Making out with Mara....

Mara's a sloppy kisser. Even when I pull her into me and bend the lids of my eyes I immediately feel uncomfortable. Her tongue sways seemingly between my lips sharply like a credit card being swiped. The inside of her mouth tastes like someone has decomposed. Her teeth feel like cold moldy slices of stalactite burrowed deeply in a rancid, underground insect riddle cavern.

I don't like making out with Mara at all. I'd rather be known as the neighborhood dish at the local nusring home than be forced into making out with Mara.

I keep trying to shove her away from me, but her hands grope everywhere, biting into the back of my neck, with thick, poison nails. When I manage to get a moment where her lips are not breathing into my mouth, Mara endeavors to suck out the pigment from the bottom of my chin.

It's like we are back in junior high making out under the tube-slide and Mara won't stop giving me hickies. She's wearing vintage JEM perfume. She want's everyone to know that I made out with her. She want's people to see her in my Varsity jacket and little-class ring hung around her neck. She wants people to see our initials added together in the locker room using permanent marker.

D.V.B.
+
MARA

Our names forever branded and multiplied in a crooked heart that is shaped more like a liver.

I hate Mara and I've been making out with Mara all day. I've been pinching my nostrils and piercing shut my eyes. I've been writing dry, arid, tasteless academic papers. I am always so scared shitless what my prof's will think, even if they just rectify a facile comma splice.

After all, I am the crazy writer. I'm supposed to be an authority.

But I have to make out with Mara. I have to do all the tedious, dry academic homework. Have to write more footnotes to another man's genius. Have to work crazy hours so I can pay my exorbitant tuition.

Have to do a lot of things I'd rather not be doing right now so that one day, during a missed curfew make-out session in the backseat of my father's Chevette, I'll be able to taste the fresh pasture of her tongue; I 'll be able to feel the early dawn of her flesh and I'll look up and see that Mara has become someone else. Perhaps even an angel.

But today. No writing. Just academic shit. Just making out with Mara for hours and hours until I fall down exhausted and she slides on top of me, wanting to know why I give so much to someone who looks and tastes like her.

I don't like kissing Mara.