Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)

​What language do they fuck each other in?  Does she whisper vieni amore in that fleeting moment the French call la petit mort? Throw her head back in ecstasy, awaken a living revenant every morning on his side of the bed? She sometimes wonders these things, these irrational, stupid, immensely unimportant things. Turning them over in her head like a smooth stone held in a palm, contemplative, as if somehow the answer will change something. As if knowing will fill that empty, dark space that exists somewhere under her ribcage, wedged up against her heart.  It won’t and she knows it. People talk about getting over someone as if it were a physics assignment to be completed, a household item to check off a grocery list.

​Cherries. Check. Toilet paper. Check. Forget him. Check. Erase the last year. Check.  What they don’t realize is you’re trying to move on without looking back and seeing the sun glint off her long black hair, her manicured hand fitting in his better than yours ever did or ever will, ever would or could ever hope to. In your rearview mirror is a perfect picture, the objects closer and farther than they might appear, the only thing that’s distorted is that you’re not in it. She loathes that girl and her perfect everything, the way the Roman alphabet rolls off her tongue with such fucking ease, the reverberating double consonants and all those other beautiful sounds that don’t exist in the English language. The sounds that are themselves pure seduction, they can’t help themselves, they pull you in. Beckoning. You are almost compelled to put your mouth on a mouth like hers. Need to know what makes those words sound so good, what it feels like. What a tongue like that could do when it’s wrapped around something other than the letter R. And so she can't blame him for leaving. He was right to want to know the answers to these questions, he was right to keep asking the questions. The perché, the why, is irrelevant. The wanting and the needing to know all those foreign tongues, this is what proponderates over the reason, over reason. 

For a bite-size snack of make-believe romance, read these short stories: 
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily