me to be covered in the dust of your beard, a shower of flour. This pane of glass that separates your kitchen from the street is sensual tension. This space is where fantasy thrives, in the in-between. Watching you knead my need into a loaf of suck and chew.
I blew glass in Buenos Aires after following a fellow art student to a retreat. Invitations are a societal constraint. You gather the glass at the end of your rod, expand it with your breath, and spin it in a mold of wet newspaper that protects your flesh from the God-water of sand on fire. Layers of paper dripping with ink shadow my hand as it cradles the growing orb of glass in my small palm. Sizzle and spit, saliva and silk. This is how it goes with blowing, the sexiest of art forms where you can never truly touch the object of your desire.
Wanting what is behind the heat, behind the door, beyond the flesh, beyond the ore; this is the romance of desire and distance that I seek. Get too close, and you’ll go the way of Johnny Tremaine where silver skin is split and crisp.
I left you a note, slipped between coupons and bills the other day, that expressed the milk of it, “I prefer the romance over the quotidian, the foraging over the grocery shopping.”
My romance for you transcends the colloquial, the Romance Language that sprung from Latin’s Vulgar vulva.
The only word that I can think of right now is “arresting”. Seriously, phrase after phrase forces one to stop and read it again.
If this is part of a longer work, please let it see the light of day soon!
Also, I had to laugh at your last sentence, because my daughter and I were discussing vulvas today. I sent her some pictures of Betty Dodson’s work, which I quite admire. She said she wouldn’t want to put it on her wall, though. 😅