Could it Be

Could it be, after all this time spent evading the cliché, that my idea of a fun evening is actually just curling up with a good book? It practically makes me sneer contemptuously at the first thought of it, but then I realize that, with all the different wild things I’ve tried, I still haven’t discovered the definition of a good night. But reading, my old insomniac companion and mistress, with whom I have long since parted believing there were “bigger, better” things—maybe even “more mature” things. Reading, I thought, my foolish childhood escapism, which withheld me from real life and actual experience. So for these past years I have let dust settle on my bookshelves as I thrust myself into the world, yearning to live life to the fullest and all those other inspirational aphorisms.
I struggled through all this just to realize it wasn’t reading that held me back, but ignorance, still. Even with my reading glasses lost and still not replaced, with me racking my brain every night to devise some form of distraction, with me longing for the kinds of memorable nights, revelry and unspeakable passion fit to inspire a masterpiece, even with all this I find no more enjoyable and profitable way to pass lonely moments than reading. Have I not longed for the life of the intellectual, the erudite? To spend evenings in languished sophistication, indulging fine tastes and enriching myself with some engaging classic piece of literature—is this not how I have always envisioned my solitary life at its most settled, its most content?
Obviously, I need a little more love in my life. She’s beautiful enough to stun silence from my lips, a shudder and stutter slipped out, with a hiccup strong enough to stop my thought’s shit up. I’m speaking weakly, shifting my gaze to chase my bouncing nerves in circles around the room, and my sentence just ends in a second, interrupted this time by dryness in my throat, so I give it a coat of saliva. Bombs drop when the knob of my neck gives a bob, sweat follows it after I swallow, so loud how I think it brings me to perspire like a fire but with a man’s stink. She’s a goddess, desired divinely but mine is a thoughtless try, clumsy, bad timing and not just a tragedy that it’s me she’ll forget after the happenings of what young life brings. Like things to mothers who never see children, good brothers not given a sibling, it should bring sympathy with a mood to mine, of those others thinking of would-be lovers. And hers is a face that will make my own burn, like she shone the sun’s life giving rays when she turns to smile at me, while I watch lips I would taste, but cannot. Wasted days are these I’ve seen gone by, wondering why feet won’t follow my gaze to her side with a smile of my own and someone’s hand to hold just for once so I won’t walk alone.