Love Hotel

I was thinking, “Maybe this is why I can’t have meaningful relationships,” when I saw the woman’s face again. As I had learned to do, I jerked my head sharply, wincing until it purged itself from my imagination. A flinch like this would always make it disappear temporarily (nearly a full minute) as if being physically thrown from my head and onto the ground. But soon after, always, it came clawing up the side of the bed to return home to me, re-entering my imagination. Was it mine? I didn’t want it to belong to me. The face was someone I knew from school, someone who in person could conjure absolutely no desire in me. She was small, but big-boned and square-ish. Her face, large, was far from kind or young-looking (as the woman with such warm skin before me,) it was loose and frightening! Yet, I was aware of the truth. Something inside me was making it appear. In my waking mind, could I ever see beauty in such a horrid thing? In that decaying face that tormented me and came between me and the purring woman? Of course, art is art. In that way, nothing can’t be beautiful. Of course, that's so. But it should have never ever followed me into a warm place. In bed with the warm, peach-skinned woman whose lips always kiss wetly, I was lost in effortless thoughts.