Letting go of the last book

I don't understand my character. I don't understand him because I still have the last book in my head. All I can think about is how he will try to race the nurse off into bed. I think about him masturbating. I wonder about his penis. I have gifted him with a foreskin because I have an intense but passing interest in foreskins at the moment. I am interested in his masturbation which is furtive and full of regret. I am interested in his lovemaking which is less robust than he would have us believe. He is all talk. He hides shyly behind his own bravado. On the rare occasions that he has been in bed, sober, with a woman, be becomes quiet and shy and follows wherever she would lead him. I cannot think about him without thinking about sex.

It has been a week since finishing the last book and I am exhausted by the run towards its completion. I sat at a desk until my back ached and my head throbbed. I stood up to pace or to masturbate, quickly, thinking of nothing but the next chapter or the next. My body has been wrecked by the rigor of it. I have become hard shelled, snapped back inside my casing, safe but quivering. I think about sex with my new character because the old book is still in me, but I have no connection with him. It bothers me. I feel that we cannot communicate. We have nothing to talk about.

I sit with him but I am ignored. We have nothing to say to each other, my character and I. I try to lie with him and I am still aroused by him, but I am all sharp edges and grit. My last book is still around me. I am coocooned. The sooner I shrug it off the sooner I will be free to climb into another skin, his skin. I name him tentatively and know that this is not his name. I have to find his name. I have to be naked with him for a while, quietly. I have to shed years and my gender. I have to know why he insists on being quietly optimistic when I would shrug and underline my existential angst. We two are not one.

It has only been a handful of days, but I do not want to give it time and space and silence. I want to press him into myself, I want to take on his shape. I want to speak with him and through him and into him. I want to abandon myself and the last book. I wish it were out of my hands, I wish I could send it out into the world where it would not nag at me.

Then, maybe then I will begin to enter his body.