Limbs Akimbo

It didn’t matter, after all, how they were, what form they were contorted into, or what they looked like because their transformation was transcendent.

They didn’t feel like themselves that night. As he pushed her up against the door of their apartment, unconcerned about who might see them grope and tease all the parts of each other they had grown familiar with, she exhaled herself and inhaled him. Hands against suffocated flesh, squeezed by tight clothes to mold their bodies into versions of who they were supposed to be outside of their home. But behind that door—the one her head slammed into, and then his back—they were free to strip themselves down to raw skin, sensitive to the touch.

“How do you want me?” she asked, just as she always did.

“Just like that,” he responded, just as he always did.

It didn’t matter, after all, how they were, what form they were contorted into, or what they looked like because their transformation was transcendent. It broke through their soft outer layer, like fingers through the peel of an orange, stripping away the protective veneer, calling their bluff. Who are you really?

It was in those moments—the ones where she tugged and pushed and he bent and buckled—that who they really were emerged; clumsy, imperfect, dimple-skinned, sweat-slicked, textured with hair, weakened by their inevitable and quickly arriving surrender. They didn’t feel like themselves that night because the people they showed to others were inhibited, stifled, bridled versions of who they shed every night in dim light and with dampened thighs. As limp dolls with limbs akimbo and hair matted to drenched sheets, they completed their transformation, knowing full well that any minute now they’d have to morph back into who they should be.