A man lives in my head.
He’s taller than me, bigger than me, blond and blue eyed, kind and funny and the perfect conversationalist. He makes me laugh. He makes me feel desired. He makes me believe I have a place in the imaginary world inside my head. I’m a lesbian.
In my imaginary world I’m still the same me, except all of my ‘flaws’ have fixed themselves, except I still have them occasionally because I still need to be comforted. Even inside my head I cannot allow myself to be fat, or to have imperfect teeth, to have blemished skin, to have sagging tits and knock knees and a weak jawline, but he doesn’t mind any of that—I’m lucky to have him as my husband. When looking in the mirror proves to be a challenge he’s there to hold me in his arms, when life tires me out he talks to me in his deep, sweet, knowing voice and tells me it’ll be alright. That I’ll be alright. His embrace is so warm. His kisses feel just like home.
I like to imagine us having sex quite a lot. I don’t touch myself, it doesn’t arouse me like that, but I daydream for hours and hours in a day about all the different ways he could take me, all the different things I could ask from him and how he’d do all of them for me because he loves spoiling me. He loves my naked body, he worships it, he handles it like it weighs nothing. When I’m afraid, he’s patient. When I’m turned on, so is he. When I want to be naughty, he delivers the sweetest punishment.
I have this one particular scenario that I love the most. It’s not really a dirty pleasure, but more like my safe space that I run to when life wears me out. I haven’t told this to anybody, but then again, I don’t think I should, anyway. If I had a therapist, maybe.
Anyway.
In this one, I’m terribly injured. A car accident. Somthing worse. Doesn’t matter. He sits beside me in my hospital room like a guard dog and he never leaves me. Our friends try to tell him to rest, but he just looks at them with bloodshot eyes and tells them he would never leave me. That I’m the person who loved him the most and there’s no way he would move from his seat now. He wouldn’t want me to wake up and be alone. He wouldn’t want me to be scared.
And I do wake up, one day. I wake up locked inside my own body, unable to move, talk, do anything but just look at him with my lifeless eyes. Sometimes I communicate with him through my gaze, blinking once for yes and twice for no. Sometimes I am but a ghost, stripped from reality but my body is still there; the doctors tell him one day I might be back and he clings to that hope because he thinks I deserve it. Depends on my mood.
Imagining this fills me with such a big sense of relief that I eventually calm down and forget about the real world for a peaceful bit. No responsibilites. No forced communication with anyone. No choices to make. All of these have been taken away from me by some mysterious force and he’s still by my side, loving me through it. He dresses me in the morning, undresses me at night. He puts my favorite shows on and watches them with me, then he tells me what he thinks of them once they end, what he liked and what he didn’t. He brushes my hair. He paints my nails. He reads to me. He sings to me. He puts me on a wheelchair and pushes me around in the museums we liked to visit so often when I was still me, and we even go to the park if the weather’s nice, looking at the ducks and the swans, the bautiful sunset, the gentle meadows. He puts me to bed and kisses my forehead before we go to sleep, he smiles at me in a way that reminds me that despite everything, he’s still here. I love you always, he whispers in my ear, I love you forever and always.
