supplicium post mortem

self-pitying rant #677A-1610

in which I despair of my situation by rubbishing friends, acquaintances, and men I’ve never met

I’ve been feeling on some level that I am growing away from tgi, perhaps forever. This isn’t exactly an iteration of Lost Kink. I’ve been thinking that maybe I will one day look back on tgi, and on my marriage, as an immature phase, an ultra-elaborate construct, a fad. A thirteen year fad. I’ve even felt–and this may be the worst part–that tgi is starting to sound like an old term, some disused, past-life word, a word which is outdated and babyish—yes, with all the beautiful, naive genuineness we both had then—but which is nevertheless embarrassing and lost to me.

Today everyone I know is a grown-up and they speak of kink or spanking or TTWD. (There’s something cute about Graham‘s the activity, but to me that sounds limited to play transactions, transactions being the key word.) These grown-ups inhabit The Scene, a world of parties, of fetish categories, of cant role-play traditions and phrases, of play-dates, of poly couplings, of atheisms, and while many of these grown-ups are extremely lovely people, and have been extremely lovely to me, they are acquainted with other grown-ups who scare me, or who at least make me want to run home, hug the dogs, and then hide under the bedclothes and talk to God.

I never want to go to another spanking party. I never want to write another blog entry. I never want to get another Fetlife message. I never want to meet another top. I never want to read the word kink again. I never want to have to watch a spanking video or to read or write another spanking story. I never want to have to go on another coffee date, platonic or otherwise. I want to burn up all of Casey’s clothes and all the implements and toys and everything in M’s closet, including his newspaper from the day he died, and his unwashed laundry, and Mr. Prior’s tweed jacket [...no, not that, never that...] and his Church’s shoes and his kilt wot he wore at our wedding and all the rest of it [...except maybe a couple of Casey's clothes, ones we can wear out...] and never again hear the words kink, spanking, TTWD, and take the word tgi and put it in a little box, and dig a hole really really deep in the backyard, down where the tomatoes put their roots, down below the Gotham rocks, and put the box there and cover it up and let it get eaten by the worms and the roots and the little black ants that the exterminator sprayed for yesterday.

There isn’t going to be another person to look after Casey. Any person who gets beyond a coffee date, he would quite rightly say: Casey was who you had with M. Let it stay that way. Let’s have something else, a new character. I won’t be able to explain how Casey isn’t a character because I will be busy processing the psychological virtue of his suggestion. Mr. Beyond-a-Coffee-Date won’t be capable of, or interested in, loving me for who I am, in finding that out, or of letting me into who he really is. He will be busy listing his needs and deciding if I’m a girl who can meet them. Or maybe he will be trying to convince me that my needs are the same as his. Or perhaps, that an activity that he’d very much enjoy would be just the thing for me. He will be trying to convince me, directly or indirectly, to Let Go of the past, to Move On, to Accept the Death of that part of me. He may have read that this is necessary, maybe in a paperback book, and it will correspond very nicely with what he wants, which is to get my eyes off M and on to him, so I can start giving him what he wants. He will want to play. He will expect to use safewords, to negotiate. He will hope my Needs can be met without much effort from him while he gets his own Needs met by me. Isn’t that what relationships are, anyhow, mutual use?

The word tgi will never be mentioned. It is buried, and anyhow I will have learned not to say it. Oh, he’ll want to know All About me, but only to find out how much I am a suitable needs-match for him. He will never have experienced the world cracking open and God breaking into it, launching that blinding rescue operation, taking two people, each somehow lost, and steering them together, two rescues in one, a divine efficiency; steering them together not so that they can use each other as objects in their own fantasies, not so they can use each other at all, but so they can long to know each other, so much and so deeply that they sometimes forget themselves, that they become for each other human channels for that love that passes understanding, that love that longs for them too, that longs for them to grow closer and closer to their real selves, and turn more and more from the lies, the fears, the illusions, the distractions, the selfishness, the wounds inflicted by this broken world and its people.

Mr. Beyond-a-Coffee-Date might find such ideas religious and repellent, or perhaps lovely and poetic, but he will not understand the kind of sanctuary that can be made in a home like this. He may think he understands, because he may think he’s had it himself, but it will shortly become clear to me that he hasn’t. What he has had will have been a sympathetic fit with a woman willing to serve as a movie screen for his kinks and psychodramas, and vice versa.

