This is My Body, This is My Blood

Round Trip

Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light.
Did it take long to find me? and are you gonna stay the night?
Cat Stevens, Moon Shadow

The moon hung like a broken pendulum from an abandoned grandfather clock outside my window last night. I tried pulling the covers over my head but the white noise crawled under the sheets and played a busy highway against the mattress. I closed my eyes and tried to turn the roar into waves the way I do when I stay at a cheap roadside motel, but it didn't help any more than when I stay in an oceanfront inn and the pounding waves turn into cars on a phantom freeway. It's all the same, isn't it? Coming and going. Going and coming.

So I got up. I got up and yanked the blinds, let the light all the way in. Stood there naked in front of the window, daring the moon to drown me in his bluewhite rain. I know it's been coming just as sure as I know winter's buried beneath my feet and one of these days it's gonna burst forth and turn Cerro San Luis green again, so why not welcome it? Yeah. Why not.

Because I'm tired of this swinging door of seasons. I'm tired of saving daylight and holding onto mornings when the evening is inevitable. I'm tired of the goodbyes and laters and maybes. I've had it with watching my life unfold in a rear-view mirror, one hand waving as he shrinks in the distance. The sun does its best to shield me, burn the memories into a smile, but with the darkness comes oblivion--a million pieces of me scattered in the sky like so much nothing.

I stood there anyway. Let the lump of sad fill my lungs then wind its way up my throat, where the soft tones of denial turned into a howl that shook me to the core. I became the highway, the ocean, the nothing and the everything.

I don't know how long it lasted, don't remember the walk back to bed where the cats curled themselves around my legs like bookends. The only fragment that has stayed with me this morning is the last arc of curved light as it rose above the window, leaving behind a soft dent in the sky where I suspect that howl must have landed. I woke feeling hollow, quiet, strangely stoic against the weaving of heart and head as they rally for tactical positions.

I give myself over to my feet instead. They take me to the kitchen, back to bed, to the window, back to bed. Coming and going. Going and coming.

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Pearls Before Swine

Sometimes I play music while I'm writing. Certains songs conjure up memories, shadowy images of the past, prompting vivid embellishments of the missing pieces. Yesterday a familiar tune sprang from the shiny new computer in J's bedroom, stopping me in mid-sweep as I cleared empty sunflower seed shells in the hallway. Like me, J has a thing for seeding. Difference is he's like Hansel on a witch hunt, scattering spit-soaked shells along every step from his bedroom to the ktichen and back again (and again and again, as teenagers are wont to do).

In addition, to our munching favorites, J and I also share an appreciation for eclectic music--much of it from the past. Elo, Janis Joplin, Heart, Nina Simore, Radiohead,  Beatles, and many other odds and ends of various music styles often fill his playlist. Unlike my parents, it's not uncommon for me to ask my son to "turn it up" instead of threating to take a hammer to that "infernal racket." Which brings us back to me leaning on the broom, poking my thoughts through that viscous membrane of time to watch myself sitting crosslegged on the floor of my bedroom, incense burning, Jim Croce on the 8-track, scribbling in my diary. I had no idea then just how much time you could cram into a bottle and how hard it is to break open years later.

So, yeah, music inspires. Sets the mood. Or in some cases, shatters it into ragged fragments of a night not soon forgotten. As in the time my new lover and I were in the midst of a passion-filled evening wherein the two of you make every moment linger into the next, linger so long the CD changer moves to the next disc, just as he makes his way down to the center of heaven. It's like, only the second time you''ve made love and you're both still a little nervous, a little shy. But it's all going well, candles burning, wine on the nightstand, his mouth all warm and wonderful against you as the next song begins.

And you gasp. Not in bliss, but because your heightened sensory perceptors have just slammed head-on into  the first familiar notes of Dueling Fucking Banjos.

