I desire you, Richard Armitage

Richard Armitage, weekend of July 14-15, 2012, San Diego, CA. Source: Me, My Thoughts and Richard Armitage

I desire you.

I want the ragged edge of your beard to taste, the fold of your neck above the string to nuzzle against, the glimpse of scalp at your mussed hair part to draw my fingers across to your forehead and smooth your hairline, your forehead to balance mine against.

I want to peel your rucksack back and push your t-shirt over your head and shoulders all the while.

When I was twenty, I concluded there were only so many faces in the world. All the faces of the men we see every day, I guessed, they all could be someone else’s. The livid face of the man humiliating his wife in the grocery store this morning over her choice of cereal, it could be the face of my lover, looking down at me after we’ve come, his exhalation skimming my cheek like an errant stroke of the thumb.

My intellect says: your face is yours, and yet someone else’s I’ve never seen. I apprehend the coextensive paradox and truth. I know your face is real and that everything I see in it is myself, reflected back at me, distorted, shadowed. The beard I want to kiss is my own.

And still my emotion says: your face is only yours. I desire it, I desire you.

Richard Armitage as Lucas North in Spooks 7.1. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Richard Armitage, I desire you most when your pictures show up in these metaphorical combinations — self-knowledge, vulnerability, generativity, all in the same package. I see this and I know, I feel — the place with the label, the same place I have to guard is also the place from which creativity explodes.

No wonder I want to trace the veins on your torso, the letters of Lucas’s tattoo, not just with my eyes and my minds but with my fingers and tongue. I want to taste that place where desire comes from to mark as firmly as I can where it is.

I’ve never been confident that most of what I witness is real. I was a poor Christian because I had no faith. I still have so little. The realest-feeling thing comes, always came, out of the center of me; I don’t know how to name it anymore — divine presence? knowledge? love? power? art? For years and years, as a teen, I thought it was music, the thing that sang without speaking.

Whatever it is: the thing that makes you feel like you’re living your life instead of just observing it. The thing that expresses itself as flow that makes me feel barren, fruitless, when it’s not there, that was just gone for so long. I want to touch it with my eyes, my tongue, my fingers, my mind, my feelings, whatever I can touch it with. I want to anchor it in multiple places. I want the map like parchment on your skin, I don’t want to forget again where it is.

The thing that arrests my gaze, makes me open my eyes.

The thing that you use to trap me in yours.

Richard Armitage as Mr. Thornton in episode 4 of North & South. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

And you taught me to refeel that thing: as desire.

For example.

This, Richard Armitage, I desire.

Here’s one of your faces that flirts with the genre of the photo — the picture that illustrates something in the article that tells us what your day is like. The definitive evidence that proves the search to know more always ends in less knowledge, that the attempt to grasp always leaves me empty-fingered.

The photo that proclaims, I will not be touched, even as you may not leave. The expression that says we will learn nothing, this could be anyone’s face and you will never know what’s behind it. Look, your eyes, say, but you will not see me. What I am is just behind my eyes, barricaded behind the chisel of my smile lines, and I am amused about all of this. More than you can know — but I’ll let just a tiny little bit out.

Look harder at me and see less, want more. No escape.

Richard Armitage, April 2010. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

But I desire you; if you’re elusive, I’m persistent. Above all, that thing that makes me feel like I’m living is drawing me onward, into your eyes, toward you. If your face is my face, when you focus your eyes, you focus me.

I look and see the way your jeans twist across your upper right thigh and groin in this picture and I desire your thigh, the improbable width and strength of the muscles of the dancer-cum-action man, the elongation of the femur, the worn patch on your left knee. I think about touching you there, and there, and there. My desire says: this belt is belted in order to be unbuckled, this zip is zipped in order to be opened. Uncross your arms. Uncross your arms!

Or here.

Richard Armitage, 2007. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

The unanticipated structure of your hand, lining up along the seam of the cushion against the relaxation of its partner, the open neck of your shirt, the way your neck cranes out of it, and again the eyes, as if you’re looking out but I can’t see it even as I can’t look away. Targeted, locked. I want to look harder and harder, I want to put my hands inside the collar of the shirt, brush your hair back from your forehead, tilt my own head back as you lean into me, as the ever insistent beat of drums I can hear in the distance starts to throb.

As I feel the desire reflected back at me in your eyes, I pull you from the couch, sense the rhythm you set in your feet, follow you, follow your hips, and then back off, my eyes still locked to yours, as I see you, feel you internalize the rhythm. Your eyes focus me still, as you back away from me and you school me in your dance, with your eyes and your feet and your hips.

I desire you, Richard Armitage. The strength of your hands, the curve of your neck, the motion of your feet, the rhythm you’re teaching me. The drums beat louder, louder, your motions insist, your eyes will not let go.

This desire for you comes out of me like a projectile spike headed for a target I can’t yet glimpse but suddenly have the trust to believe is there. I can trust as long as the feeling at the center of me persists, that coiled spring, that uncontrollable heat, that wild, energetic flow. The drums you make me think are beating for us are something I can hear as long as I can desire you.

Richard Armitage meets a fan during filming of Black Sky, Overland University, July 15, 2012. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I desire you, Richard Armitage. My hands want your hair stroked, my index finger tip wants the peak of your sideburn traced, my tongue wants the edge of your ear sounded, my lips want the edge of your lip brushed, a margin traced against that vulnerable, exposed septum, my ear wants to hear your breath in it, from close or from far.

I know that I risk trapping myself in metaphor after metaphor, falling through the rickety scaffold of word after meaningless word, and I don’t care as long as I can feel that desire.

When I desire, I can write, and that’s the other half of the puzzle, I grasp the desire and I can feel again and when I can feel, I can write, I can let go of all the things that no one else wanted, in words, all the things that could be so good if someone could just see them. If I could make them see, like you have made me see. I want to see you, you make me want to see, you make me want to make people see, inside you, inside me. And when I’m stuck, if I look at your face, I can look at my own, I can force myself to see even if no one else wants to.

I desire you. I hold to the flow, I leave my eyes locked with yours, Richard Armitage, and I can find a page that will accept all the love I have, because there will always be more to deal with tomorrow. More desire, more words, more love. Still, there are only so many words in the world, like there are only so many faces, and my words could be any words, except for you.

There is only your face. There is only my face. There is only desire. There are only words. The paradoxes are enough.

~ by Servetus on September 16, 2012.