A Decided Lack of Introduction

I'm not good at introductions. Let's just pretend we've already met, shaken hands, exchanged pleasantries, yes? There, now we're both comfortable, like old friends.

Things you know about me?

Well, I'm in my mid-twenties. College graduate, gainfully employed, and happily single.

And that's what all this is about, you know.

This is everything.

Finally having burst my way free out of a too-confining relationship, I've discovered that I've lost pieces of myself in the last few years. I've been too comfortable, too sedentary, and now I find that I've got to make up for lost time.

Losing yourself is never pleasant.

I spent most of the last two years of my life attempting to make a normal life for myself. Dutiful boyfriend, gorgeous apartment, solid, unchanging group of friends, holiday parties, softball in the park, pet-sitting for neighbors...

You know what I am not?

Normal.

Living this life, scrabbling at my skin, trying so hard to achieve the American dream. Trying to hard to do what was expected of me, to keep everything under wraps, drummed into me that no matter how bad things were, everything had to look good.

So I crashed.

And I loved it.

It has been said of me that I feed off pain. Not of others, but of my own. I need pain to learn, to grow, to develop. I cannot do things the easy way... it just isn't in my nature. If there is an assbackwards way to attempt a goal, that will be the first route I will take, hands down.

It isn't on purpose, though.

It's just how I work.

This is why I am who I am.

This is why there are scars all over my body, this is why people come to me with their secrets, their truths, their fetishes. I am a vacuum for others. The most uncomfortable, private people open their lives to me without any attempt on my part. I don't ask for their secrets, I just give them my own.

Secrets. Like so many things, they only have power if you let them.

Lovers. I've had many. Enough to have lost track, forgotten names. In the last few months I've tumbled in and out of enough beds that I'm even concerned about my behavior.

But you can't really help it when you meet so many amazing people. Or rather, I won't help it. I like learning another's body, their scars, their skin, the spots that make them shudder, how easy or difficult they are to please, what the head of their penis feels like on your tongue, how smoothly skin can glide when enough sweat is present, and how that sweat tastes when licked off the shoulder of a man pounding into you.

My life is not poetry. It is not beautiful or metered. It is crazy and raw, full of honesty, pain, and joy.

But my flesh, my flesh and yours, how we move together... that is my poetry.