obsessions

It is not the love. Obsession comes from within. Some vital thing missing and the potential to fill the gap with someone else. The need to feel better about yourself. The glimpse of something you have always wanted to be. A scrap of talent that makes you feel forever inferior.

And so you covet.

The physical comes after. The physicality is the usual thing. You are used to finding the warm bodies irresistible. This is nothing new. But add to this the terrible emptiness, the lack and there is alchemy.

But do not mistake it for love. The love is there and there is an intersection but it is not the thing that binds you. The love is familial. Recognition of commonality. Obsession comes from a place where something is missing, the need to repair. The love does not come with a sense of urgency. I must unpick it so that I can put it together for myself. I am making this thing from scratch, and each thread must be perfectly placed and perfectly coloured.

erasures

The things that can't be erased sustain us. We pretend to forget but the memories return like wine stains on a carpet. They are in the meat of us. They are like bruising and we imagine that time will fade the livid colour and perhaps it will. Time eases everything from acute to a muted sepia.

I can't imagine that passion will withstand this erosion, but this is the premise that I will begin from. Maybe it is not the specific passion itself, but the idea of passion that is so long lived. We come to this point and there will be a juncture. The intensity of it is about timing, circumstance. I cannot bring myself to call it love. But it lodges physically. It is a disease that settles into our bones, making our legs shake. Eventually we will be worn away by it, but for now it is molten. It pulls focus. A veneer of normality is brittle. This thing will crack it. Passion spilled out all over the place. Like blood. Like ink from that squid I once caught in the night. Noticing the stain of it, only later, in the morning, when the light had come around once more.

escalation

Don't talk to a boy because talking will lead to sitting beside him on a couch. This will lead to an arm around your shoulder which will lead to the inhalation of your perfumed hair. One thing leads to another is the warning they give to you. You have been warned and yet you sit with a boy and you are anticipating the escalation before it has begun. Do not touch or you will kiss. Do not kiss or you will make love. And so talking opens up the possibility of his penis. Sitting foreshadows the possibility that you might shift slightly on the couch and throw your leg over his lap and it would be done in a second, this entering into something.

Potential tristes, each and every conversation. Your vagina settling onto his penis at the warm heart of every interaction. You are filled by the potential to be filled.

In the playground they draw a line across the asphalt. Girls on one side. Boys on the other. And they meet at the line to learn games that involve clapping hands. If it weren't for the line they would remain coyly in their segregated groups. It is the warning that drives them to link fingers. It is the banning of books leads to more reading.

small child

Good to have had empathy, says the small child in the lolly aisle. Breath like chocolate, the taste of the denied still on the lips which are stretched to screaming. Empty hands. I have anticipated this furious tearing away. I have empathised. On the point of shriek or tantrum I pause, strange dejavu. It settles me to know these things in advance. Everything has been before. This strange future knowledge is the echo of past lessons. I close my mouth, the shriek unuttered. I relax into the lesson.

New Novel

You feel nothing but you do it anyway. All in your head. Head work. We use this term as an acusation. Murakami, Auster in his weakest moments, Beethoven. We still have a symphony to perform and perhaps my heat is enough to warm it. You feel nothing but you play the notes, not with the skill of the savante but with enough knowledge to get by.

How is it that we are so completely unaligned. I dance, you follow awkwardly. I am all flesh and heart. You do the head work.

A + B = an equation that you have practiced. And so it goes, this thing between us figured, decimal place by decimal place until we come to our separate conclusions.

The joke

The joke is that he is under her skirt in an elevator.

They laugh.

I wonder if they are laughing because they are in an elevator doing this or because it is funny that he would lick her vagina. This kind of behaviour seems ordinary but I wonder if they don't do this, these boys. All of these boys. Not liking it because it tastes of flesh and juice. Not liking it because it is too intimate. Not liking it because there is hair. Not liking it because that is where we bleed from.

The audience laugh and I do not. It is not funny because I like to be the recipient of this kind of attention, not all the time, but some of the time. I wonder how many head jobs, how much spit or swallow, how much hand on the back of the head a woman has to get down to before a man can kneel and put his mouth to her and not snicker.

