porno vs romance

      Make-up won't come off quickly: brown stains smudge over the eyelids and cheeks, ink lies under the eyes, washing off the lashes. Lipstick leaves a faint red imprint on the lips, as if kissed. You rub your face with a wipe, trying to get rid of it. In your bathroom at home, with the sink staffed with special products in boxes and bottles, the process would probably go easier - without irritated skin and unpleasant stickiness - but you're at my place, and that's all I can offer.       You sigh, folding the smeared lump away, and then comes silence, underwater stillness. But, like a sonar, you catch me in the mirror. And I've been staring for a while.             "I'm fine," you declare.       Wish I could believe.       Can't tell the time, but the night is in charge now and won't release us anytime soon. Darkness, like a vacuum, fills the room and the world outside it - only owing to the grayish-green light of my phonescreen we discern each other in the mirror. If it dies out, there'll be only hope for passing cars - when they sweep past with a sithe, the headlights' tracks will get caught in the louvres and cover us both with stripes, like prisoners.       You're fine. Obviously. As long as the moon's race is on and we dread the dawn, you've got everything in check. You know everything about yourself without my abstruse speeches.       Like you know you'll be better off without him - the one in whose presence the sharpest minds turn unseeing, not for the brightess of his wits, but because he knows how to blindfold. You know he's done - doing - you wrong, this dishonest, unfair, cruel man, this child to whom you resemle a toy. You know it shouldn't hurt like that between your thighs. Should not burn in the back. Should not burn in the eyes. You're scarred with his good intentions.       Strange times we live in. Not even debauchery this is, not permissiveness - but a simple substitution, an endless voyage. Once you plunge headlong, you'll seek that familliar feeling everywhere. If so, then that man is an angler, a monkfish following the light before his very eyes, oblivious of where he's headed.       You must be cold. I am, and I'm in a shirt - you are wrapped in negligee alone. The satin shines unnaturally in the lousy light of the phone, with which I guard you, like a servant, from a person who has never been here. My hand on a cool shoulder, as soft and smooth as that fabric. I run my thumb along you neck so that you relax.       "I'm fine," you repeat, twitching to scare my hand away - and just bringing it closer to your cheek. You can try, but I won't let go. "I said I'm over it, Diaval."       "Then why are you here?"       No answer - and no pride taken in having brought you into silence. Always better to hear your voice: at least keeps the feeling that there is really a connection between us, unlike you two. With him you seem to fall mute.       Assumptions peck at my brain like hungry ravens. Maybe you had a fight, he exploded in insults, then decided to fix everything with sex you didn't ask for. Maybe you didn't even have to quarrel. Whatever happened, it didn't happen today - you're too collected, too clean to conclude otherwise. You would not have come the same day, let me see you like this, contrary to my most sincere desires. But I fear, oh I fear, that I still hit the mark. Only there glimmers a monstrous, selfish hope. If truth is on my side and strength is on yours, you'll gain enough self-respect and rage to stay with me not for the evening, but for the night, and not return. Your eyes twinkle in the apartment's twilight, and I catch their glow on the surface of the dirty glass, trying to decipher, find you under the the armour of makeup and chilly tone. Why are you putting it on with me? I will not harm you.       "Just take it off," I blurt out. You flinch - I scared you, and this scares me. "I meant makeup. Ain't much left".       With a crackling rustle of plastic, I blindly fish out another wipe - damp, cold, slightly smelling of alcohol and something floral. You've got eyeliner stains on your temples, and the lipstick has not been completely removed - this can be fixed. If only it was that easy to find answers to questions I'm afraid to even mouth. You will speak once you're ready - but then again, you have arrived, haven't you?       Accidentally aim the flash too close to see what I'm doing - you squint. I put the phone aside on the nightstand screen up, and long shadows lie along the cheekbones and neck. A face of a statue you've got, my lady - carved out of marble or alabaster, beautiful, timeless. But not still, not anymore. The less armour, the farther away the dead light of the screen, the more it exudes. Scupture comes to life.       I cannot understand him. Not that I strive to - I just dreamed of being in his place for so long that his actions echo with burning hatred. The most disgusting part is that, in the grand scheme of everything, he'd probably be considered a nice man. Well, or a ordinary kind of man, like everyone else. With strong hands, hazy eyes, and your feelings taken into account. He says he's providing fun for both of you. Not a glimpse of fun on your face, only remnants of mascara and wells framed by green rings, filled with feelings not meant to coexist. Your whole body burns with resentment, righteous anger, yet guilt splashes in your eyes, sparkling.       But what are you to apologize for - and to whom? To him? For not surrendering as easily as expected, daring to have an opinion about your own body? For what, for offending him? For not becoming a copy of what the rectangular screens show - there, in the dark, into which he stares like a fish with his trousers down? For not pleasing with real feelings to a person stuck in a world with are no feelings at all? Why would you feel guilty? Because your bed doesn't look like a slaughterhouse, because love doesn't look like pornography?       But there is nothing to blame you for. Not for that he preferred iron and plastic to the silk of your skin, clickbait titles and ads to the warmth of your body, a phone that heats up in hands, as it's used while charging, because he's desperate. Not for that when he feels the urge again, videos and photos will be ready faster than you. That, if one counts to three with an order to run away, he'll take a false start.       There are many of them, these boys with their porno, and seems like, if we stand on opposite sides of the barricades, our side is sadly defeated by hunger and assertiveness. When the cup overflows, and the world is theirs, where can we go? We, who move much slower and quieter, for whom physical proximity means something different.       You shuffle a chair, rising from a nightstand with a rustle of fabric, a silent breath and the cargo of a hundred weights on your chest. Heaven knows how long it will press on your shoulders, how much it'll trample you down. Will I be able to save you? Will you allow me?       Our eyes meet: line establishing, synchronization. Silently I ask if you'd want to go out: to prowl around the ink-black city, plunge into the neon lights and the roar of speakers to forget it all. In the same tacit manner you insist on the opposite. You won't drink either, won't smoke on the balcony. Guess you've tried it all already; I am your terminal station. I nod. So be it. I turn off the phone, studying the half-hidden portrait of the city outside the window, as you sink onto the bed, slowly and gently, as if walking on air. I mustn't let it grow, mustn't allow the expectation sircle my neck like a serpent if I don't want to suffocate - leastways because I'm not Stefan. You owe me nothing, and I'll stay at arm's length if you wish.       Metaphorically. In reality, a little closer.       You lean against me, when I move blindly abaft, and huddle up just slightly - a confession without a word uttered. We do not touch in any other way, we only gaze together at the darkness that has swallowed half of the room, at the fragments of life behind the glass. In the drowning gloom I see you more clearly than in the light of the brightest sun.       You say love is real - like a disease, but allow yourself to be wrong at least once.       Please, stay. Don't disappear to deathly silence, don't return with the first rays of sunshine to the world where the smell of danger is constantly silently streaming in the air, don't turn away from me. I will not harm you. I know what he does not.