Either Way

By Brewt.Blacklist

May 2013

THERE’S NO right way through this. The degradations and the ridicules are going to come no matter what, with pretty much no possibility of any mercy from anybody. Which is, of course, part of the point.

Holding my head high as I walk through the door won’t make any difference. Neither would the last deep breath of the polluted air outside. I’m already late, I can’t put this off any longer, and calling in sick simply means that I will have to put it off until tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. There’s no way out of this. My courage will not be enough. I will be slouching and defeated in seconds and will remain that way for the rest of the day, and there is but one way through it: to bite my tongue and endure.

I am alone in the lobby for a moment, and my eyes stray toward the full-wall mirror that holds nothing but my own reflection, and I have to concede that my appearance will not help matters today, and the desperate calls for consolation about inner beauty have no echo, no reply, no feedback whatsoever, for I am, in many ways, lacking in that area as well. The Furies have no end of say on that front.

Skin is never perfect, and mine is no exception. Moles, scars, blemishes, discolorations, I have no shortage of mars. Underlying tissue is less than cooperative as well—fat in all the wrong places, muscle tone long resistant to being in any of the right ones, bad posture, no shortage of flaw—not to mention years, nay, decades of wrong living taking its toll. And do not get me started on the failures of character. I am as ugly as I expect I could be, both inside and out, and I am about to get exactly what I deserve.

Some people shave when this happens, some people don’t, all in a vain attempt to stave off at least some of the reprehensible vindictives that come with this. Nothing would, in fact do that, the result of any choice would only change the nature of the assaults, and it ultimately came down to how I wanted to be seen. I had considered it long and hard. Human body hair is never right. On the one hand, the vanity of becoming a hairless one says “look at me trying to be pretty” and the vanity of leaving the hairs the way the gods planted them says “see, this is how I am, you have to accept me”; both fools think they are not going to succeed in not even risking the offense of those who look merely to deride for their own petty little thrills, a.k.a., the whyfor of all this. My own arrogance knows all about that. As I always, do, I considered a middle ground as being laughably more desirable and I settled for a trim, making the worst of the hair shorter with a lopping of strays, but not so short as to appear shallow for a man my age, which was also not going to spare me anything. There simply isn’t any correct course of action; there will be contempt despite all possible tact taken.

I will be feasted upon, as I have feasted.

The hyperborean air conditioning attacks in a way it hadn’t ever before, setting me up for the first round of defilements. The lack of the usual insulation initiates a retreat and a contraction that is noticed and commented upon as the first set of eyes for the day lock on, inducing the expected initial reaction of wanting to cower to myself. It is all I can do to keep my hands to my sides. Trying to hide at this point is more disreputable than not, although either way still leads to being held as the same kind of unworthy. Not to mention the possibility of force being used; getting choice taken away from me does have its own appeal. I could retreat into the solace of compulsion, which, though offering a slightly more endurable uncomfortable refuge for today—it's not my fault (even though it is)—would merely extend the dishonor in a way that has all the undertones of weakness, and that would haunt, possibly forever. The question is how do I want to live with myself.

The sneer of disgust before me is familiar; I, myself, have been in possession of it, and any expectation of anything different gets combated with a concession to the violation, a further diminution of pride, a giving up of one last vestige of denial that this really is happening, even though in some ways, the last silver lining it represents is the only relief possible, however minute it verifiably is: I’m not thought of that way by this guy, and his disdain belays my fears of not knowing how to handle that kind of attraction from a man. It’s a prejudice of my own, for sure, and all my big talk of condoning and advocacy and acceptance of different loving has a back-ring of “as long as it isn’t me” and I am a hypocrite. I don’t have to contend with even a possibility of an attraction there, and that is just not something I have to deal with right off the bat and I am scrambling to find some small comfort, no matter how convoluted I have to twist my thinking to come up with it. The rationalization makes me grateful and I take it, even if it is contrived and artificial, a mere shadow in this hard core reality.

To my shame, as if I don’t have enough.

Once the initial fleecing is over and this panotii moves on to even more fertile ground elsewhere, I have to walk down the hall, passing the glassed-in conference rooms. The meeting, predictably, stops, and everyone turns and stares as I make my way on by. I lower my head—that didn't take long—and try to flatten my lips into an expression that is neither a smile nor a frown. My tongue attempts to wet my lips once or twice, and I regret it. That can be seen as wrong, too: anticipatory, sarcastic, parsimonious, it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do. Fault will be found. I don’t look in toward anyone, but the corner of my eye catches the hand motions to the mouths of the tittering Sirens, those who, in their own efforts to be pitifully gentle and save their own faces from being seen as being anything but cruel, make me pay in yet another way.

