POTUS

There's all kinds of silliness—we work in the White House for God's sake, so it's hard to make anything out of anything; ever. 

Our attraction, to each other, was instantaneous, I'm pretty sure (meaning about the timing of it, not the intensity).  Well, I know mine was and I think hers was too.  You’d have to ask her.  Anyway, but, so life is strange and funny and unpredictable and silliness in the 21st century comes in all shapes and forms and so we found ourselves (meaning the articulation, physical, oral, otherwise, of our attraction) constrained by all kinds of things; our career considerations, the proprieties of executive branch, west-wing style protocol (which is ancient and modern at the same time), the sheer monument of the work hours (“the work is monumental when you work in a monument” was a quip I kept re-working trying to make it funny and even test driving it from time to time in the odd Saturday afternoon Senate sub-committee appropriation meetings that I occasionally got to attend; never to good effect) and the baroque, labyrinthine mouse-maze that is my ego (large) and psycho-sexual self-image (self-sabotaging, which my (ex-)therapist says is common in men in positions of power and with uncommon intellect, which made me of course immediately want to fuck her, thus the “ex-”).  I say all this to make the point that a lot, and I mean A LOT, was overcome in order for anything to have happened between us at all which is a testament mainly to what our attraction ultimately was. 

But I don’t want to go into, ultimately, what “happened” between us—in the end it’s fairly conventional stuff, if you exclude the part where the president of the United States, of all people, took one of us aside, I won’t say who, to offer some romantic advice, being a meddler by nature (the president that is), which I guess you know, and then so maybe that too is typical because there’s always someone inserting themselves isn’t there?  The fact that it was the president is neither here nor there (she would say “actually no, it’s both here AND there,” but that’s just her and, you know, an idea about what she’s like in case you were interested.

So this is all I want to say—this one thing, because it was a moment and the moment is what matters.

We were standing in the cafeteria in the west wing.  I’m leaning against a wall waiting for her to mix her coffee.  We’re talking, engrossed in the topic as we could be and often were, probably oblivious, consciously, to the pheromones  oozing out of pores and mixing, collecting in the air around us.  She crosses to me with her coffee, which apparently took a little longer to get than usual and thus she had lost her usual cool and had this tinge of aggressiveness.  She’s standing in front of me, half a step into my personal space.  Talking.  I’m cornered.  Not a position I typically like.  But I’m staring at her mouth, how the words are forming there and somehow how her entire face is focused there, her words, her phrases, what she’s saying.  I move to kiss that mouth, those lips.  And time stops. 

It’s stopped there still, despite everything that’s happened.  That moment is the last moment I can recollect.  Sure other things have happened, but nothing like that.  It’s right there behind the velvet curtain in my mind.  I step back and I’m there again, moving to kiss her lips.