you're too young & eager to love

Emere + Maine snippet.
Written under the effects of vodka. Don't hold this against me in the morning.


She calls you in the middle of the night, and her voice is slurred. Standard words become incoherent, but you answer anyway. Listen to way she falters and stumbles as she talks about love and the inconsistencies within her life. You want to hold her, and you want to stroke away the darkness of her hair along with the vividness of her nightmares. How she stands so tall, walks so straight, but consistently battles with being afraid of her shadow.

There is a comfort in the alcohol. In the liquor she installs into herself. As though there, in that liquid delusion, she can understand herself. Her need to be recognized, to be acknowledged. You realize how readily she gives herself, how there is nothing removed from her bones and skin – the flesh she supplies so willingly. A skeleton of desires.

You want to tell her that she is beautiful. That she is ethereal. A creature beyond these means. She smokes her cigarettes and replies in sardonic after tones, men brushing her shoulders, that intimate space of her lower back.

“Emere,” You say, and she does not comprehend her own name. “You are wasting yourself.”

Oh, but there is so very little to waste. The taste of your tongue in her mouth. The feel of expensive silk. The tactile wonderment of dusky drunk illusion. How easy it is to drive the sexes crazy, delusional with craving. She only ever gives what she can afford to lose. Intimacy denies her actuality, and it’s impossible to invade her individuality by the capture of her skin.

You are snow and lobster. The red peeling flesh that she wants to claim, devour. An exchange of differences. And in the morning you drink your coffee black, contemplating the shape of her eyes and the sorrow captured by her mouth.