Broken Record: How to Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes

Devilsfilm

Emma Hix, Calvin Hardy Pic(s)

The needle of my desire always finds that same familiar groove, carving its path along the well-worn spiral of your skin, a circuit I have traced with my lips a thousand times before. Each time I promise myself a new destination, a different rhythm to our tangled dance, yet my hands, like traitors, return to the known landscape of your hips, the soft valley of your lower back. The scent of you, a heady mix of salt and sleep, pulls me back into the old script, my mouth finding the frantic pulse at the base of your throat as if following a map to a treasure I have already spent. I hear the same gasp escape you, a sound I have memorized, and I am the trument playing the only song it knows, my fingers strumming the same tense chords along your inner thigh. The climax approaches with a predictable shudder, a beautiful, devastating earthquake whose tremors I can anticipate down to the second, leaving me hollow in its perfect, practiced wake. Lying in the aftermath, the silence is not peaceful but accusatory, the ghost of my intention hanging in the air between our damp, cooling bodies. I stare at the ceiling and swear on the next breath that this will be the final performance, the last encore of this particular fever dream. But even as I make the vow, I feel the magnetic pull, the addicting gravity of your orbit, and I know the record is already beginning to spin again. The cycle is a prison of my own devising, each revolution a deeper engraving on my soul, a melody of failure set to the beat of my own stubborn heart.