“He was such a creeper, he made my skin crawl.”
She spoke with squinted nose and eyes sucked in tightly drawn to the center of deep disgust.
“Where did you meet him?” I sipped lemon water.
“A place called ‘After Hours’ on Beach near Central.”
She shuffled the boot leather sole of her left foot underneath the quaint table dressed for two.
Its mate was folded up underneath the back pockets of her 501 Levi’s firmly squat into the padded seat.
We used to meet at this corner cafe often; she was married then.
“He spit when he talked too close to me and had a dripping smile, loose grin spun widely–and loud.”
I conjured up with a shudder the stale beer, punishing electronic drum beats and the glint of a greasy stare too close up inside the parameters of my circle of heated breath.
“He thought he was hilariously funny wishing me ‘good morning’ at 9:30 at night with a wink as if he could make it happen just by saying it.”
Sinking inside with an outward sympathetic half smile, I inwardly groaned at the enormity of it, like Sisyphus’ burden this giant gap of want, need, ties we seek just to sever, never have and don’t even want.
photo credit: http://media.brainz.org/willmon
The Second Time
Credit: http://www.autostraddle.com
The second time she came was with a boy-man she had attracted while perusing selections in a shoe store. He was a salesman and she was in the market for some comfortable shoes that evoked her style: earth shoes.
“Do you have these in a size 9?” she asked huskily, then choking slightly, clearing her throat as she held up the shelf model to his smiling eyes.
It was late 1978. She had already met Sean but he was spending the summer with his girlfriend while she was working and making her way through college as a young, vibrant, jeans-and-flannel 18 year old seeking love and fun in between classes.
She was thrilled that she caught his attention, he with the thick, sandy brown, wavy, shoulder length hair, the same texture as his full wide bandito mustache of old Spaghetti westerns, that covered his full mouth and detracted from his cobalt blue eyes, the same color as Sean’s. He was clearly flirting, touching her foot in lingering courtesy, as he helped her try on the ugly dirt brown leather earth shoe with its flat rubber sole the color of bottled rubber cement, and hobbit-foot curved toe box.
“How do these fit?” he asked, grinning too widely for the contextual inquiry.
It was the first of many encounters with Jim, whom she loved to kiss for hours. He may still go down as one of the best kissers ever, someone who could savor a mouth, a tongue, the fullness of a brushing lower lip along another’s thinner, grasping top lip in utter tender breathlessness of passionate study. He clearly understood that a kiss was a conversation.
He was a natural fit and they had sex often but after a time, made love, high on cheap wine and pot, in synced undulation that moved her body–shoulders to thighs–slithery-slowly in sweaty sensual waves inside the steamy, airless room of a slightly seedy, shared apartment behind the liquor store of the town’s busy main drag. A shoe salesman’s commissions afforded little luxury.
On one occasion, she found herself lying underneath him, hands softly cupping his bare shoulders, fingers rounded relaxed so that her nails lightly tingled the skin of his back as he slowly moved in and out of her, rhythmic but slow-savor of flesh on flesh, every stroke of it on the way in and out, even-calm gliding sweetness that all of the sudden burst tears from her eyes in a full-blown opening that was yet a closeness to his being; it moved her body and heart–an unknown sensation to her prior to that moment and a mystery still as she bathed in the warm tears on her face and the outpour from her brain down to the depths of her, some place she only abstractly identified as the darkness of her womb.
She was surprised at the tears and the tender feeling of surrender and body deep warmth leaking from her pores and especially her legs, between her thighs. She would many years later identify that sensation in the throes of an intentionally induced orgasm in the bed of the technician, whose fingers worked effortlessly to make her body arch in that final tautness before the release–as an orgasm.
It was an aha! moment 12 years later while reflecting in the night spent with that technician, “Hotel Jones,” lying awake in glorious incongruous aftermath of body-spent stillness and sleeplessness for the sheer bubbling liquid excitement that stirred inside her: the newness of an unknown man, experience, and sex never before recognized, come to light of her mind, where she knew everything, filtered by ponderous thought and book-learned emotion, how she understood the world and herself.
Flash of Stillness: Playing Patience at the DMV
Some virtues are beyond me. Patience, for instance, ever the teacher, lover and nemesis, eludes me today. As I sit in the hard plastic chair in the DMV, watching the screen to confirm the number announced courteously by the subtly enthusiastic electronic female voice, “Now serving number G095 at Window 13”, I sigh in exasperation. My number is G0172. It’s the second time in a month and a half that I have lost my driver’s license, and apparently the punishment is laid before me.
