The Right Person Yet

You sit at the table in defeated silence, as your thoughts simmer with rage after what some relative said. Fools, presuming they know You just haven’t found the right person, yet.

To you it is as funny as it is frustrating, knowing that such person already came, and in the end nothing has changed. But what do they know? Refrain a laugh of disdain, save the breath for a speech that is not in vain.

You wish they could see it. You wish they could walk the places you’ve been and feel the frustration on the long journey to accept yourself. A never-ending journey, a never-ending frustration. You wish they knew what it means to cast your eyes upon a person and feel. Too much, and yet not enough. Loving them completely, and yet in an incomplete way, because you’re missing that piece society added to the puzzle. Your sexuality succeeding where not even your illness could, crippling like the most disabling of disabilities.

You’ve always felt like the odd one out, never fast enough at catching the innuendos, convinced your friends’ outbursts were mere exaggerations. You’ve felt defective, trying to stand their titters to your guilelessness, heterosexual without the sexual. You’ve been craving intimacy for a long time but never sex, blaming naivety, blaming yourself when they told you that the package of intimacy always comes wrapped in sex.

Yours, apparently, came unwrapped.

As years went by and questions about kisses, sex, and relationships multiplied, you started learning to leave the answers open. You ceased trying to convince them, let them think what they want. And underneath it all, you began to fear that not even you knew what you were nor what you wished for. At times their queries became yours, and you looked for answers where there were none.

Maybe it’s because you’ve learned too early that the flesh deteriorates, that you have only felt attraction for the soul.

Maybe it’s because your body failed you a long time ago, that you look for a deeper bond.

What if it’s trauma? But no, because even prior to your illness sexual attraction was never part of the picture.

You’ve always known there is beauty in bodies. Your eyes have spent hours admiring hills and valleys of the human landscape, observing its movements like a child trying to catch the tide. There is elegance in the way the soft lines curve and then turn into sharp edges, like different parts of the same melody. First andante then allegro, they blend in a rhapsody that tells a story. Where the cracks are the pauses that let the singer breathe.

The tip of your pencil was consumed in the uncountable attempts to imitate that beauty. But the admiration only builds in your chest, never lower, because nakedness is purity and simplicity, it is art and spirituality. There is no other appeal to it, no second purpose to it. Only poetry.

And yet sometimes you questioned it. Doubt creeped in with too many maybes. They could be right, maybe it’s a phase, you’re a late bloomer and things will change. You just haven’t found the right person, yet.

And so you convinced yourself you would learn to want flesh.

Eventually, maybe. Not sure. Not today.

Until you met him. You’ve met that person that knew before you did, that saw right through you and taught you what you used to ignore. Through your reflection in the mirror of his eyes, you’ve learned. To see yourself clearly, to appreciate your vulnerability.

But nothing really changed. If anything, intimacy amplified leaving sexual desire behind.

You still see nothing after the kiss, when your imagination stops at brushes and lingering touches, as if that was the pinnacle of it. It’s not that there’s nothing after, it’s just that nothing that comes after can equate the moment two hands glance with intent. It’s the kindness of fingertips trailing on soft skin, on his hands, on his face. It’s the intimacy in two eyes staring into yours while you let them, let them in. It’s the trust and comprehension. It’s the feeling of safety in a person’s arms as they embrace the vulnerabilities you held captive behind the mask. It’s the acceptance after making acquaintance with each other’s cracks, the pads of your fingers finally free to delicately brush the scarred tissue of his past.

And you stay fascinated by his cracks through which you peek into his past. That’s how you fell for him, mesmerizing at the light you saw filtering through the fractures in his chrysalis, marveling at what he’ll be. You never saw him naked on your sheets, the excitement never weighted down on your navel as much as it elevated like thin air to fill the hollows of your chest.

The gravity of poetry sits on your sternum and you can’t speak, only write down the emotions he left. You wrote one too many poems, as if he taught you to rhyme. All poems about intimacy, none of them about carnality.

Sometimes you still wonder if that’s a crime.

You do believe in dovetailing. In humans finding humans, humans choosing humans. You do believe that chests are meant to collide, and arms are meant to encase, but bodies are just the means to something that can be expressed in many different ways. Sex is superficial. You don’t think it’s required for you to fulfill your life.

Maybe your sexual organ is the heart, for to your brain there is no better orgasm than the arrhythmic sound it makes when he’s by your side.

You sit at the table in victorious silence, as your thoughts simmer with images of him. Just shrug and shake their words off because they know nothing about your right person, yet.