"I am sorry I didn't sleep with you"

My take on this clever epistolary essay

This epistolary essay is written in response to two essays of the same name by Stella Tsantekidou and Pasha Kalachev. I felt a version from an older soul was in order. Enjoy.

I am sorry I didn’t sleep with you.

You were tired, I was amped up. We had just thirty minutes from your arrival and my departure and I had so much to say.

In that short span I had to burrow into your brain, parasite-like, and release my beneficent toxins, re-infecting you, completing the cycle of release and renewal that controls me by instinct.

Words, my tools, my contagious gifts to you, incubated in the deepest, dampest parts of me and left in you to remember me while I am gone.

I am sorry I didn’t sleep with you.

And by sleep, I don’t mean rest, because there was no rest for me. Bags packed, Uber pre-reserved, the airport waiting for me, just me, never mind the thousands of other passengers with their own origins and destinations.

You are both to me, origin and destination. And so to leave you I had to first make you mine in the way I know best. Subsuming you with my words, disgorging them from my trembling self, at a rate of too many per minute. Thus I could depart knowing that I must soon return, to reclaim my marked territory.

Your body.

I am sorry you didn’t ask me to sleep with you.

And by sleep, I mean fuck. That word we don’t say except when I’m already open for you, after long ministrations by your at first careful hands, starting on my shoulders, then my neck, then lower down the body only you know. Then can you whisper that word and have it land with the full force it portends.

There was no way you could have known that I would have let you invite me to fuck you. Because I didn’t know, not in those spare minutes, sitting together as we were on the basement couch, with our youngest child upstairs, far enough away that we could definitely have heard her steps on the staircase, all the early warning we would have needed to pull a blanket over our intertwined bodies.

But you knew I fear that vulnerability, the lack of locked doors, the threat of being discovered. You always know. And you respect. As you respected me then by merely holding me close and letting me talk. Instead of insistently pressing your needs upon me the way I pressed upon you mine.

I am sorry I didn’t sleep with you.

Had you invited me at least sixty things would have crossed my mind, reasons not to, ways we could maybe get caught, how I could miss my Uber, mess my hair, have to reapply my lipstick when we were through. All of those thoughts would have crossed my mind and the exclamation mark concluding all of them would be the one that haunts my aging body: What if I couldn’t? What if the climb up the ladder of orgasm, in this unexpected place, with all the risks attendant, what if I could only make it five or six rungs up the eight-rung ladder? Would you ever dare invite me for something like that again knowing that the shadow the failed climax cast would haunt each future spontaneous request?

I am sorry I make it so you don’t often invite me to fuck you like that.

You had been gone for five days, I would be gone for another four. For nine days we would be apart without a chance for you to invert the process I was busily consummating. To climb up inside me, not figuratively as I do to you, but literally. To release your benevolent fluid, incubated in your darkest regions, marking me as yours. So that I could leave and you would know that I would return. As I have always done and will always do, but drawn as much by your animal possession of me as by my need to unburden myself of my many, many words.

Your seed, my words, gifts we swap in hurried exchange. 

I am sorry I didn’t sleep with you. 

As soon as I return home, I promise myself, I will seek you out. The now-version of me is confident I will lead you straight to our room, throw you to the bed, strip you of your clothes, and own your body, not a care in my mind to distract me from my urgent mission.

But the then-version of me will likely falter, wait too long before suggesting, worry that you’ve decided, considerately, preemptively, that you should let me get a good night’s sleep before you invite me. Or worse, that you’ll be right and I’ll acquiesce to your unspoken permission to let me take things on my timing, not yours. And we will genuinely sleep together, just sleep.

I am sorry in advance that I might only sleep with you.