I met a man last night that I swore was a djinn. Eyes a dark brown, lightening when amused. An artist dabbling in the esoteric. His room an artist’s room, metal bowls with coffee and brushes to paint with, parchment paper with half-finished sketches spread across the old wood floor. A woman’s head, half painted, in the fireplace.
On the cushions on the floor, he wrapped himself around me and squeezed. His arms found all the hollows, wrist meeting waist, forearm tucked behind the small of my back. His mouth buried in my collarbone. Like some kind of animal, elegant, unrelenting, carnivorous. All I could do was surrender to the sensation. Feel my body unfold. Close my eyes. Allow myself to be devoured.
It took me a while to fall asleep next to him. I couldn’t relax. My foot would jolt, breath would catch, and I would wake with a start. In the morning, I felt hollowed out. I think he took something from me. He had drawn a new sketch late in the night, which was left on the table. A woman, whose gaze was direct but expressionless, confronted the viewer, hair the same shape mine had been in the shadows on the wall the night before. Guarding her, almost claiming her, was a tiger, mouth carved into a snarl. There was a calmness in their composition. And a mystery. Some distance that could not be traversed.
Everything is all wrong. I’m lost in the endlessness of this feeling. That the boat won’t right itself. That it will continue to be this hard. And so I run headlong into the kinds of experiences that I think will help wake me up, but if I’m not careful, I could just get eaten up instead.