"you're so, innocent"*, he said to me, eyes widening, soul opening, gritting his teeth letting this word take over my entire body, my body that would now belong to him, withholding his fingerprints like scratches on a penny
i absorbed his sentence and deflected it back out into the universe, for i never really considered myself as such, innocent.
what does it mean to be innocent, why did it excite him so much? was it my lack of experience? was it because he had never encountered someone with such purity in their heart? had he never touched the soul of someone who was comprised of mostly good intentions?
i realized his excitement really was just masking fear. he was afraid of me. if i wasn't using him, i was good. if i was good, i mattered. i don't think he had every considered the fact that a woman he was investing time with could matter. i don't think he was the type of person who wanted to care. so to fold up the fear like origami, and shape it into a facade, he began to express aggression. he was mean. i could not understand this. if i was so innocent, why was he trying to take this away from me? was the concept of my good character making him angry? i remember looking into his greenish eyes and feeling smoke in my lungs. my body polluted by his piercing stare, and i watched as his soul arose out of his shell, like fumes and dissipated into the air around me. the anger then turned to tiredness. i watched him sleep and i wondered if it could even be called that. i had never in my life seen someone in such deep, emotional pain that even when their body is resting their face is stiff and fragile as if he had been resting their his entire life, accumulating dust, hardening the cracks of his smile, cementing his ligaments until the possibilities of him standing again were not even questionable.
watching him, i thought about this innocence he described, and about how he was almost envious of it, how he wanted that for himself and somehow knew that he once owned that quality but somewhere along the lines of a wrong left turn or a path not chosen he had lost it. what he didn't know was that it was still there.
don't get me wrong, i had never met such a cold person in my entire life, but at the same time, he was like fire.
i rolled over next to him, holding his arms, comforting his sleeping body in hopes of him somehow regaining consciousness and becoming aware that he does not have to be so guarded, so cold, and so afraid of being vulnerable. i hoped he'd find the warmth he already has, but i too was tired, so i closed my eyes, and fell asleep.