So, yes, Casey is something I was with M, because–as I will suicidally explain to Mr. BCD–I am not actually kinky. I once fell in love with a man, and he loved me as I have never been loved, and Casey and Mark and the Others were ways we sometimes expressed ourselves, exercised ourselves, when we were loving one another. Mr. BCD will think he knows what I mean. This lifestyle is who I am, he will tell me. Kink is who I am. I won’t know how to explain that I am incapable of loving a kink. I’m only capable of loving a man.

And pretty soon it will become clear to me that I am guilty of the worst kind of leading on. I have entered into coffee dates and beyond on the pretence of looking for a friend, a playmate, or possibly “more”. Mr. BCD will think we are meeting in the hopes of a sexual relationship, or a play relationship, or at least a sympathetic ear for his concerns; perhaps he will be there for a simple diversion from the humdrum life between parties. I have, I’ll realize, led him on. The one at fault is me for being dishonest, not him for being self-serving. The truth is I want the old kind of love, but it isn’t something I can procure on my own. It needs that cracking open of the world, another wave in the rescue operation—for me, for him, and for the bits of the world we touch.

Come, you thunderclaps.
Come lightning, come quake.
Move, plates, atoms, seas.
Tear, curtain.
Blow aside, veil, an instant
All it takes.
Fall, arrows; roll chariots; pierce spears.
Come parachutes, come knights, come infants.
Burn, fire.
Pour, rain.

I don’t know if I want to write this post. Maybe I would rather pretend this is a usual, boring day. Maybe I would like to pretend that the thing that bothers me most is that a colleague is dying of cancer and I can’t bear to see her 13-year-old daughter, my student, left without a mother; and so maybe what I really need to do is bake a cake so I can send a big chunk of it home with this girl this afternoon. It scares me to feel death so close again. Maybe I would rather think about this instead of the fact that today is my wedding anniversary.

Nine years ago was the day I can honestly call the happiest day of my life, as cliché as that sounds. Nine years doesn’t sound long enough. Wasn’t it more like twenty? Could so much have happened in a mere nine years? Could I have lived the seven best years of my life, and the two worst? Could I have lived not only that best day, but also that worst one?

We married in church, in the chantry chapel rather than at the high altar, on a snowy, frigid Saturday in February 2001. About 80 people came. There was ivy and white roses. I wore a dress that had been made out of the antique lace of my mother’s wedding dress. He wore his kilt. I was never allowed to know for sure whether or not he wore anything underneath it.

I walked down the aisle with my father, M waiting at the end, as the organist played Elgar’s Nimrod. Seven years later, I would walk down a parallel aisle behind his coffin, to that same music—though that second day was a much bigger event, at the high altar, hundreds of people, Fauré’s Requiem.

But let me tell you about the rehearsal on Friday night. It was just me, him, our two witnesses, and the Rector. We had decided to do the 1662 ring vows [With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost]. At the rehearsal the Rector said: If you want to do this properly, this is how it goes… And he took the ring and demonstrated how M should slip it onto the end of my finger three times—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost—only slipping it fully into place on the last word. There we were, the Rector and I, and all I could think was: OMG! It’s popping the cherry with this ring!!! And then I was blushing and cracking up and I couldn’t stop, and it was almost as bad as the first time I had to kiss a boy, onstage in Cinderella, when the rehearsal dragged on and on because I couldn’t stop laughing and flinching away. M kept a discreet distance during this ludicrous display of nerves, and eventually I pulled myself together and we carried on. Later, and from then on whenever we recalled the rehearsal, he always laughed, shaking his head, about how Casey had turned up out of nowhere and interrupted it all with her snickering.

One of the readings, a common one at weddings, was the Song of Solomon 2:10-12. “Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away! For lo, the winter is past… the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.” In later years, when I was learning letter-press printing, I set this text and did a big print of it. The print still hangs above our bed—my bed—and reminds me of the overpowering relief I felt that day, and all the days I knew him. The long winter was indeed past. Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away!

There wasn’t a big party. We had a small reception with cake in the parish house, and a dinner with the family at a restaurant. Then he and I left for a long weekend at a B&B upstate. I couldn’t get the time off for a honeymoon then. We would take one later, in the summer, we said. We were still waiting to take it seven years later when the marriage was ended by the only force acknowledged in the Book of Common Prayer.

I still wear both of our rings, albeit on my right hand. Death ends marriage, but it doesn’t feel ended. I wish there was a rite to help you take off the rings.