No matter how you frame it my friends, scenes from Deliverance playing across your eyelids in the midst of lovemaking is not sexy.  I fully exepected S to politely excuse himself and change the music, but then I remembered that I was the one who'd given him the CD, appropriately titled "Fun Mix." He must have thought I'd be pleased knowing he liked it enough to play during our "fun" times. Obviously, he either hadn't listened to it, or forgot it was in there.

In any case, he made no move to change the music, kept on doing what he was doing as if he were so involved with pleasuring my body he didn't notice.  Not wanting to break his perfect rhythm, I did my best to block out the song, and eventually found my way back to ecstasy, dropping all pretense of shyness as I woke the neighbors upstairs with my squeals of delight.

Afterwards, we lay together, tangled in the sheets and around each other. I sighed as he pulled me close and kissed the top of my head. S is a quiet, rather serious man, easily embarassed, which is why I'm almost sure he he thought I was asleep before whispering, "Goodnight, my little Piggy."

Almost.

Too Cool for School

I'm proud of the fact that my children grew up knowing the correct words for their reproductive organs and genitalia and how they worked. When I was growing up, parents didn't really talk about those things other than that you were supposed to stay a virgin until marriage and you could get venereal diseases from toilet seats so you better never sit in public restrooms.

I was one of the lucky ones. Thanks to a heavy dose of  painkillers that dulled her inhibitions along with her back pain, my mom shared much more information than what might be deemed appropriate for a fourth grade girl growing up in the Midwest in 1968. Although some of the details made me a little uncomfortable, it didn't stop me from goading her with questions. By the time she fell asleep with drool puddling on her pillow, I felt sufficiently informed, despite the fact that she'd left out substantial bits pertaining to anatomy.

Armed with a load of fascinating new information, I slipped a juicy tidbit into conversation with my two best friends on the playground the following day.

"A man's thing grows really big and then he sticks it in a lady's butt and pees," I said as my friend, Wendy, drew a hopscotch pattern on a patch of cement behind the school.

Lili and Wendy looked at each other then back at me. "Uh uh!" they said in unison, which being twins, was not all that uncommon.

"Uh-huh!" I insisted. "My mom said so."

Wendy stomped her foot and planted her hands on her hips.  "Our dad would not do that to our mom," she spat from between blinding braces..

"Go ahead and ask her. My mom wouldn't lie. She's a preacher's wife." I said it as if I'd gotten the information from the next best thing to God, which at the time, I believed was true.   

Lili made the cuckoo sign with her index finger, drawing circles in the air around her ear and Wendy nodded.

"Fine," I said, and tossed my stone on the fourth square of our chalked diagram. I hopped across the pavement, scooped up my rock, and hopped back just as the bell rang. "You're just not mature enough to understand."

The next day the twins reported back, saying  I'd gotten it all wrong. "The man puts it in the woman's  bagina, not her butt," Wendy insisted, "and only because he has to in order to fertilize the baby."

Lili nodded. "Plus they do it in the dark under the covers so they don't have to look at each other."

And so it was that we made peace with the unthinkable, curiosity deepening as we defended our misguided theories. Unbeknownst to her, my mom had started an urban myth and we were happy to embellish the story as it passed from my lips to the twins to their mother's and back to other children, who bastardized it with their own variations. According to Susie Buttleman, for example, if a boy peed in the garden, the seeds would grow into cabbage leaves under which the stork would later hide the baby.

It was another couple years before I learned where my bagina actually was and that I didn't pee out of it. By the time I became a mother, I'd long before determined to raise my children with honest and open communication. Although I meant well, occasionally I crossed the delicate line between being a cool mom and being weird. Like the time I put a vibrator in my teenage daughter's Christmas stockings, thinking that if they learned to pleasure themselves, it'd buffer their need to explore sex with partners.

As is often the case with non-twins, most children have very different personalities.

My shy and quiet sixteen year-old daughter, A, was mortified by my act of sexual openness. "Mom!" she cried out  upon emptying her stocking.

"What? I thought you'd like it."

She meant to throw the rounded pink tootsie roll at me but her  fourteen year-old drama-queen sister, M, intercepted. "I'll take yours if you don't want it."