As I pass my boss’s office, he lumbers his bullish keeper of oaths away from his game of solitaire on the screen and looks out. My eyes, but not my head, roll toward him to see what he would do, and he shakes his own colossal beard and goes back to whatever it is he does all day, which I have understood does include surfing for porn. I could probably at least count on not getting called into his company for any thunder today, which has its own mercy, however tiny.

There weren’t a lot of people in the back cubicles, and I manage to get to my own desk without looking at anyone. Whatever conversation was happening amongst the Harpies over the walls dies as I walk in to my own island; it was obvious that there was a problem in the room, and that I was it. I sit down, and slide as much of myself underneath my desktop as I could to, admittedly, hide.

The computer stares at me and doesn’t see, and I am grateful for the blind anonymity offered by inanimate objects. Not that I could bring myself to look at anything it had to show me. It's oracular skill is wasted on me.

“Knock knock.”

Shit. “Yeah?”

“Can I come in?”

Like I could stop her. There isn’t exactly an “in” or an “out” to my desk. I tip my head back, not quite far enough to show her my face. Or anything else. “Sure.” I swallow around the fish bone in my throat. This was the interaction I dreaded the most, the one I was actually afraid to have to deal with here today. There was no way I could prepare for this: the one person I had no desire on earth to see was simultaneously the only person I genuinely wanted to see.

“Are you okay?”

“I will be; thanks.”

The woman I like at this shithole job, the one I in truth go out of my way to smile to, who goes out of her way to smile back, comes into what she had asked permission to encroach: personal space. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and nudges me to turn my chair.

Normally, I can’t wait for her to do this, to have the few seconds we get during the day to flirt, and my usual response is to beam at her, and she glows right back, and it is the only thing in here that is remotely tolerable. She’s absolutely the only reason I stay at this dive. Which is nothing short of insane.

She is as bright as she always is, and the endless social conditioning that I have undergone reports to me that I am being accepted and liked by this person and tries to kick in and spin up the more-than appropriate response that the feeling is mutual, and and and it simply cannot find its way to the surface. Not today. The expression I can feel on my face is the one that I get when I see her get in her car and go home to her husband, the person she is destined to spend her time away from here with—not me—and the only way I can describe how it must look is the way I know that it feels. There is a sadness I cannot keep off my cheekbones, and I can’t hide it from her any more than I can hide anything else. I am forlorn, I am despondent, I am destitute of hope that she will but also partake in the day’s activities along with everyone else. I don’t even bother to put my hands in the way, to hide my insolence. There’s simply no point. I mourn toward her, and pray she doesn’t reflect back how pitiful I must appear.

My chair turns toward her in its autonomic response, my head dips off to the side like it has too, and my eyes tumble down the paneling until I can’t see her any more. I can’t help that, and some part of me calls for prayer.

“Forgive me; I have to know.” My angel speaks, no, sings and my head does something without my consent, my permission, and I can hardly even feel it when it happens, and it stupidly grants her sanction. Anything you want, my friend. Be merciful, be quick in the tearing, the renting. We can pick up from there.

Her hand snakes down off my shoulder and across my chest, down my stomach, slowly, gently, and I don’t try to stop her, and she keeps moving toward impiety and corruption, and I will not resist the hemlock.

I cannot breathe, I cannot blink, I cannot move. I am stone. Or so I think.

I look forward in our conversations to the split seconds of her touch on my person that come and go at any given moment with an anticipation that makes the happenstances of that under normal circumstances feel tectonic. Slow to come, irresistible, they are a force of nature like no other. The slightest of reassurances that a physical connection with another human being—particularly this one—affords those of us—like myself—who need it more than others sparkle with nothing less than thunderbolt strikes when they happen. I, being among the unlucky few who crave and are summarily denied this simplest communion among humans, am sustained when the slightest graze happens, when it’s from her, when it’s from my friend, through the longest droughts, even at the infrequency that it does with her, from my friend, my friend who occasionally grants this one wish and does so happily for reasons that are nothing short of uncanny to me. There’s so much I absorb off her in those instants that come when she casually brushes up against me, or deliberately offers the holy of holies of deliberate physical contact with another of my species, with me, that it is enough for me to simulate what it would be like to make love to her, in my moments alone in the dark at home when I languish and long and dream and masturbate. I make titanic mountains out of fractions of time, and they move.

But this determination she has to know how I truly feel about her, to ask the one part of me that can answer exactly one question, and in that one narrow contemplation it cannot lie or be bothered with manners or social pressures of conformity, is overwhelming me and delighting me and terrifying me and paralyzing me and sending ecstatic shivers all over my body, radiating off where her hand is like an electrical field irradiating all the way through me, front to back, taking cancer out with it, burning me through and through, washing me, purifying me, paring me down to the one thing I know that I feel that I'm not supposed to, and when she finally has almost made it to my core, when she at last has her hand so close to where I have so long dreamed of having her hand, her mouth, her sex, her body, where I have so long mythologized the idea of having her here, having her being as happy as I want her to be at being with me as she always is, every day, having her here with me as naked as I am now, I cannot even begin to fight or suppress or keep what was about to happen from happening.