And you know, I was never going to get married. Maybe this surprises you. My parents split up when I was thirteen, and unsurprisingly, it devastated me. I came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s amidst a very liberal, feminist education. There is a video interview of me in my early 20s—conducted by my little sister—in which I say we (meaning the girls in our family) don’t believe in marriage. We don’t think much of men in general. We could do without the whole patriarchal construct. Instead, we would have lovers. (I am paraphrasing, but that was the gist.) Of course I wanted a boyfriend, even a life relationship, but I figured if I met someone and we were serious, we wouldn’t need the “crutch” of matrimony to stay together. And if we couldn’t stay together without the institution of marriage, then we shouldn’t be together, full stop. But then—about three years after this arrogant but defensive interview—I met M, and the world as I knew it passed away. Gradually, as we were together, as he moved here, as I realized this wasn’t a “practice relationship”, I began to feel that marriage wasn’t necessarily just a patriarchal institution. And somewhere in those first six years, I came to know that I wanted to marry him, before and through God, not because I wanted to secure him, but because we already were bonded together for life, and I wanted to sanctify this bond. I wanted to be “bound” together via the only authority we both acknowledged entirely, the authority, we both believed, that had brought us together in the first place.

But let me not get theological. You know, Pandora tweeted today (actually re-tweeted) about a beautiful blog I’d never seen before, Male Submission Art. I am a switch, but a lot of male submission kind of turns me off; also, I am generally so much more stimulated by bottoming, that I often wonder if my switchiness was just a desire to accommodate M. But then I look at this site, and oh gosh, some of the images are so hot to me. And as I was perusing the blog this morning, I thought about how much M would have liked it. At least I think he would have like it. I think it would have been right up his alley. Maybe we could have taken some pictures like that. God, I wish he was here today to look at it with me. God? Please love him extra special, from me, not just today but every day. Every single day, every hour, every second.

I was recently asked what I missed most about Mark. My first impulse was to dismiss such a question as unanswerable, unless Everything! counts as an answer. However, in this case it happens I brought the question on myself, so to dodge it would not be cricket. So I thought, I know. I’ll use a lifeline! I’ll ask the audience. And this isn’t cheating, kids, because 1) you get three lifelines and I haven’t used any yet; 2) other people can usually see you better than you can see yourself; 3) it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve been blogging about for the last year; 4) It’s almost my one-year blogoversary, so, um… there!

Right, then. What do I miss most about him? We will accept entries in comments, email, or tweets @caseydamnmorgan. Best answer of any length can have a story written for them. (Yay?) To give everyone a fair chance to complete their research or cogitation, and to accommodate text-based masochists (thanks to Bitchy Jones via Caroline Grey for this apt term), the deadline will be next Sunday 1/24 at 6pm EST.

Ok, go forth and think about meeeeeee hahahaha.

She locked the back door and heard the murmur of the television from the den. No voices, though, giving her hope, however faint, that the children were asleep. She tossed her coat across the table and kicked off her clogs.

“Hey.” Her husband appeared in the dining room arch, back lit from the den.

“Are the kids—”

“In bed,” he interrupted. “Asleep.”

“Wow. Did you drug ‘em?”

“I thought you’d be back by eight thirty.” His voice acquired that edge. She could tell he wouldn’t be babysitting again anytime soon.

“The train was delayed. We got stuck in the tunnel.”

He palmed the dimmer, and the chandelier blared alight. She squinted.

“The website didn’t say anything,” he said stiffly.

She shrugged. “I’m shattered. You coming to bed?” She asked, knowing that he wouldn’t. She asked for form’s sake, to maintain the illusion of civility. As she slouched past him, his hand snatched her above the elbow. “Hey!”

“You were with him, weren’t you?”

“Who?”

“You know who.  Wasn’t enough, I suppose, to flirt with him in the deli every day. To have drinks with him last Thursday from five to seven PM.”

“What the hell?”

“Oh, I don’t need to spy on you. Do you think everyone in this town doesn’t know everything. Do you think they wouldn’t tell me?”

“And what did the jungle drums report about tonight, then?” She wrenched her arm free, but still he blocked her path.

“I’m your husband. You owe me the truth at least.”

Something in his eyes, something she’d never seen before made her heart ricochet in her chest.

“What do you want to hear?”