2am

The 2am seduction. The witching hour. The time when novels are written, homes broken and entered. The time when lights are switched off and arms are stretched out over couches. A yawn becomes an embrace because, perhaps, we are at a low point. The time I wake, haul myself up in bed and wait for the clock to come clear in my focus, just a vague glow at first but I know the time regardless. I wake at 2am. Sometimes at some minutes past the hour. Sometimes before. Anticipatory. I wake and I think about words unwritten and words being spoken in other places, battlements breached, the lowpoint of the high point depending how you see it. My low point. Your high point. Strange that I wake to it. Strange that I know in this ridiculous way. This witchy way. My eyes focus, the numbers solidify and it is 2am.

In the story

In the story it could all end at the resolution. It could stop at the moment where they come together, mutual understanding. Making good a bad note held too long. In the story they could find themselves in bed together, one chance to salvage a little of their self respect. Knowing that this unrepeatable kiss would sustain them for a while. Knowing that the clamour of fighting can be drowned out by the muffled grunt of a single orgasm. In the story there can be a neat ending, but life has no neat endings, not unless you choose the moment and walk away from it, tying the thing in a knot.

I watch Disgrace and I see the ending followed by a lack of resolution. A drawing out of the resolution. What might be neat is followed by a limping string of events that serve to muddy things again.

In my story they do not walk away from each other at the moment of resolution. They choose to stay, and so the muffled orgasm will be followed by more fighting and more fighting without the relief of sex to clear the decks once more. Their timing will be perpetually out, a toy bird ducking its head to drink the water then stuttering into a graceless fall and bob and nod. Forever if you let it drink and fall away again. The pattern can not be broken unless someone steps in to remove the glass or, better yet, the bird.

learn this

Lessons learned and repeated and learned again only to be repeated. Circle. Change now. Now. Learn now. Grow up. Remember that you are alone no matter how you trick yourself into thinking you have others. There is just you to lean on, you to find yourself attractive, you to change the battery in your vibrator and run your bath and entertain yourself. You are alone with your work and no one else can make it better. You admire others, but really they are undeserving of your admiration. You put yourself out to help them but it is a distraction from the fact that they do not appreciate you as they should. You do not appreciate yourself as you should.

Buy the fucking battery Krissy. Take the old one out and go to the shop and buy it because you must not rely on the world to make you feel whole and sexy. You must be alone in this and all things. Have you not learned?

Learn learn learn learn learn learn.

Your time is up.

sense memory

When I walk down that street and stop and I feel that time we walked down it together. When I glance into that cafe - first date. I waited for hours for you to arrive, arriving early, my work a pretense. When I fill the bike with petrol and I remember setting out for the ride, early, like it is today, like I am leaving.

All this is fine for now, for today because the memories are good and clean but one day the smoke traces will lead me back to people I miss. People who are gone. Dead perhaps or disappeared in a stamp of feet and a barrage of fists.

The secret lurch down in my bowels as I remember sex, touches, kisses. Sense memory stirring me like a drug, like the acid sweat smell of a trip coming on and all the trepidation and excitement that goes with it. Sometimes the memory of a thing is almost better than the thing itself.

before

In the before times. In memory. In bed, lying face to face and should be sleeping but can't. The race of a heartbeat. The breasts that feel so taut and full that they might rise off my chest like dough that has been left too long. I remember my breasts most of all, the ache in them, and wanting your hand on them, the little reach, the fingers kneading, the nip of teeth. Now as it was then. still fresh. still making my nipples hard and tight to think of it.

Will this ever go away? This longing for a distant past? This flesh knowledge? Wet. I become wet when I think of it for any length of time. I do not become wet for other memories. I save this for you.

They ask about obsession and I remember. Distant past that might have been last week or the one before. You do not leave me. I return to you. Will this be forever? Is this single train of thought a faithlessness when the one I love is here and tangible and cared for?

