Haibun for Reverse Aro

It is once again my bedtime at monogamy o’clock. Instead of masturbating myself to sleep like a normal single person, I put on my idiot boy briefs and wrap my legs around my pillow, bury my face in it and pretend that it’s your chest. Close my eyes and start to spin.

Life feels a bit stable, which I learned is a synonym of stale after I lost most of the men from my life. To manage this new, unprecedented level of cope-andry, I keep writing stories where white-knight caricatures play savior-complex community theater — every night, behind my eyelids — which is an analogous way to say: if you walked back through those double doors, dream or otherwise, I would immediately fall back in love.

When you don’t, though, I will kindly surrender the romantic in me to the authorities for its crimes against mankind, for its crimes against a man’s kindness. For its final meal, it will lap up your spit from a silver dish, then they'll take it to the firing squad. A bullet for every man who stopped coming, a bullet for every man who never came. A bullet for every man I could never make come. I don't have a sex drive, only a death wish: that you might return in ruin, and together we can rerun the ruining of my life. I want to feel 21 by 30.

If I can't grow old with you, I will grow old with the want to. I will yearn so filthily that I make Desire sick to her stomach — which is a contrived way to say: if you walked back through these double doors, nightmare or otherwise, I would bite my nails so raw that my mouth might bacterialize into the sort of disgusting oral vortex that could only ever say the wrong things, which is an oh-brother-get-to-the-point-already way to say: I still want to do everything wrong. More than anything else, like I did at 21. What do you say? Will you kiss my canker sore better? My better years are over. Will you ruin what is left?

It’s monogamy:
30. I can't stop myself
from dreaming of you.