It occurred to me much later that knowing M's hedonistic tendencies, I should have stocked up on batteries.

Dealing with my daughters' ripening sexuality was challenging, but not as difficult as being the single parent of a sixteen year old precocious son as he approaches manhood. I could relate to my girls because I have the same equipment and went through a lot of the same things. J and I have a very open and honest relationship, but it's much more awkward.

However, I continue to do my best to be hip, so when he mentioned that he and his buddies were "experimenting" with sex, I offered to give him a box of condoms. Knowing his propensity for physical comedy, I conditioned my offer.

"I'm not giving you them just so you can blow them up or fill them with water."

He looked at me, eyebrows raised. "Um, okay. So what you're saying is that if you give me condoms I better get out there and fuck someone, damn it!"

"No! I mean, I just don't want you to catch something or get somebody pregnant, or..."

"Mom?"

"What?"

"Do I get a vibrator in my stocking?"

"Knock it off."

"Flavored astro glide?"

"Stop it."

"Butt plug? Porn video?"

"Shut up!"

"Alright, alright.  I know you were just trying to be cool about things."

"Well, so much for that idea. Just promise me you'll be careful."

"Don't worry. And I appreciate it, but I can get my own condoms" He returned to his x-box game, guttural noises and flashing lights to draw him away from me and into his private world of ninja warriors.

Relieved of the conversation,  I recovered a fallen ornament from under the tree and hung it on free branch. It's my favorite, one J made in first grade from a photo glued inside a canning jar lid. As I stared at my bespectacled child, missing his two front teeth, a gush of maternal sentimentality flooded my veins.  I walked behind the sofa and hugged J around the neck. He patted my hand for an indulgent millisecond before latching back onto the game control.

As I headed for the kitchen to start dinner, he spoke.

"Mom?"

I should have kept walking, pretended I didn't hear, but like any mother perched on the edge of a near-empty nest, I hesitated, hoping for a rare morsel of tenderness in the days before he takes the Big Flight.

"Yes?"

"I suppose a blow-up doll is out of the question."

A Little Rain

 

I received news today that a young man with whom I had an irreverent (and inappropriate) teenage fling was found dead of a gunshot wound this weekend. They're not sure if it was murder or a hunting accident.

Strange that I was thinking about him just a few days ago, remembering how we stole glances across a smoky room where crooked sofas cradled lazy teenagers as they passed a joint under the haunting spell of Led Zeppelin. Viet Nam was supposedly over, Patty Hearst had robbed a bank, a peanut farmer from Georgia was vying for the presidency and somewhere beneath the whitecaps of Lake Superior, The Edmund Fitzgerald was beginning to rust in its blackwater deathbed.

These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall
This is the wonder of devotion - I see the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient - Upon us all a little rain must fall

We we sat in somebody's basement, hiding behind a haze of apathy while eating stale Halloween candy and grinning like anorexic pumpkins left too long on the porch. We didn't have a clue what to do with the torch so we just let the rain soak it until the flame died out. At the time, I was married to a boy who spent most Fall evenings drinking beer while shining a bright light into the faces of deer, stunning them long enough to pull a trigger.  I'd wed at sixteen in order to escape the jurisdiction of my fundamentalist father.  A year later I longed to escape the tyranny of my alcoholic husband, and when F made eye contact beneath the brim of his camouflage cap, I held it.

He was beautiful, a top wrestler, voted Cutest Smile in our high school yearbook-- a well deserved title. No words passed between us when he moved to sit next to me. Beneath a ratty blanket, he gently stroked my palm with his thumb as if he were reading my future. I closed my fist around his hand. I was willing to share my body, but not my soul.

After a while he asked for a ride home. During the next song, I stood and offered my goodbyes to friends. F waited a few respectable minutes before following me toward a disrespectful act of defiance against my life choices. On the way to his rural farm, we stopped at the creek and made out in the front seat of my Chevette. Teenage passion overtook space and we spilled out of the car into the leaves, clawing at one another like hungry children which in a way, I suppose, we still were. It started to rain but we didn't notice or didn't care.

