Triangles – A Triptych on Love

Sunlight over sheets is a beautiful thing when you don’t mind it’s there. Our festival is over. Crews taking down tents and banging steel poles. Testing, one, two. You are no longer in my bed. Last night you had a key to my room because you are the director. You still do but you have so many things to see to. My clothes coming off gradually. First my pants. I walked around, the long tassels on my shirt playing on my thighs. We drank on the veranda looking at the empty garden, at the shadows of people who had gone home. Someone called and you said by the time I come back I want your shirt off. You are good at giving orders. I waited. Took it off for you in front of the mirror instead. Because the last time we were together long ago a mirror was our friend. When I watched you take me from behind. When you coached moans and words over my back like poems. Though you don’t write. You only direct. This time you were still. Look at you, you said. Coming closer. Your hand moving slowly, to run a cupped line under my breast. Then the other. We waited. Watching each other. Speaking through the glass. Because we don’t belong to one another. We are polite in the foyer.

In a few years, I’ll be going to jail for this. Fucking a married Balinese man. Over and over and over. Is a lifetime sentence. Will the government mete out our punishment by the times or the nights? Will the police collect hairs left on the vanity and in the bed, bag underpants tangled in sheets as evidence. Jerk off to the images we sent each other on our phones. Will they swab me for a taste of you? Will I bribe them with offerings? Lay back and let them take what it is they really want. To deny you. And defile me. Perhaps we could stage a false wedding in our defense, under a fake banyan tree. My wrists covered in tendrils of your come, stained hard, your crusty henna bruises, your cheap jewels all over me. But we won’t. They won’t let us. In our cells we’ll scratch out messages to each other with crude files. Etchings only we can hear because some dark spirit took sympathy on us in the night. And travelled. When the guards bang their batons on the bars to announce their arrival at dawn, we’ll remember the gamelan drumming, the bells we made in each other’s skin. How the night rang out. And how hard they tried to make it end.

I like your girlfriend’s way with plants. How the bottled green leaves fall delicately on all the hard white edges of your apartment, the near-empty bookcases, fleshy silhouettes like her, in the down lights. I’m asking for the wine she’s bringing to me, and you are standing there awkwardly. She knows, she knows, she knows. Each clip of her sensible heel on the tile. I like her camel coat. Her open plain face. I don’t miss how you ask her why she’s home. I like her, I say, when you try to kiss me outside. Moving my head away. Once you told me how you’d never leave her because she was there. And I found that weak, but it wasn’t like I really cared. You are something I want only after midnight. In laundries over washing machines. In whiskey traced places where we burrow into easy lies and hide. Legs wrapped around you too tight, so you come too quickly. I want your hands under my skirt in taxis. Your churlish boyish voice on the phone late at night. I want you to want me all the time. And I want it to hurt only slightly, every time you never try.

Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Griffith University, Australia, and Executive Director of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT), Sally Breen is the author of the grunge memoir The Casuals and the neo-noir novel Atomic City. Her short-form work has been published widely. www.sallybreen.com.au.