You are a symbol of yourself. This is not a hat. This is not a pipe. This is not you, this is me and the memory I drag up over and over. This is you worn smooth and turned into the thing I want of you. This is me, my orgasm, my orgasms. Over and over without much effort. Minimum effort. Maximum result.

Note

To those who have written comments. They are read. Thank you for your feedback. It is important to me. I have decided to post only the comments that directly add to the work for an audience. I am using this blog to find my way into my next project, not as a diary, and often, comments posted just distract from the flow of ideas and make it seem that Furious Vaginas is a personal account of what is happening in my life. It is not. My own life is far more tedious. FV is an experiment in language and a gathering of material for a new book.

Many thanks for your continued support.

people to have sex with

We sit up and there is the kind of buzz that can't be dulled by alcohol. It is the aftermath of good company and a string of hours suffused by happiness. It is the knowledge that loneliness lurks beyond the glow of the hearth but that for now the fire is in it's final moments of blaze and all is well with the world.

We talk of people you could have sex with. I imagine this in gentle sepia. I imagine you dipping your head to kiss their necks, these girls, some of whom love you. You are surprised to be loved, it seems, or perhaps this is just a conceit because you know all too well that you are lusted after. Still, when I imagine you with each one, I imagine you clothed and doe-eyed. I imagine the romance of it when you have never been a romantic soul.

You ask for a list of people I could see you with because your judgement is blinded by the lack of sex and your proximity to the possibilities. You ask me to picture you with your perfect other. I picture you, but they are faceless, these others, because it has been a good night and we are here in the early hours of the morning and the picture of us is infused in that same sepia glow. All I can see is the laying down of memories, our memories.

We will be friends for ever you say and it might be true. You with your indistinguishable other. Me with your children close as family. But I cannot picture the sex because this is all about talking way into the night, fond smiles across a conversation-lit room, and the safe wonderful hug at the end of it. This is the wonderous idea that now, finally I can be a friend for you, just for the sake of it.

Old friend

He holds my hand. He touches me on the shoulder. He hugs me and it is a hug starved of skin. He is rarely hugged. He shambles. He has become monstrous, and yet he is diminished. Lost weight. Lost life. Lost dreams. A life coralled by so many losses. He needs. I can give some things but not enough. I do not want to give him more. He is not my person. Even my person feels the lack of me. I have nothing to give. I have so little for myself and this small amount I cling on to jealously.

So he touches me and it is a man touching a woman, and it is an old friend, knowing that most of his old friends have abandoned him and I will not do so.

I am not the abandoning type. I am loyal. Kisses me on the cheek and I am reminded of other similar kisses. Other, closer, newer friends who I worry for. Don't let them fall as my old friend has fallen. Keep them safe. I love them more and if they fell I would catch them without question, I would keep this faith that I have in them.A hard promise, but one that feels right.

Publisher

I have found a publisher. A publisher has picked me. Suddenly my work has been elevated to something that others would want to read. I am chosen. I am no longer the wallflower with her pile of words that might be awful or, worse embarrasing. I am now chosen.

Nothing has changed, and yet importance has been given to a body of work.

This is what happens when you pick me. Suddenly, I am given credibility. I can relax in to an easy confidence. I think of all the times I have been picked. Someone agrees to have sex with me, not the next girl or the one before, but me. Legitimacy I become someone desired.

After the picking is done with I know that nothing has changed. My work is still as good or as bad as it always was. My body is as questionable. My sexual prowess has not been transformed by the fact that I have been chosen.

I am considering the idea of sexual verses sexy. I am considering the concept of beautiful. All this for something I am writing, but I pause and I think, before I was published I was still this good. Before I was picked to be someone's lover I was still as full of sex.

I need to learn how to pick me. I pick me. I don't need you to pick me at all. I know when the work is good. I know when I am all sex in a thin skin. All this is up to me.

Other story

There is always some other story. I see you curled around your guitar and there is a story somewhere, behind the things we assume to know about each other. You are the stranger to me. I am the stranger to you. We keep an image of each other in our heads but it is never the whole truth. I like the you that I keep. You like the me. This is enough for both of us. We live our lives separately and invisibly. We say we love.