 

I woke the next morning with leaves in my hair and guilt gnawing at my gut. I was seventeen, sorry, and six weeks pregnant. Though we never spoke of it again, there was a sadness in F's smile the next time I saw him. He and my young husband,T, were hunting buddies. Secrets were told over campfires. It was a very a small town. I later heard that F stood before T and offered himself up as an unmoving target, an act of honor against dishonorable offenses. My husband threw one drunken punch, that amazingly made it's mark, before collapsing in sobs.

 

Our child was born 7 1/2 months later. The marriage never recovered from the dent left in  wet leaves beneath a tree by the creek.  I left T when our daughter was five months old, left that town a few years later, and left the Midwest a dozen years after that. I've made a lot more mistakes since then, but leaving my abusive husband wasn't one of them, and for that I have F to thank. If there is an afterlife, I like to think his smile will light the sky on his way to the next one.

 

 Speak to me only with your eyes. It is to you I give this tune.
Ain't so hard to recognize - These things are clear to all from
time to time...

Home Run

I'm being held accountable by a loyal reader for a promise I made to share a certain story in which I suffered one of my most embarrassing moments. So here it is. Turn your head if you're squeamish.

Between wasbunds I dated L, a man with a great sense of humor who liked to share his funny stories in the break room. I once arrived at work to find a crowd of people standing around the front of his car where he was documenting one of those stories by pointing out the shape of my butt cheeks in the dusty hood of his yellow chevy to the delight of our grinning coworkers. I would have dumped him then and there, save for the genuine delight he took in surprising me with funny cards under my desk or blindfolding me before leading me to the table where he'd arranged my favorite Milano cookies in the shape of a heart or having flowers sent ahead to restaurants so the waiter would present them to me at our table. I tolerated his loose lips in exchange for his abundant humor and romantic creativity and he tolerated my obsession with organizing his unruly desk because Iwas unruly in other ways.

L's apartment was located a mere six blocks from where we both worked--which made for a convenient love nest on those afternoons when we were supposed to be out knocking on doors to solicit potential customers. Our boss referred to it as "cold calling." We referred to it as another serendipitous opportunity to keep each other warm in the middle of freezing ass winter afternoons.

Unfortunately, our regular rendezvous were interrupted for a couple of weeks when I had laser surgery to burn abnormal cells from my cervix, a part of my anatomy L affectionately called my "whatchamacallit." On the exact day my doctor gave permission to "resume intercourse" we skated across the icy street to his apartment for what turned out to be one of our more, er, energetic lovemaking sessions that combined food with play.

Afterward, as we lay atop tangled sheets, the steam still rising as it evaporated from our sweaty bodies, L reached beneath his back to remove what he imagined was probably an apple core or a piece of sourdough baguette. He held the item out for me to inspect.

Him: We didn't have strawberries, did we?

Me: It's the middle of January in Michigan. Where would we get strawberries, you doofus?

Him: Well then what's this?

Me:(Turning three shades of red) Um. I think it's part of my whatchamacallit.

Him: (Turning three shades of green before pitching the thing across the room where it bounced off the wall and lay like a dismembered nose on the floor in the doorway) Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Me: (Kicking unmentionable piece of my destroyed anatomy into the bathroom as I escaped) I think I'll run home and die now.

We both recovered, L more quickly than me. When I called my OB-GYN, she explained that it was normal for my body to eventually expel the destroyed tissue. She didn't mention this when we scheduled the procedure. I didn't mention I'd had assistance in the expelment.

Some men brag about fucking their girlfriend's brains out. L could now brag of being endowed to the degree he knocked his woman's whatchamacallit right out of the "ball park." However, I believe this story was his third and final strike against my field of tolerance, a foul way outside the borders of any woman's personal boundaries.

Missed that bat for a while, though.

PLEASE NOTE: This may be my last post for a while until I finish up a rewrite of my novel. Sorry for the lack of posts--I hope you'll hang in there with me through the silence of editing. Come November I should be back in the game. Thanks for your patience.

