nuts4chic - the online women's lifestyle magazine

Tania Boghossian

Left/Right Love

But I didn’t.

Cut to the last chapter. Hurry. Read the
last sentence, and then close the book.
This is how this story will end.

While I spent my days as a Food Not Bombs volunteer doling out bread and soup to the lines of homeless snaking around the Civic Center, Miles would trek downtown in a three-piece suit to the swanky offices of the Republican Party. What he did there I never knew — and never cared to ask. When we met at night, both tired yet filled with an unwavering and often vying sense of purpose, most of our time was comprised of political discussions — which somehow ended in a fit of passion. Miles rendered the brain an erogenous zone. It constituted mental masturbation – verbal intercourse as a form of foreplay. Tax cuts made him horny. Defense spending kicked his testosterone production into overdrive. For Miles, sex and politics were mutually combustible, and I often wondered whether he was tempted to jerk off whenever politicians debated issues like they do at the Republican National Convention. As a proponent of hand-and-mouth probing, I seldom found myself hot after analyzing Third World debt or the trade deficit. Occasionally, I marveled at his ability to get me so riled up that I would collapse on my back, screaming my lungs out, and kicking my legs in the air. Miles, ever the opportunist, would pounce on top and attempt to dazzle me with his latest trick. And it often worked.

In his over-priced, yuppified, rat-sized studio in the Marina (a.k.a., Trust-Fund-Central) we’d sprawl out on a florescent orange beanbag couch, some fleabag relic left over from the tacky 70s Partridge Family décor, fighting for the remote control. Inevitably, he crawled on top and soon we lay naked, tongues licking skin, mouths forming sounds, hands touching the most intimate parts of our being. Here, the lines blurred, and there were no boundaries between us. We kissed, and our bodies entwined in a wordless conversation, a place where an unspoken language gave birth to a whole new territory. And, somehow, even this was not enough to keep the fever alive.
Miles turned out to be pathologically ambivalent. Outside of the sack, I couldn’t tell if he even had a pulse. Void of an interior landscape, he averted his eyes, clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and didn’t so much as even glance in my direction to meet my unrelenting glare whenever I brought up a topic remotely related to emotions. Seven beers later, he would gradually begin to respond, grasping at words, sulking between breaths, staring at the door, where long periods of silence filled the void while the shape of thoughts were still breeding in his mind. What an idiot, I thought; what a goddamn piece of work. Say something. Anything.

Nothing.

He sits in silence, jaw clenched, arms folded across chest.

At some level we were both unwilling to give up our ground and meet halfway. Instead of embracing the yin/yang dynamic that defined our relationship, we held firm to our ego, our agendas and our ideals. The overarching desire to change the other eventually ruled – and destroyed – what we had. It was a power struggle, and we were not yet mature, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. We knew that we were headed nowhere, that we were traversing a hopeless trajectory. We will forever remain a half-read novel with good dialogue but a weak plot whose ending we predict in advance without enduring a painstaking read of its final pages. Cut to the last chapter. Hurry. Read the last sentence, and then close the book. This is how this story will end.

I will always be longing – for a different Miles, for San Francisco, for the years that passed like clouds racing through the sky, and for the days when love seemed so close I could taste it in the air. I will always wish we could have conquered a bold new land, carved our names in it, and erased the borders with our own two hands. I will always be hoping for a new ending.

2 of 2

Continued from Page 1