Sorry

Sorry, my bad, did I skip a step? I thought it was supposed to just be happening already. Look, dude - and no, I don't mind you calling me dude, as long as you keep holding doors for me - I'm here. What am I supposed to do now, generate interest? I'm never the instigator. I'm defensive. My signature move is acquiescence. It's worked out pretty well, until right now. If intermediary steps, if there's no need to acquiesce, then I don't know what to do next, other than to ruminate on my improbable misfortune of ascending into adulthood without previously navigating this type of situation, without even realizing my skill set is deficient. We explicated intentions, we transacted permissions. Your application was accepted. You’re admitted. We’re in business. So now what? God help me, I don't know how to initiate sex.

Here we are on your sailboat, well the sailboat doesn't belong to you but it's your place of residence, and you're saying, "I know, I know, you want to have sex." You say the word sex, weighing it down with anxious resignation. You're pleading with an alarm clock.

"It's just that, usually, sex is like, oh, OK, sex." You say the word sex, coolly drawing it out of a faucet. You're listening to your favorite DJ dominate an unexpected new genre.

"It's not like, sex." You say the word sex, sternly gouging it into the moldy air. You're the teacher of a non-core curriculum announcing a critically boring topic on the first day of school.

Tempered by embarrassment, I fold my shoulders forward and repent. I say I'm sorry. "I didn't mean to mandate sex. I took all the fun out of it."

---

We first met in a hostel in Panama. You arrived from California the day I packed to go back to New York. Twelve beds per room, ours contiguous, we fussed in our luggage, nervously giggling. I gave you my number, you kept in touch. A few long phone calls in the past few months. I flew across the country to spend ten days on vacation with you. Energetically abbreviated a microcosmic relationship with you.

Standing beside your modified truck with inside dog and surfboard stuff on the rainy airport sidewalk, the immediately crippling physical attraction I hoped would extend from our recent text messages was absent. In yet a more substantial way felt frantically romantic. Infatuation deeply prepubescent problematic.

We dispensed our family secrets and exhausted our embarrassments, and when they didn't ricochet but rather were absorbed, accepted into each of us, doubled and adored, we emptied out our deepest theories in each other's hungry minds, to marinate and macerate and cyclically assimilate and bodily accelerate and boundaries remediate. We shared our food, we slept messily, I met your mom, we took ecstasy, you bought us both tickets for a rave downtown where I wore a spandex dress so you carried my license and cash in your pockets.

You were under the blanket and I was on top of it. Curled up on your lap in the shared-bathroom broken-radiator hotel room we'd just gotten. Reaching that sweet pinnacle, that interpersonal miracle, that moment when disclosure coalesces self and other: recounting our subjective experiences of that day when first we met, in the hostel trading toiletries, beaming in Panama City sweat. What was said, what was meant, what was thought and tightly kept, motivations, hesitations, what we later told our friends. Shedding the mythologies of self-invented idolatry from the chrysalis of real-time cause and effect. Having the flash of passionate clarity that momentarily separates shouldering emotions up a mountain from chasing them down the other side. Building and testing and pensive investing and framing and forging and extra-securing from cogwheels and sprockets a circumspect circus and now just enjoying the rides. All night.

Then, in the bloodshot morning, on the seasick sailboat awning, you told me I couldn’t stay. You had classes and exams, you had feelings you didn’t say. Merely forty-something hours since my eyes first you devoured on the airport asphalt grey.

You packed my lunch and dropped me off. It was a sunny New Year's Day.

I sobbed so bodily in the train station lobby that strangers asked was I OK.

I stayed a week with friends in Oakland and told you it was fun hooray.

We planned I would to return to you, to your airport, anyway.

So I left twelve hours early with my thoughts in disarray.

I changed my bra in the Amtrak bathroom four-hundred miles of daydreams away.

You claimed me from the train station in rush hour L.A.

My flight home is tomorrow, I mean, later today.

We’ve spent so far this final night a certain-seeming way.

Windy winding nighttime highways curate honest speech.

You named your local neighborhoods until your favorite beach

Where you gave me fancy facts about the oil rigs and reefs

The big words I repeated back, distracted, dreaming, blushing

You told me why the fish are so pollution something something

We traded constellations and explained our spatial truths

We attributed our rap tastes to the coastlines of our youth

We were breathing sandy moonlight frantic standing by the ocean

When you made me second-guess the strappy, unlined bra I'd chosen

Bought first-hand and not on sale

In waxy rash and fresh-paint nails

For you my details I prepared

With fabric scissors trimmed my hair

Then primmed and packed all sleepless night

I cut off all the price tags lest you quantify my sacrifice

While saying on the phone to you I couldn’t find my pocket knife

I’d had it just the other day- and by the way, the kitchen drawer

I’d used it on a pineapple, my roommates think that’s all it’s for-

You told me you had plenty, sweatshirts, toothpaste, knives, deodorant

I didn't need to pack because you'd cater my rearmament

My army-surplus duffelbag all lingerie and ornaments

Embellished lacy shapeless in your hand at last impatient

Wish I would have worn instead a rigid half-sphere of encasement

Should have led with an improvement over nakedness

Firmly with my hands around your neck, pulling up the hood over your head

Felted jacket covers gingham dress that, covering your hand, covers my leg

Then we got in your car to drive back to your place and I asked you, dude, from your passenger seat, to tell me your favorite kind of sex and what you would but hadn't yet and how much sleep you wanted to get. Your 7am exam is, like, not that many hours from now.

You grimaced at the dashboard clock. You froze me with self-conscious shock.

"Oh yeah, no, sleep is key. Yeah. I really, seriously, need to get a lot of sleep tonight. Why do you ask?"

Suddenly, our conversation was two conversations. I gathered up my failed obviousness and repackaged it as incredulous hesitation. I said loudly, "Um."

You looked at me then quickly to the road again half-smiling. You giggled maybe nervously progressively inquiring, "What? Just say it. It's already out there."

Your yellow dog climbed clumsily from the seatless backseat to my lap. You drove fast. As if guessing at a trick question, I ventured slowly, with an upward inflection, "Because I want to have sex for as long as possible."

"Oh. You want to have sex."

Wait, was that the wrong answer? How unforeseen, to explicate much more than just the time constraint!

The windshield might break if our eyes meet. Christmas lights on palm trees on side streets.

Now here we are on your sailboat, well not your sailboat but your home, and somehow you aren't already on top of me making me wish you had left me alone, siphoning the pending acquiescence from my bones. You're walking from the table-couch up over to the counter saying, "Woah, 'mandatory' comes from 'mandate!' The word mandate, you know? I just realized that! You know how, sometimes, you just realize something? Like the other day, I realized that 'enchilada' means 'in sauce.' Like that's what it means."

I'm mesmerized as your words arise out of childish shyness and take flight. I'm generating a memory I'll be writing down when the edges round. But I must be making a dissatisfied face that would have, if realized, been tried not to make. You look in my direction then you suddenly stop talking. You look to the ground and say - of all things - "Sorry."

I giggle maybe nervously bewildered and enchanted. Are you vapid or just driven by my solemness to madness? You could never lose my interest! Please don't ever think me careless! But for real, let’s stay focused here. I'm trying to have sex with you.