Native Tongue

My first real kiss was from an aho. No, really. His last name was Aho, and he gave me that kiss behind church after prayer meeting while we waited for my Dad to finish gabbing with his parishioners so he could drive the 'bus kids" home. Aho was one of the Bus Kids.

It was a rickety old school bus painted white, with "New Era Bible Church" in black letters on one side and a Bible verse--I think it was John 3:16--on the other. Every week one of the deacons or my dad would drive to the outskirts of town and round up the Bus Kids from the trailer park and tract houses surrounding a tiny man-made lake they actually named Lake Tahoe (which claimed the life of one of the other bus kids the following summer) and drove them into town to "save" their souls. Didn't save the kid that drowned, though my father would likely disagree, insist that kid was in heaven because he took Jesus as his personal savior before he was found floating on top of the muddy water after everyone else got out of the lake. I couldn't help but wonder why Jesus didn't prevent him from hitting his head on the bottom when he dove in but back then I didn't ask those kinds of questions. At least not out loud.

So anyway, like most of the trailer park and Lake Tahoe kids, Aho was a "fast" boy in terms of life experience. He had a big nose and claimed he was part Indian, wore his greasy brown hair long with bangs that hung over his eyes, making him have to flip his head every few seconds in order to see anything. Growing up in a rural Midwestern town with a population of 416, I'd had very little exposure to the outside world or the dens of iniquity my father warned me about, but I had a suspicion Aho had probably seen those dens. Maybe even lived in one. And I was drawn to him like a racoon to a full trash can.

It was summer, muggy-n-buggy as we used to say, when Aho and I sat in church that evening, pretending to listen to my Dad preach. At some point our fingers touched and he laid his hand over mine. Every nerve on the surface of my skin danced as he lightly ran his thumb back and forth over the back of my hand. A few other nerves I hadn't been tuned into put on their dancin' shoes as well. Eventually our youth pastor caught sight of what was going on and separated us but I could still feel his hand on mine, that tingle shooting from my fingers to places hidden beneath an ugly dress and a sweat-soaked cotton slip.

After Prayer Meeting let out, Aho smiled at me, flipped his hair and mouthed something I couldn't hear. When I didn't move he flipped it again, then walked away Ooooh, I get it. You're flipping your hair but what you're really doing is pointing me in the direction of the flipping. I followed him out the back door of the church where he immediately grabbed me and gave me a long, soft kiss. I kept my mouth closed. He didn't. I wanted to wipe his spit off my face but was afraid I'd offend him so I just stood there, hoping it would evaporate quickly.

"I like you," he half-whispered, in a fourteen year-old croaky voice.

Well, that was enough for me. "Me, too," I said. "I mean, I like you, too."

"Why don't you ride with us on the bus tonight?"

My legs were shaking. "I have to ask my dad."

He let go of my waist. "Well, what are you waiting for?"

I ran back inside and tugged on my Dad's suit coat as he stood in the back of the church auditorium shaking hands with Mr. G, who owned an insurance company and a house with three bathrooms.

"Daddy can I ride with you on the bus tonight?"

"Go ask your mother." It was his standard answer.

I found Mom in the basement kitchen washing coffee cups with Mrs. F., whose son dated my older sister.

"Mom can I ride on the bus with Daddy tonight?"

"If it's okay with him, it's okay with me." Her standard answer.

Several minutes later I climbed up the steps behind Mr. F, who'd offered to drive the Bus Kids home so Pastor E could go home to his family. Aho sat in the very back, grinning. He patted the seat next to him, on the window side, as I approached. I squeezed past him and sat down, feeling shy and watched by all the stinky Bus Kids turned around facing us, bouncng in their seats. Aho made a motion with his hands and said, "Get the hell out of here." The back half of the bus cleared out immediately. I don't know if I was more impressed by his command over the other kids or that he'd just said hell.

