Angel Lust

I got angry at the sound of emotion in her voice, because I found it to be a bit presumptive, a bit arrogant, a bit disturbing, a bit awkward, and even a bit repulsive; for she had taken a liberty with me that ceased to be kosher. The privilege of dressing me down was no longer hers. I mean, sure we were still friends, but we weren’t close friends. Not nearly as close as we used to be. It’d been years since she had called me in the middle of the night just to say hi and tell me that I was terrible at chess.

We didn’t know anything about each other’s day to day lives anymore. She didn’t know what it took for me to get up in the morning, and she didn’t know about the suicide attempt. There was a time when I would have told her about it, and I would have also told her the story of what stopped me. As embarrassing as it was, I wouldn’t have hesitated to tell her that I took the belt off my neck at the last second because I remembered that hanging resulted in a death erection, brought on by something poetically referred to as, angel lust. In short, I didn’t want the coroner writing autoerotic asphyxiation across my death certificate. But I never told her all that because things changed. We grew apart. And now the distance between us was making me angry. At myself. At her. How could she get so emotional when she didn’t even know about the belt? She didn’t have the goddamn right, I thought, as my anger swelled inside me, gathering in my throat, along with the truth.