At night we roll away from each other and curl our arms up and hug nothing, very tightly.

This is the way we keep love for the longest time. This is the way we mind each other without becoming disappointed. This is love and I am comfortable with that.

Desired

I am desired because I am desirable. I am desirable because I am, at heart, a good person. I do not set out to hurt or to belittle. I am honest and upfront about almost everything. I do not fit the mainstream mould but that is part of my charm. I am funny. I come easily. I find good things in people I love and bring this to their attention. I enjoy sex. More than all else I enjoy sex.

For these reasons if you do not desire me then the loss is specific and acute. This does not affect me or my desirability. Look at how I move, I will make a good dance partner, given time, I follow easily and am not afraid to take the lead. All the criticisms I sometimes hurl at myself are irrelevant. I store them up because I am a good catch, double entendres intended.

I have been caught, and I fall into his hands and he puts his fingers inside me and he says, 'you are desirable' and he is right. I have to nod, although at times I can't see through the hurly burly of the day to day to recognise this as truth. I am desirable, and despite the silence from the audience of poe-faced gazers, I am desired.

Empathy

My skin is not so thick after all. I carry this small seed of empathy that grows where it should not. Cuckoos egg. I can't help imagining her loss as my own. The poignant tearing away of something I thought I could own. The child in the lolly aisles weeping, empty-handed, my fingers still curled around nothing. I feel all the pain of rejection, the insecurities rise up, I am too large, too out-spoken, too unfeminine. Then I remind myself that this is her loss I am feeling and she is none of these things.

I feel the mean snap of his chatter and am reminded that I am privileged and may not complain. But there is still pain. Nothing gets easier with these blessings I have collected up. There are still the dark nights and I am still no less lonely. Only now I have no story and must remain silent. Or that is what he tells me.

I see her hurt and I am moved. I do not want to be moved but I am. I am sorry for your loss because I am no longer supposed to be sorry for my own.

ah huh

So maybe I am not sexy. I have no control over that. Sexy is how you see me and although I often long for this, right now I just don't need it. I am sexual. I enjoy my sex. I never tire of it. This body with its various flaws is just so perfectly tuned to scent and touch and taste. A finely tuned instrument in fact. I don't care about the output, the way I make you feel when you see me. Today, no amount of underwear shopping could shatter my mood. I am in my skin and, you know what? I like it here.

ah

ah the line. I butted up against it. Perhaps I stepped over it. Any way you look at it I overstepped something. Wracked by insecurities I think back to all the other lines I use like a game of elastics in the playground.

My fault entirely. No point apologising because I apologise every day. I am sorry but this will happen again.

Maybe all I need is silence.

Hensen

The new Bill Hensen. The furor. The flaccid young penises. The barely formed breasts. The available light. The darkness. This is about sex. This is about my sex. On landscape formatted pages, high gloss and a scent of binder's glue.

before work

Tired old images. I return, exhausted, in need or relief. I settle under the doona and think of things that never were and will never be and my vibrator is old and the batteries are almost flat but I manage it in that way that makes me sad afterward. I should stop doing this perhaps, dog at a bone, wearing it away to nothing. It is already so thin that I can see through it.

In the quietening of my heart I think about the way my friendships follow this same pattern. So thin that I could break them. And I do. Eventually. I rattle the fragments of us in my fist, pull the wings off it, throw it into a breeze. When there is no life in it I cry. When will I learn to be more gentle with my things.

I struggle into my clothes. Catch a glance in the mirror. Habitual wince. All this before dragging myself back to work.

aborted tussle

the weekend of aborted wrestling. So I thought maybe, stripped naked and with all the time metered out to us we might achieve some success. I came to it with my arms open. I came to it full bodied, only vaguely distracted by the housework and the washing up. Weekend away together, or something close to it.

