I Am Used

We had started in the middle, but the driving force of him inside of me and the waves of orgasms I had been riding had propelled us forward, almost to the end of the bed.  My head was hanging slightly over the edge, and from that angle, I could see the shadows of the hallway.  One particularly intense wave hit my abdomen, and my back arched, my head tilted back, and I saw him.  A six or seven year old boy, whom of which I was positive hadn't been there seconds ago, was laying on the ground with an impossibly thin blanket covering him.  Somehow, my orgasm still managed to ripple across my body.  As soon as it softened, however, a man came ripping and yelling out of the room I had almost been positive I had been half of the only two occupants of. I looked at my partner's face to see if he was alert of the situation unfolding, and he seemed to be unaware. 

The boy in the hallway curled up into a smaller heap on the floor, trying to hide under the blanket he was clutching.  I don't know how the man didn't see the child on the floor, but as he reached the living room his screams of anger and hatred mixed with the echos of my ecstasy.  Panic replaced the dopamine surging through my brain, as it frantically searched for an answer to the bizarre events unfolding before me. 

Somewhere in the yelling on the other side of the incredibly small house, my brain must have made out some of what the man was saying, because I suddenly grasped onto understanding.  The little guy on the floor was who would become the man who was panting on top of me. I didn't have time to sort through disgust and doubt before my body betrayed me and sent violent quivers up my spine.  I was slightly surprised when the groan that escaped my teeth didn't disturb anyone in the house.  My lover brushed his lips against mine, bringing me back to another level of awareness, as I heard the definite sound of flesh on floor behind us.  I curled into his chest and whimpered, not from bliss but from fear, as the sounds of abuse came sweeping up the hall. 

With each strike, that reality became more real than me.  I had been so sure, though, that I existed.  It became harder to think of anything, let alone grasp onto a memory, as the boy on the floor began trying to pull his father from his mother.  The very matter that held my life together, the certainty that I was substance, was failing me.  I was slipping, or maybe I was sinking, beneath the surface of fact.  It felt like falling asleep, but I believed the atoms of existence were unlocking.  Just as I lost consciousness (Was I conscious? I could be consciousness itself…) I frantically asked what would happen to me.  Was I fantasy or actuality?

I am my lover's coping mechanism.  I am a drug.  I am a song.  I am a memory that he holds onto when night slips in.  I am the image he remembers when he's bored. I am the sound that pushes him over the edge of climaxing.  I am the nonexistent woman in his bed.  I am the company when he must go back to lonely places.  I am the thin sheet of easy on a hard life.  I am comfort when it must be fake.  I am the hope of sweet things.  I am a hiding place inside his head.  I am pretend when I can't be reality.  I am pornographic images.  I am the stories he tells to friends.  I am not real. I am very real.  I, simply put, am used.