What is there to Love in a Man?
strip down, step into it, search for an explanation under its skin.
by Gaurav Deka
he is everything that is visible. Made of
things that are known. he is what makes
you see what is where
even in the dark — dig your hands, feel the flatness,
count the last bone, pluck the sex — when the
unicorns meet the dying moon. That is how you begin
to wonder, if he is nothing but an absolution
from the weight of discovering the difference,
that one needs to love better.
in my case, it’s a pair of brown crested nipples,
pinned taut across a night-full of hair. For those
are the only things you’d dream of
while you’d learn to touch differently, begin to
think of a woman, suck at her breasts and ask
of questions: where is the skill in desiring
things that do not produce? A body that is
less of curiosity and more a shadow, how does
one cope to consume?
imagine him naked, imagine him waiting,
imagine sleep, the pleasure of waking up to
touch the rain on his face, the stubble on his chin,
muscles on his back, freckles waiting to be pinched.
Imagine the smell of closed spaces on his skin. And when you
are done practicing heterosexuality in a room full of whores,
imagine him walking right through you: let your
body understand the physics of fluid dynamics
beyond the necessity of expelling.
For now, I’m giving you a mirror inscribed with
logic: strip down, step into it, search for an
explanation under its skin. Locate
the points of sameness that you seek desperately
in him. There is no kindness in loving an image
of your own. No, you aren’t god! No empathy
in aspiring to win over a heart that knows little
of an ocean’s depth. Begin to understand, if you are
haunted by yourself, or what is it that makes
you seek a man inside you.
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Gaurav Deka studied medicine at Gauhati Medical College and Hospital. When not writing, he is a practicing psychotherapist. His fictions, poetry and reviews have been published in The Open Road Review, The Tenement Block Review, Café Dissensus, The Four Quarter Magazine, DNA-Out of Print, Northeast Review, and The Solstice Initiative, among others. His fiction “To Whom He Wrote From Berlin” won The Open Road Review Short Fiction Contest, 2014. He lives in Delhi, India.