Intimacies

I've been with a woman twice now. I still remember the way she let my fingers guide up the hem of her dress. The subtle shock caught in my throat when she did not stop me, but would not kiss me, either. Only looked at my eyes with her own like cappucino supernovas keep you up long into the early hours. I struggled sleeping for days.

Before that night, being with a woman had never occurred to me, not once. I'd gone through life impervious to the occlusion of desire, yet I carry still shamefully the memory of taste, her stolen star nipple graze against my half-open lips. The mothering instinct that told her at that precise moment to press it inside my mouth, and hold my head steadily in place, not as a lover might, yet not fully like a mother, either. We stayed for several seconds, both of us closing our eyes. I, mortified, never fully able of shutting out my ever-churning brain. Never learning that not asking sometimes is wiser than asking. Red-hand shamed, but elated, also, rasping on a high, riding to the clouds the honey-drip warmth of her closeness to me. I'd never allowed myself to look at women the way I looked at her, never understood the importance of my own inner-sanctum permission. I could guess at how she felt, but I couldn't know. She carried herself, always, as a mystery into my life, to be administered and gazed upon at will. Made me feel, always, a little starstruck.

What privilege, to love somebody so beautiful, and for her to acknowledge me. For her to run her palms over the hill-tops of my sides, to pull me closer, to press her belly into mine.

I never told anybody about this. I never knew what they'd say, nor what I should. Once in a blue moon, conversation would turn to. In different circles, but always the same hushed tones - the fantastic not knowing of where the borders of attraction reside. Which ones am I allowed to look on, and trace with the length of my gaze, and fixate on a dent in their cheek, or the curve of a ribcage?

We're living times of great fluidity, yet still, we go most our lives wondering am I allowed to want the holy shard alight in other people?

Though my peers spoke about her often, I never joined in, for I knew they didn't speak specifically about her, and worried how they might perceive me if I uncovered her too lightly. She came to me with soles older than mine, and ran her manicured hands through my short-crop hair, and whisper-hinted I might be some kind of miracle.

The second time was very different. It was years after, and by then, I thought convinced I'd lost my shine, that my lips were too wide, and I'd gone and squandered the brilliance that had, in my youth, attracted all sorts to me. When do you go from being a brilliant, promising young thing to only just being, and how do you ask forgiveness for this?

She came to me a wildflower gypsy queen, unfettered by the shalt-nots enshrined in my eyes. Painted heavy, well-lined eyes to give me the illusion of composure - hers or mine? She had, this second stollbird of my erratic-compulsive life, a way of making me wonder where the border of self ended and where others began. Like I was part of something broader than I'd known possible.

I worshipped her secretly for months. Allowed her to see inside the crushed fruit that had become my brain, steady-drip on a cocktail of meds and dope. Wore myself naked, changed before her eyes the shirt off my own back. She helped me off a ledge, twice metaphorically, and once, third time lucky, not-. Before her, I never thought of myself as someone who might want to end things. It somehow seemed unbecoming of what the previous one had loved, or claimed to. I told her, this second mother-lover-alien-woman of the intense shame I felt, the milklessness of her former nipples in my mouth, the way I still longed sometimes to hold my ear to a swollen belly and hear kicking, welcoming me back inside.

She held me at a distance, but with her grip steady, and said I loved her not as a woman, but as a receptacle for all the truths I'd hidden from myself. I asked, did it matter as long as it was still love, at the end of the day?

I liked to tease with my palms the stubby fuzz of her unshaved calves, and lick the sweat from her armpits. Let me forget myself as a person, and play at wanderer, the way I had as a child, this sanctified exploration that nobody in my life had warned me I would so desperately enjoy.

It fills me, though, with great noise. With should I's, and worse, the mortal-pressing fear of what my life would be like, were she to suddenly vanish from my life. Even at my age, I have not yet learned to translate good things outside the bounds of shame and the gut-wrench fear of them being torn from me. I suspect, in a way, my arms are still not strong, that though I'm being asked for a full-grown woman's due loving, I have yet only the heart of a child, insufficient and unfulfilling.

One truth is, life was much simpler when I wasn't asked to love. But another, flowing immediately into the first, is I didn't take with me a map, am unsure how to go back. I rinse the wet, watch the errant short black hairs float merrily down the drain, and bring the razor to her skin once more.

Adjust on the edge of the tub so that I no longer see myself in the mirror. The moment of reflection passes. Must not forget I'm only transitory, and no great confusion of mine will be great forever.