“Everything.” He imprisoned her wrists in his hands. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt his palms there.

“Do you want to hear how he took my hand?”

“How? The little punk.”

She met his gaze. He released her wrists. She took one of his hands flat between both of hers, and then brushed one protruding finger against her lip. He inhaled.

“Did you let him kiss you?”

Again, the look she’d never seen. Jealousy, but something more. “I kissed him.”

“You what?”

She ran her hands up his arms, over his t-shirt, and into the line of his disheveled hair. Then she pulled his face down and kissed him—lips, breath, tongue, teeth—as they hadn’t kissed in—

“What else did he do, the bastard?”

She moved his hand under her blouse. “This.” The other hand she led round to the back of her skirt. “And this.”

He pulled her close, stiff against her. “What else? I could kill him.”

Some time later they went up to bed, exhausted, sore, sated. She felt a pang of guilt, but fleeting. He wouldn’t have minded about the truth, a drink too many with her college roommate after the play; but the illusory lover not only proved incandescent, but it also guaranteed he’d babysit again soon, willingly.

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What is Secret Saturday? This piece was a little different than my usual fare. I suppose you can decide whether the change was for the good or the bad! My wildcard, like Emma Jane’s, was tunnel.

Check out the other excellent writers joining in this week:

• Emma Jane – injecting a special verisimilitude to hers!

Today I received an email from Chris Baty, Daddy of NaNoWriMo. Maybe you received one, too. Here is how it began:

I ran into your 2009 NaNoWriMo novel yesterday, and it said that you two are currently “taking a break.” I offered my condolences and mentioned that I’d probably be seeing you today. It quickly scribbled out a note for me to give you. The note seemed kind of personal, so I didn’t read it. Here it is!

“Hi! Come back to me. I’ll be better this time, I promise!”

Maybe Chris sent this email to every one of the 166,700 participants, or perhaps he limited it to the 32,000 ish “winners”. Whatever. He’s trying to encourage people to finish what they began. My book and I are indeed currently “taking a break” for the holidays, but it’s like the kind of break M and I used to have to take in the first year, when he was still living in Englandland. Anyone who’s ever carried on a long distance love affair will know what this feels like. Time is always your enemy. It’s forever and ever before you see each other again, and then when you’re together, time evaporates. Even after he had moved here and moved in with me, I would still feel traumatized when he had to travel, even for a short time like a week. On some level, I think, I couldn’t accept that I really had him–and since that sounds as though I considered him a possession, let me rephrase: I couldn’t entirely accept that something this good, someone this good, far and away the best thing that had ever happened in my life–that it was for real, and wasn’t going to be taken away like other good things. That I could rely upon it.

As I’ve written before, we got married after being together six years, and we were married for seven years before he died. I think it was really only towards the end of that, in the last couple of years of marriage, that I began to treat him–us–as a real, permanent, true, reliable thing. The rooms inside me that reserved themselves, reluctant to surrender to the good thing lest it disappear, even they gave in. When he died, I found I didn’t have anything reserved anymore. All of me was with him. We had become us.

I am thankful that I haven’t become the kind of person who is afraid to give in like that again. I want to. I need to. I was more myself then, more truly me than I’ve been before or since.

We are knee deep in winter. I thought last winter was the longest winter of my life, but now, here is another one, no less cold, no less long. The thought of my book sending me a little note saying, Please come back, I’ll be better this time–it makes me cry because I love that book, and I haven’t left it, I would never leave it, and it doesn’t need to try to be better for me, because I love it in all its messiness, and it’s up to me to clear the beds around it so it can come up and grow right.

But if there was someone to take a note to that other shore for me, I would write the same thing to him: Please come back to me. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I won’t fight for so long. I won’t fight at all. I won’t work so hard at stupid things. And did you know, yesterday when I had the Host in my mouth, all I could think and feel was you, your tongue on my tongue, you inside me, and it felt like you were there somehow in that melting, wine-tinged substance in my mouth. If you would come back I would kiss you all the time. I would make love to you all the time. I want to touch your eyelids, your cock, your hands, your bottom, every bit of you, even where your hair is thinning and where the skin is red from your wrist watch. I’ve learned a lot, since you’ve been gone. I’m smarter now. I can do more things. I take up more of the bed, but I’ll move over again. Your son has got so tall.

Please come back. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I promise.