Mr. F pulled out of the parking lot and pointed the bus toward Lake Tahoe. As we bounced along U.S. 31, Aho put his arm around me. I stared straight ahead. Determined, he turned my head with his hand and kissed me again. This time he forced his tongue through my lips and swirled it around in my mouth. I was totally disgusted and completely fascinated at the same time. My older sister had told me what French kissing was but I never imagined I'd be doing it (though my younger sister and I used to stick out our tongues and touch each other's, then squeal with delightful ickiness).

Again with the party in the nether-regions of my body, heretofore known by many names. But at the same time, I felt uncomfortable. Uneasy. Something in the way he kissed me told me he'd done this a lot, probably with a lot of girls. Probably a lot more than just kissing. Maybe he'd want me to do other stuff. I wanted him to stop. I wanted to move to another seat. I wanted him to get off the bus.

Thankfully, the bus rolled to a stop. Mr. F turned the lights up then cranked open the front door. Aho jumped out of the seat and propelled his skinny body up the aisle by hoisting himself on the back of the seats and swinging his legs forward every few rows. When he got to the front of the bus he turned, flipped his hair and winked before chasing the younger kids up the dirt road toward their houses. As soon as he was gone I wanted him back.

I rode in silence as the bus emptied itself of the rest of the kids, my lips still numb from that boy pressing his face against mine. Mr. F pulled into the gravel parking lot behind the church and got out, forgetting I was still on the bus. He was whistling "Surely Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me," a song I used to think was about two angels named Shirley Goodness and Marcy. I sat alone in the dark, watched Mr. F disappear up the road with his Bible under his arm, still whistling.

Across the street, the second-story windows of our parsonage threw light from behind wide horizontal blinds. Bats dove for mosquitoes under the street lamp in front of our house and somewhere in the distance a coon dog howled at the end of his chain. When I finally stood my skin unstuck itself from the vinyl bus seat leaving an orange-peel pattern on the back of my stinging thighs. I kicked off my black shoes and walked barefoot on the still-warm blacktop, daring the bats to tangle themselves in my hair as I crossed over the crumbling road of my childhood.

Noises Off

Last night I hardly slept due to the fact that a.) The low-carb ice cream I ate after dinner contained sugar alcohols which inflated every inch of my intestines with pockets of high octane gas, and b.) M is here for the weekend so I ended up walking (running) to the kitchen every time I needed to let off a little steam.

I don't know what it is about my relationship with M that hasn't allowed it to progress to shared farts, but I simply can't let go in front of him. At our ages both of us surely cut the cheese a lot more than we used to, yet we never slice it in the same room. I hear him toot in other parts of the house just as I'm sure he hears me, but there seems to be an unspoken rule that neither will do it in the other's immediate presence. (Except for that time I thought he'd gone outside and trumpeted as soon as the door closed but it turned out he'd just opened it to check the weather, whereby we both politely stepped around that elephant until she slunk out of the room.)

I've always had problems with my guts. A few years ago I was on the receiving end of the delightful procedure they call a colonoscopy. After trying everything from Colonics to Metamucil (which I sweartogod my grandfather used to call metamusical having no idea how funny or apt it was-- given the side effects) to hypnotism, I finally gave in and saw an internist. When I asked what the difference was between a sigmoidoscopy and a colonoscopy, he grinned and said "about 17 inches."

The procedure itself wasn't that bad, thanks to a nurse friend who tipped me off on how to get enough Versed (a drug that makes you madly drunk while mercifully erasing the memory of the entire event) so I wouldn't feel a thing, let alone remember it. When asked if the drug was working, I simply answered that I didn't feel any different, despite the fog creeping in on the edges of my consciousness. They gave me another shot, after which I have no memory of the camera-on-a-stick that turned my body into a recumbent popsicle other than the vague awareness of a reality TV show showing on a huge screen, starring my colon.

