In the Flesh

I stopped posting because other things became priority and I’m not as self-disciplined as you might have hoped (sorry five people who liked my posts)…but I’ve kept writing….I need to. My natural tendency is overwriting and I’m trying to find the balance between being creative and telling a story.

Conditions still aren’t ideal (I’m living where my internet depends on the direction of the wind) but posting gives me a reason to keep writing, so I’m aiming for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Send me a message asking “What the fuck Tin Boy?!” if I miss a day please.

So…we left off with me leaving a paying job in Panama for uncertainty in Costa Rica.

The Third Day with the Boyfriend

He has started a new job and mine here continues…keeping this story up to date.

A selfie of the two of us in bed is my new profile picture on Facebook. My hope is for it to be a ‘case closed’ stamp on posting as it appears to me my life is better lived than outsourced to social media.

C. often falls forward and kisses me before I kiss him, and I think about what love likes to look like, and what it might really be for me. Should I hold his hand in public? I wonder when I see a man-woman couple doing it. I’ve never been much of a hand holder though…it always seemed infantile, which isn’t a cop out. There’s no reconciling my actions potentially being interpreted based on expectations. Is it more important to seem to love, or worse, to be in love than to simply love?

Level of Comfort

We really like each other though, which is good because, after three months of texting, I’d imagined an awkward reunion, when the virtual spirit of our relationship didn’t align with reality.

We met and kissed. He asked what had happened and we talked about right turns. Now I don’t think as much about whether my breath is bad since we kiss even first thing in the morning. Lying next to him in sin is such a comfort, sensing the tension release as his head falls to the side or arm becomes heavy; listening to his heart fill and empty through his flat, bony chest.

Whenever he changes positions, putting his back to me, he’ll reach around and pull my arm over him, as if to say, “Where did you get to? You belong here,” making me his blanket. The position that would always be my choice, is him on his side facing me, while I’m on my back, my legs hooked over his pelvis. It is the only one from which I don’t need to change because my arm is trapped, or my concern is for my weight on one of his body parts.

Last night he told me about an ex. This ex was, at best, a man lacking character and self-control in a way I’d never heard about before…at worst he was worse than a whore. The story began with a friend C. had met by chance last night. This friend was unhappy because he held on to a past when he has always had, as we all do, an aptitude for change. A tall beer later and C. told me about his church experience, coming out (another expression loaded with expectation) and this ex.

In the process of becoming, pain seems to be an inescapable catalyst, I thought and wondered how close C. was to crying and how bad not crying along would be if he did.