Neutral/Negative

I went out with him not out of a sense of obligation and without any expectation that I would experience that much-described, difficult-to-imagine feeling. I hated to look at him and so averted my gaze, sliding it over only at intervals to alleviate the tension which accumulated like pus in a sore. When he laid a hand on mine, I felt revulsion, the slight dampness of his skin tainting me through contact with that permeable layer. When I got home, I called my mom, and I could hear the distance ringing through the proverbial line, temporal overwhelming physical in a wash of oblivion,, sweeping away the meaning of years like a dying echo in an empty room. My boy, too, lived in a corner of my phone, though he was not yet mine and was not yet really living, but I had no better way to define his existence than to cradle that cold aluminum slab till it warmed deceptively in my hands. An unknown future hinged on the instantaneous signals through resistors, which would obsequiously resist and concede to the tapping of my fingers. The next time, I said, I like you, which was neither true nor a lie but rather hung in the neutral space of a hypothetical, daring him to resist, daring him to bend against anything at all, but he only smiled and said, me too. So I drove home listening to the sound of the engine and the wheels against pavement and let him fuck me. He was inside me and then he wasn't, and I wished it not to have happened so I could want it again. His penis had not hollowed out a space inside of me, nor did I feel any obligation except to the past to which he did not belong and which I felt sure I would never know. I drove him home and when I said later, stupidly, ignorantly, I felt that this had happened a million times, that he had fallen asleep and woken up for years while I languished in motion, and that the space between us could never be filled because it was inside me.