What a joke. Weekend of growling and barking and standing tight lipped in our corners. We are less than friends now. This aborted attempt to come to grips with each other. I bring all my intellect to the task but no amount of craft and structural truths will save this shambles of a love. You and I for years, coming to some kind of internal truth. I stare at you and you are nothing but a manuscript. You are not my person anymore. I have no person. I have no new thing to go onto. Damn you were fine. We were fine. I miss something. You. I think I miss you.

father and son

so this is about a father and son and therefore it is not about sex but instead about competition and generational change and the horn-clashing foot stomping spring display. So therefore it is about sex. Penis like an elephant, like a zebra. The whole animal protrusion looking ridiculous in the light of day. A Hemingway-esque pissing on territory. A climbing up on her back mid-velt. A quick penetration more for display than for pleasure.

I am more experienced and therefore I am better. I am more virile, more orgasms in any one day therefore I win the king of the jungle.

It is about father's and sons and therefore it is inextricably about sex. Eating and fucking the human animal reveals itself. All of it about sex. You can hide it behind science or philosophy, volcanoes or gods, but still it erupts a thousand times a day. This territorial fucking. This beating of chests. And yes, I am impressed. And yes, I am interested. A female of the species, ever-attuned to the scent of fathers and their sons.

kiss

what if he can kiss. What if by some strange twist of fate he has this one thing that he can do above all else. What if he can kiss her and she knows immediately that she has never kissed like this before. Would this be unbelievable? Is a kiss enough to dissolve her ethical conundrums. Not just a kiss perhaps but all the other complications sealed in a kiss that will never be forgotten or repeated. Is this just too mythic? Too sleeping beauty? Too romance novelist wet dream? I never believed in kissing. I didn't kiss. But this is a coming of age and the young still believe in the magic of lip to lip.

I will make them kiss, not once, but for the longest time. Then we shall see where a kiss can take us.

about sex

Is this book about sex? This is a coming of age tale and every coming of age involves our blossoming genitals. He tells me that I do not write about sex. He tells me that when I write it seems to be about sex but is actually about something else. I look at this coming of age tale and wonder if I have betrayed myself in my lust for something young and fresh and still brimming with potential.

I used to love him, my boy, myself. I used to love to touch his perfect skin. I revelled in his shy enquiry. I knew that I would be the first to touch him, and as the first I would be without judgement. He would be too nervous to notice the hardening of my skin, the reddening of my cheeks where the veins have swelled and burst, a little map of damage.

I could settle into my boy and there would be the joy of exploring something new together. He would teach me to see with young eyes and to touch with trembling hands when the reality of repetition has numbed me.

I come to sex with a workmanlike pleasure. I enjoy the craft but the art is rare and the edge has worn off it. I am comfortable with the act.

So this book is about sex, but perhaps it is about aging. The rush to grow too fast, the tired looking back over one's shoulder. Perhaps he is right, my friend. This boy who can write as I would want to write. Perhaps, this young man is my teacher. Perhaps he will become one with my character and we can set out on this journey with that frightened, edgy joy of the just-begun. Talking about other things when it seems that we are talking about sex. And he never talks about sex. Or only rarely.

exchanging boys

What can I glean from one boy to give to another. This is where the richness comes from. A sauce developing it's various flavours from the richness of another element added. Some heat. I am fond of the boy but I am no longer enamoured. I have moved on. I have grown wiser and my child-eyes are open just a little more. It is no longer all black and white. How I have changed in a mere handful of years. I will no longer make love to the child. I need more than the shy interest and a vague scent of sex. Still I need to bring myself to settle into him, the prickle of his edges are an uncomfortable fit. My how my tastes have changed. Years intervene. Life picks me up and carries me. now I am addicted to the underplay, the less obvious traits. The long term intimacy has its own special sexual charge. Still I will disrobe before him. I will show him what it is to be in my thin skin. I will have sex with him but it will not be love now. I am fond. I am physical. This is all there is.

old love

Back to the old thing, the book that was in the drawer. A scent of decay, damp and dark and all the sex smells gone to seed in the years between. He has grown older now, my character, yet here he is, dusted off and still 15. The hand shaking, the errant blush, the erections which are both a pleasure and a distress to him. I have grown into his love interest. I am now her age. Perhaps I can approach her more kindly now.

