I have 34 saved voicemails — what I’m doing is never forgetting a voice.  There’s M. with her Texas twang, the way she says my name still sends threads tied tight with longing down my back.  KC is in there too, deep and promising and two nights of cold.  C., just recently, just tonight, lost in his own thoughts and I laughed when he did (is this why I like him so much?).  K., my best, a drunk request that I was too sleepy to fulfill.

I don’t know why I hold so desperately on to these things.

My mind keeps drifting back to the boy who told me he once spent a year without speaking because the muscles in his throat and jaw were too constricted to allow that movement.  I just thought what a different life that must have been.

One of these days I will tell you everything and then lapse into silence.

If you asked me if I was sorry for the things I’ve done, I’d tell you no.

I kissed someone last night, tucked into his jacket.  The little things that warmth will do to you.  Turn that kissing into something hard, searching for the animals that hide behind teeth and tongue.  I don’t pretend much that passion is anything else other than a way to pass the time.  I could be passionate with anyone and it wouldn’t be a lie.  It just wouldn’t last.

And then I kissed someone else, because one wasn’t enough.  In the end, it’s not about anything other than power and proving that I can.  He went for something simple because how do you read a girl like me?  I’m as likely to walk away as I am to stay awhile.  What could I do but want a little bit more?  So a kiss on the cheek turned into a kiss on the lips and I did what I always do, I walked away knowing that in those moments I was the only thing he was thinking about. 

That’s what gives me the thrill, I can just bend these men without breaking them, that I can come and go as I like and I am that girl they’ll think about years later, the one who kissed them like it was the most logical thing to do and never looked back.

It feels like a small victory when I see you’re still using the pictures you took for me when we were together.  Like you’re admitting that you liked yourself best when you were with me.

What followed was a wretched series of exaggerated, supercharged affairs with men she initially welcomed but quickly grew to despise. She slept with them to try to find some kind of replacement for the one she could never replace. She was destroyed and knew it, but because she was beautiful there were always men around who were eager to try, and she let them. She let too many of them try, and their touching enthusiasm and desire only made things worse. She felt that she was suffocating inside her own life; as if it were one of those plastic bags dry cleaners put over clothes. When she breathed, she inhaled herself and her failure. There was no more air.

Jonathan Carroll, From the Teeth of Angels

This is, in the grand scheme of the past two years of my life, how I feel.  I’m dating again, after a few little brief affairs, and what’s the most disappointing is that I never get nervous.  Never get butterflies.  When someone kisses me, I expect it because many people think I’m pretty enough to be kissed.  You can call that ego or fact or some combination of both, it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that I’m unmovable, constantly looking for a feeling I had with someone, once.  It was love but it went deeper than that.  I sleep with people because I can and because I like kissing them for one night or two or however long it takes me to get bored and start kissing someone else.  I don’t look at these encounters as failures, but I do look at them as being quite hollow when all is said and done.

I’d just like someone to make me nervous to be around them again.