My cock leaps into her hand, and is pulsing and throbbing, doing everything a cock can do to get a woman’s attention as it tries so desperately to change size, to change shape, to become something that could be useful to a woman—please, dear, god, please, let it be her of all women—to being something that a woman can accept into her, into her body, so we can do the thing that men and women are supposed to do with each other, so that we can be together and put our arms around each other and kiss each other, for the few precious moments we can in reality make contact with each other, when we can love each other and make love to each other and come together and find our ways towards the vaults of heaven together, now and forever, praise god, amen.

Please, lord, let me know her, let me go in unto her, let us celebrate the Erotes, let us fuck.

Her fingers wrap slowly, carefully, gently around my sex, and my damnable need to breathe forces the artificially cold air into my lungs as I feel her touch curl and enclose me as her thumb traverses across and around my circumcision—the small cut my parents thought would make me more attractive to a woman, make it more likely to get a woman’s mouth to open for me and the fact lot of good that has done save the continual dashing of anticipation there, thanks so much, mom, dad—my head, my glans, my tip of my penis, she is electrifying fresh current around in wild ways as she finds her way across the top, over where the opening was situated, and she pressures the aperture slightly, making contact with the bit of flesh that is the last place semen crosses over inside of me before it finds its way to the outside, pressing on the vent that is tender and makes offerings of children and urine and the resonance through my being is nothing short of an earthquake and I gasp.

Her hand has to adjust to a pound of flesh that I have, and then readjust, and then make further allowances yet again as I fulfill her palm, her fingers, and she greets my enthusiasm warmly and does not shirk. She exhales an unintelligible word that is universal in meaning, regardless of language or culture, a sound that launches ships and starts wars and induces the gods to demand sacrifices.

My perineum, the stretch of flesh between my asshole and my balls where there is hair I could not do anything about—not without help—drums out a beat that my breathing synchs up to, my stomach palpitates to and it is all I can do to listen to the pressure build in my head as the tympani mallets induce a swelling and the snares roll and the bass drums' heads as they flutter their way cymatic as they get hit. I lean further back in my chair, and my hips join in, thrusting without my consent, without my control, and there is only one thing on earth, and it is happening now, and it is worth dying for.

I did not even realize my eyes were closed; the light emanating from her hand is blinding me anyway, and I am startled by the light pressure on my cheek. It increases in an instant and is wet. She is kissing me and my eyes fall open and the expression I had before is gone, there is a slight up-turning of my cheek muscles, bowing out to meet her lips. The precious air I have taken in has furnaced into something hot and I force the pyroclastic cloud out and it incinerates the forest I had left on my chest, I force it all out through my nose, which insisted I pull some more in and I am rewarded. Her own arousal smells wonderful. My eyes droop back shut as I revel in the joy that my friend had brought to me today, this day of all days.

I am affirmed.

The atmosphere struck the side of my face where she had been like a slap and was suddenly slightly colder, and then the warmth of the blanket of her hand that I had between my legs evaporated as well. I was so enraptured in the tactile connection that it didn’t even register that it was over until it was too late. I lifted my head over to the side, wrenching my eyes out of my reverie into the darkness of the fluorescents, and the vibrational space she had occupied was empty. She wasn’t there. I tried again to inhale some remnant of her perfume, and all that was left were the stale gasses of the office and they were foul.

The dance hall in my chair closed down for the day; the calypso slowed comically down as the juke box that had been driving me became unplugged. The ventilation system roared while my jig trudged down to something less amusing, something less obvious, something inert and miserable that can only remember that it had once been alive.

I hung my head as I watched my erection wither away and be unhappy that it hadn’t gotten to do all that it wanted in its blunt pathetic little life. But I didn’t care. I am more than what is between my legs. All that mattered is that there was someone, someone I cared about, someone I couldn’t have for my own had stepped up and made all this day of horror and of shame alright, and it was enough. As the naysayers and the scornful presented themselves and their vile opinions of me throughout the rest of the day, I had a place I could retreat to, a place I could counter it all with—go ahead and laugh, assholes, I don’t give a shit—where a beautiful Muse was holding my cock and kissing me and assuring me that she would be here tomorrow, too, even if it was going to be under different circumstances with a different set of rules in play that would forbid the actions I longed for as they always had; it was that brief irreplaceable moment that mattered. The moment I could dream about and take home and replay when I will put my hands on myself where she had, and I could fulfill what we had for that briefest of eons, even if she wasn’t ever going to be there again.

I have been given fire.

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