He watched her whirl about the apartment, in what he called her Tasmanian Devil state. There were so many things to do she couldn’t draw breath to count them, and there he sat on the bed, stripped down to boxer briefs, flicking channels between the baseball and Househunting Wales: Denbighshire.

“Come to bed,” he said gently, settling further into the pillows. She declined in a bugger-off tone and strode to the kitchen to initiate another task. The crockery on top of the fridge needed putting away. She dragged chair across tiles and climbed up with the ugly plate their neighbor had given them for their wedding.

Then, the chair was skidding out from under her and crashing to the floor, shattering the plate and slamming her knee against the counter. And he was there, lifting her from the scene of the accident and pointing to the dressing room: “Go.”

Tears threatening, she did as he said. After sweeping up the shards, he waited for her, then led her to bed. He resumed his spot and pulled her by the wrist to sit between his legs, her head against his chest like a pillow, his arms wrapped around her from behind, muscles like the statue of Youthful Hercules she’d seen at the museum, his lips brushing against her ear, her cheek, her neck, watching the sheep in Wales, running his fingers through her hair until everything wrong was right again and she could call off the archers, put down the stick, surrender.

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What is Flash Fiction Friday?

Read the other folks writing this week:

• Marie
• Rafi

How did I know he loved me? I figured it from the second serious story he wrote for me, Jigsaw. I don’t believe I’ve ever shared this one; he said it was just for us. He wrote it before we met in person, sometime in July that summer. It imagined a school weekend, casey and mark with Mr. Penn, and it ended with the two of them putting the pieces together, working out that this was the real deal, life-mangling, life-restoring.

He was married. Jigsaw called the bluff on our ostensibly platonic friendship. My parents’ marriage had ended in divorce; I refused to be an Other Woman. I remember falling on my knees in my study, sobbing and imploring God to help, somehow. I was not religious at this point, so this impulse was as spontaneous as it was extraordinary. Here I was—here we were—being vivisected by this love, yet I did not want to help destroy anyone’s marriage. I had no idea what the near or distant future held, I only knew it was utterly insane to feel as though my entire existence—all 26 years of it—had been permanently rearranged by this Englishman I had never met face-to-face.

I remember the calm that came over me, not lessening the acute emotion, but muting it for a moment, and I remember the irrational certainty, like a rumbling in my stomach, that if I merely sat back and waited, doing nothing, all would be well, and all would be well, and all manner of means would be well…

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Arrgh…again, not quite fiction. And a topic that deserves much more thorough dealing. Half-way through writing it, I wanted to delete it and start again. However, I have this…attitude?…philosophy? that once something starts to write itself, one really ought not to give up on it, or censure it. In a way, those are the rules. I’m not sure I would stick with them in all circumstances, but I did today. Forgive any flippancy this 250-word treatment suggests. And please, if you can, refrain from drawing conclusions about me. I was, at that time, astoundingly naive.

What is Flash Fiction Friday?
Read the other folks writing this week:

• Marie - welcome!
• Graham
• Rafi
• Mija - welcome also!!
• PapaTomLA

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead, it seemed. Her stomach clenched, a passing fancy, and she stretched her arm across to see that he was still breathing. His chest did, in fact, move. He wasn’t to die yet, though when he did, he would look the same as that twilight on their bed.

The Pervy Hour had past. He lay naked, the duvet twisted at his feet. She still wore a shirt. The room cold now, she pulled the covers over them, as much against the air as against her own eyes. What had seemed a part of them now felt incongruous, like Adam and Eve felt towards each other after eating the knowledge.

Was it part of their fallen inheritance that she should always feel naked after? She had no Puritan admonition against making love with her husband, but always, after – either quickly or some time later – a self-consciousness would come over her, turning their acts into something faintly repellent. Before the arrival of the observing mind, the relentless panopticon, she could love him with her body, as she had promised at the altar; but, that Eden always fled, like a fawn, before the cold gaze of reason.

He jerked awake with a sharp intake of breath and turned to her, resting his head on her chest, curling a knee across her, his arm encircling her as if to keep her from rising, then or ever. Life had been long, so long for both of them, before they finally found each other.

“You were late,” he would tease, “as usual.”

They had been together before, in the distant past. “Last time,” he said, “I think I was the girl.” Or was the last time when they had both been boys? It was hard to remember precisely. Once, visiting the chapel of his Public School, she had been possessed of an eerie familiarity, as if she were recalling long ago, before her childhood, as if the memory resided just behind her eyeballs, if only she could see it there.