We will tangle, this young boy and I, younger than I like them. Old-young and she young-old as I have become in my dotage. I will be kinder to her breasts that resemble my own, full, supple, yet subtly sagged, a nod towards the body I will soon grow into. A sad sag of skin that has not yet fallen but with this, a knowledge that even at my most disastrous sexual moments I can still make myself come in that way I like. I can find some way to reach my pleasure, and my lover, my beautiful boy, need not take responsibility for my relief. The easy comfort of an older woman who can deal with herself quite nicely. The joy of knowing she is learning, even now, even at this great age she learns something from you.

My character is there waiting for me to join him. The promise of a hug, a tussle, a falling into new sexual territory. I pick up my notes, my index cards, the great wad of years of my life gone by. I pick up this book that I once loved, this character I once took in hand. This boy I once went down on in a literary way and I am slightly nervous, as on a first date. Let us wander down to the river under an impossibly blue sky, and I will begin to remember why we fell in love.

Rules for talking about sex

I will be talking about sex. There will be an audience. What is said in the privacy of my own Moleskine notebook will become something that is said and cannot be retracted. My mouth has a habit of opening and remaining so, an open flu and all the creaking and echoes of my life all there to hear if you listen closely. So there must be rules.

Do not talk about the husband. This is the first rule, although this is a rule that I will have trouble keeping. Statuesque, becoming more rich and gorgeous with every passing day. I sometimes drag myself out of bed so that I can be there to watch him step into the shower. Unclothed, he is something to be savoured. Still, the sex is a no go zone and he is off limits to me.

My crushes. I can speak of my crushes but in the scheme of things they will swell to disproportionate sizes without the boundaries of my husband to contain them. I could speak of fantasy, unnamed bodies that I rub myself against to gain the greatest pleasure. But these are real people. People can be bruised. I must not be rough with real people. Perhaps I should not speak about my crushes.

Pornography? Certainly I can speak about pornography, but what was once rich and bloodfilled has no shrunk down to nothing but dust. I pick at the crumbs of pornography these days, but the orgasms that accompany them are dry and blow away at the slightest disturbance of the air.

Still I will need to talk about sex. I pencil the dates into my diary and it is a conundrum. What to say? What to say?

Rules of writing sex

Back to the grindstone. I have been wallowing in the play of truth telling. Just a game, truth or dare. I have been picking the easiest path towards truth. Now is the time to hunker down and dare myself to think about the craft of it. My craft. My only superpower which is sex.

Leaving space. I think this might be the first rule. Space for the reader to sink into. Space for you to slip into my skin. You want to touch what I touch, bite down into flesh or slip your fingers into one place or another. You want me to lead you to the adventure and to stay with you, see you through it all. If I were to leave before the deal is sealed you will be left with this lover that you do not know and perhaps nothing would come of it. Like that time I set it up for you and it untangled one drunken thread at a time when I left the building.

But I must hold back in the actual act. I must slip in one finger and allow you space for two of your own. I must kiss one breast and leave the other free for your mouth. Sometimes our lips must touch over a single nipple. Writing like doing. Leaving space for the other. Raymond Carver does it. James Salter does it. We will do it together, you and I in the same heady tussle. You and I make love to them.

good and bad orgasms

I had an orgasm that was a disappointment. I came fresh from a shower and, despite the lessons learned I opened my laptop and trawled for porn. Nothing. A blip. The blood rising to the surface and retreating again. The lips of my vagina barely thickening. No moisture. No joy. Is that all? And the two men still going through the motions, and the girl still lying there looking half glad, half scared.

So dressed then and wishing it had gone some other way. How can I let it end like that? The bus waits. I know. I think about the time it wil take to get to the day job. Bookshop awaits but there is more. Surely there is more. Real world. Nothing pornographic. Sweet moments. A little love. People conversing with just an edge of flitation. Clothed hugs. Clothed kissing. Old old old, I am getting old when people brushing past each other on the street eclipses double entry and a cum shot.