About a week later I returned for my follow-up visit during which I was presented with stills of my short-lived series and told that I have a Lazy Colon. "Yeah, well you're a lousy photographer!" I shot back, waving blurry photographs of unidentifiable body parts. Where did he get off telling me my intestines were too lazy to poop on schedule anyway? Maybe I had better things to do than sit around in the bathroom waiting for a peristaltic response to yesterday's dinner. Like find out where I can get more of the Versed stuff, for instance. I've got a few more memories I'd like to erase. Starting with the time I farted when I thought M was outside.

Turns out the sluggish colon (I prefer this less judgmental word) is genetic. I've talked with my sisters and every single one of them suffers from the same problem, though each has developed her own unique way of dealing with it. One uses suppositories, which she calls her Magic Silver Bullets. Another sister prefers Ducolax (she never was the patient type). And yet another sister purchases Top Care fleet enemas by the case, which is an oxymoron if you ask me. My oldest sibling eats a high fiber diet because she's been married long enough not to worry about the fallout.

Me, I've signed up for regular abdominal massage treatments. As anyone who knows me will testify, I'm a massage slut and will use any excuse available to be rubbed down. Or up. Or around, in the case of the abdominal thing. And if you didn't before, you now know me better than you likely wanted to.

Losing It

N was my first love.  He was tall and dark and smelled so sweet that I used to stick my nose inside his locker between classes just to inhale his scent. Voted Best Looking in his class (a year above mine) I was certain one of those googly-eyed beautiful girls who smiled at him as we passed in the hall would surely steal him away by the end of the day.

On our first date he took me to see The Exorcist--which scarred me for life, but that’s another story.  After that, we usually went for walks in the dunes near Lake Michigan. Sometimes we’d smoke a joint or sip a little peach brandy and make out. The first time he touched my breast I nearly imploded with guilty pleasure.  Having been raised on stories of harlots doomed to suffer for eternity, I didn't let him go any further, but I sure as hell wanted to.

After a couple months of building and dousing a fire that nearly burned up our teenage bodies, N finally made his move, setting the stage for the Big Night with a day shopping at the mall where he bought me a new sweater and ice cream.  That night when we walked into the dunes, he spread out a blanket and a sleeping bag.  I gulped. Although most of my friends had already done “it” I was always the last to tie the next ribbon on our collective kite string as we sailed further away from our childhoods. Last to get her period, last to need a bra, last to lose her virginity.

At least I’m in love with him, I thought, as N slipped off my clothes and then his. We crawled under the sleeping bag and for a moment just held each other as the first intense gasp of all that skin against skin made its acquaintance with the other’s surfaces. It’s still like that for me, even now, after all these years. When I climb into bed with my lover, my skin draws a deep breath before sighing into the sheets.

About the same time as the last gaudy yolk of sun spattered greasy streaks above the far end of the lake, N climbed atop my trembling body and gently nudged my legs apart with his knee.  He reached down and aimed himself, then began to push against me.  I bit a scream in half as he pushed and pushed and pushed for what seemed like forever, but my body wouldn’t let him in.  When he finally rolled off, I began to cry.  Surely he would leave me.

He didn’t. Wrapping his arms around my fetal limbs, he whispered “I love you” for the very first time.

We tried to have sex a dozen different times after that, without success. Finally, one night in early September he sneaked into my bedroom, which was in the basement of my parent’s house. Sometime during the early morning hours he managed to penetrate me for the very first time. 

“Please don’t move,” I whispered. “It hurts.” 

After all that waiting it didn’t matter  because he came the instant he was inside me anyway. I was 15 and a half. He was almost 17. It was 1974. From my bedside radio, Carole King sang, “Will You Still love me Tomorrow?” giving voice to the question that had already formed in my mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about sex.  Not in a randy way--more in a what happened? kind of way. What it was, what it is, what it isn’t. And where it went. It's almost as if time is running in reverse and my body is sealing itself back up again. I haven't lost the ability to enjoy sex, but I've lost the urge. That roaring blaze has become a quiet pilot light. Given enough gas, it will burst into a beautiful blue flame but most of the time it sleeps, in a dream I can't seem to get back to.

*Thanks to Kelly for combining my photograph with Loretta's art to create this lovely body collage.