Later, once he actually was dead, she would discover that Anglican belief did not include reincarnation as such. “What do you make of it, then?” she would ask her theologian curate. “We both thought we remembered the same thing.”

The theologian would touch his index fingers to his lips and look at the ceiling, silent for a spell. “I think,” he would reply, “that it was a kind of spiritual gift, a blanket of Grace, perhaps.”

The blanket of Grace was large enough to cover the two of them that twilight, to extend the unspeaking respite. Holding him and being held by him was like being able finally to breathe, like stepping down into fresh, thick air after a lifetime at altitude. They exchanged no words, but the way he held her fingers said more than conversation. They were thinking the same thoughts, the same thought, as it sometimes seemed they would dream the same dream, not separately in their own heads, but tandem, one mind.

Twilight gave way to evening. Soon the dog would need dinner. Soon the phone would ring, and the traffic would resume outside the window. Soon they would resume ordinary living, side by side. For this moment, though, his arm still around her, his heart still pumping against her side, his cheek warm on her chest, duvet covering them, for this moment they lingered, ignorant of everything except each other. She breathed, sinking against him, no words, no self-regarding. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind.

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What is Bookends?

Come read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi – yay!
• Tom - yay!

The dreams don’t stop. Neither does the hope that he’ll be upstairs when I come in the door, that I’ll hear his footsteps clumping along the floorboards and down the spiral stairs. It will be such a relief, as it always is when he comes home. Like stepping into air conditioning from a brutal, New York summer.

People don’t talk about him as much as they used to. Everyone else seems to have repaired the colossal tear in the matrix that his disappearance caused. His job has been filled. It is no longer tasteful to think on him.

I cannot tell you… I cannot tell you—anything. I know…I know. Everyone has part of their life which is now in the past. I am no different from any single person still walking this planet. I don’t like the word unfair. But how come I have to keep living when he didn’t?

The card I gave him on our last anniversary is still in the bedside drawer that used to be his, its message a kind of steganography:

xoxoxo me

h&l&nt & tc4mh, l&h ohbb uhc, h-h, & ont4cdm b/c sagg.

I asked him if he understood, and he read the whole thing confidently aloud: hugs and love and nice things, and the cane for marky, long and hard on his bare bottom, ha-ha, and only nice things for casey because she’s a good girl.

There is no one to talk to this way anymore. Even the dogs don’t get it.

God, help me.

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What is Flash Fiction Friday?

This really was a bumper crop for 3F. Don’t know if it is fall industriousness or the thrill of a hard challenge, but these writers deserve a big hand (won’t say what kind or where) or at the very least nice comments on their blogs. Read on, Macduff!

• Rafi
• Sandy
• Abby
• Nettagyrl
• PapaTomLA

Life can be so routine that you imagine nothing will ever happen. Six o’clock, evening commute, people funneling out of the subway, alongside the health-food store, back to their apartments. Me, going roundie-mcblock with the dogs; you, emerging from the train. We exchanged glances as one does with a thousand strangers in this town. A mere detail in the unchanging monotony of too-slow life.

What stood out was your Aran sweater. It’s September, and no one’s wearing sweaters yet. I’ve always liked woolen sweaters on tall men, the way they sit upon a broad, flat chest. You were tall, slim but not lanky. You noticed my wolfhound, then me. We exchanged an almost-smile, the shy grimace of urban passings. Your sweater had already entranced me, making my mind pucker – like lemon, salt, and tequila to a mouth – at the bizarre sight of those leather elbow pads sewn into it.

Rounding the corner amidst hipsters and their phones, I imagined how it might feel to be across your knee. No role suggested itself, curiously, just the palpable urge to be held quite firmly by someone tall and fit, your woolen sleeve across my waist, a foretaste of rock-solidness. I imagined how your bear hug might feel. Does it show, how very hug-deprived I am? Last night I remembered the safety and satisfaction of sinking into bed with my husband. Rock-solidness now a dream, recalled by you and your sweater in the corridor of a nondescript evening commute.

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Come write your own missed connection – real or fantasy, who will know? Post the link today (Wednesday) here or on Twitter (@caseydamnmorgan). What is Midweek Missed Connections?

Read other missed connections this week:

• Jessica wrote a post today which described an awesome midweek missed connection, though I’m sure she wasn’t attempting this challenge.
• PapaTomLA