Story by Kathryn Santic

Kathryn Santic is a young writer from Griffith University. She belongs to a writing collective called Small Room. One of the members of this group, Chris Somerville has written for this blog before and has read at my workplace. I am a huge fan of his work and reading Kathryn's piece, I think these young writers are set to take over the world. Today I take a day off and welcome a new voice to furiousvaginas.

A Siren in the Night – Kathryn Santic

He lingers outside her window as if he simply happened there by chance.
As if in all the world, the stone steps of her building are nothing to him but a place to stand.
No more than two floors above, her body is restless, turning in her silky sheets.
And though the night and the city is warm, it is not the heat that stirs her sleep.

In the shadows near her building's door, a small light gently floats and flickers.
A light which rides the cigarette that rests in the spread of his strong fingers.
And as he takes a breath of poison, he lifts his hand toward the sky,
And sings of the sweet pleasures that she so frequently denies..

While he shapes each tempting word, his accent rises up two floors then falls,
So that only his deep voice remains, to seep through the cracks in her thin walls.
Brushing against her in her dreams, it strips her body bare,
Wrapping itself around her ankles, tangling in her hair.

Persuaded by his siren call, she shares his every whim.
Knowing that if he had his way, she would feel his hands upon her skin.
And while briefly dreaming of his kiss, she naively sees her thoughts as harmless,
Considering what might come of it, if she was to walk with him into the darkness.

Alone, she fights to block him out yet with no one to defend her,
She lets the smell of his brandless cigarette secretly befriend her.
And though she knows the gates that keep her safe from hell are thinning,
Her heart becomes a rhythm pushing her towards a new beginning.

And in the moment that control avoids her, when discretion and restraint forget her name,
His serenade undresses every part of her, undoing every promise she has ever made.
And as she lets her body rise, his voice lifts her from her sheets and from her life,
Carrying her down to the road below and out into the night.

alive

That feeling that you are in your skin. It is hormonally driven probably. A hunger that is almost vampyric in its intensity. The idea that some one other has blood and bodily fluids that you might roll on the tongue. The idea of filling your mouth with it. When this feeling comes on you know you are amongst the living.

Months of hiding inside the thick dullness of your skin have not prepared you for the sudden rush of lust. The day to day can overtake you. A trudge toward nothing. Smile. Laugh. Chat. But when there is no one there you know that you are emptied out. There is no smile to be had without performative imperative. There is no opening out to the elements without the scent of sex.

This, then, is the dilemma. Thin skin singing you are open to the pain that comes with being alive. But even with the pain it seems better than the dull thud, a migrainous gray. The safe and empty world without the sex.

So give me the sex. Let me teeter on the edge of it. Let me inhale it torturously through open pores. I chose this. I accept this. I live with this.

unresolved sexual tension

You can see it between them. It is in the way they fight like kids in a playground, throwing stones. He says he does not like her but if you step back far enough that seems unlikely. He is not nasty like this with anyone else. She is not mean. It is against their fundamental natures. They tussle. I watch them. She admits that is what is moving her. He says he is unmoved. Sometimes I believe him. She is not his type. He likes a prettier, quieter, non-threatening kind of little girl. Yet they argy-bargy till I begin to wonder. I can see the wrestling in the bedroom. Inelegant. Half play, half honest agitation.

Come on - I tell him - surely there is some small flame where smoke is billowing.

I am not attracted to her - he tells me. I am curious, but not interested. And suddenly I could slap him. Unresolved sexual tension? or just empathy and a sudden indefensible need to defend her from the hurt that she will surely feel.

wet

surprised because this does not happen. This is not how I am made. I am not the slippery sliding type and yet there is this sudden uncontrollable physical reaction. So rare. So rare to make it an almost unique experience and now my attention is hijacked. I can think of nothing else. Just the way it changes the way I walk. The chafe of my lips against each other, the idea that, although not alone, I might slip my hand in and check the feel of it. I am missing an experience that happens so little that it is almost never. Lake Eyre filling up with water, and me, half a continent away unable to dip my fingers into the clear shallow pool.