I want to pluck my eyeballs right out of my head at the thought of this wait in the stupefyingly catatonic government issue slate blues and grays of this Kafka-esque muffled, stifling prison. Too many dull civil servants shuffling paper among chair slumpers and leg shifters, all emitting muted boredom, disgust and defeat. No one appears to be content–merely a large aggregation of bodies connected only by will to the call of the numbers.
My daily practice of late has been precisely about this: finding contentment wherever I am. But not just the ordinary contentment of gratitude for a life lived in relative comfort and safety. For example, this may not be the best experience a late Friday afternoon has to offer, but at least I am not being held hostage in a bank. I will eventually leave this drone of hushed activity, having completed the exercise in obedient compliance with temporary license in hand.
And it is not mere at-oneness, presence within the space I am led to by attention to breath. That place is familiar to me as I have beckoned that presence to practice yoga on particularly distractible days, to preserve my sanity in extreme adversity, situations beyond my control such as waiting in a hospital room for test results, and to create–writing within the clasp of close observational sensation and thought.
No, the kind of contentment found in voluntary partial confinement among these resigned soldiers of complicity is not mere surrender; it is much more focused, pinpoint. It is the kind of contentment that comes in very small packages, minute actually, perhaps down to the cellular level. This cellular ease is squeezed out of a stillness and silence within that can hear the seduction of the computerized voice tapping into specific sensors in my brain, sliding across synapses that fire the corresponding response: chill. I hear the voice, calm, soothing, and yet infused with the transparency of its purpose. It’s experiencing and knowing all at once, an ultra alert moment of bathing light.
These moments of hyper awareness, like visualizing sound vibrations traveling across cilia in my ear canal to produce tones, reactions and information, store savory bits of future antidote to the haze of an overslept day just like today. They entertain and calm me when bored or anxious.
There are seemingly insignificant moments I can remember as mere hair’s breath of time and movement recorded so finely to capillary’s considered caress. I close my eyes in the echo of “Now serving…G108…” and summon one such scene of long ago to the black screen of my eyelids and I am there:
Walking out the door in a hurry, late for work, I don’t even notice as I rush past him. Evan near misses but manages to clasp my elbow on the fly. “Hey,” he says huskily. He has just awakened and struggles slightly with sleep-shorn disarray, a waver in his stance. Stopped, the momentum of my intention and determined pace is still rushing on ahead of me as my body is stilled before his eyes. “Hey,” he says again still clasping my elbow, my attention now filling my eyes that have been locked into his by the soft insistence of his gaze. He raises his free hand to my face and rests his four fingers, thumb-less, palm down, under my chin lightly. I feel the warmth of his morning hand and his embracing time. “Have a fine day.” The sound of his touch lingers. My racing pulse of wheeling stepped-to thought slowed in the honeyed silk of stilled breath and moment, somehow I sense I will.
I open my eyes, once again to the dimmed fluorescent daylight of the room. The 90s throw-back television screen flicks to G112 as I recover the speed of my breath, regulate it to the pace of the room’s still life painting of humans in suspended animation. Leaving behind the image on a slo-mo memory reel, I feel the filmy residue coating my mood–a clear outlook reset. The furrows in my brow have smoothed out, not merely caved into my face. The tension lines around my mouth are slightly faded.
Returning to the room, I imagine the civil space of 10 inches between my loudly sighing, glum neighbor and me, hitched to the same row of five chairs connected respectably, tolerably separated to allow both detached misery and connected commiseration in accordance with the building’s function. I will myself to blanket that distance with warmth like the heat of Evan’s hand emanating an atomic wave of empathic static connection.
Can he feel it? I have tuned out all voices, human or electronic, and squinch my sight with open eyes, twisting the last drop of intention from the tube of my will to touch him with an invisible hand. I turn to look at him, retreating from my straight-ahead-vision of the shaved head and neck of the body in front of me, but I only catch his departing blurred frame. His number, G118, is up.
Fortunate for him. Fifty-four more numbers to go. Twenty-five numbers in 90 minutes. Lots of time to practice patience and play at staking the heart of the energy vampire in this room. Luckily, I have a full flash drive of micro memory moments to fuel my efforts. Heck, I have time enough to remember where I lost my driver’s license in the first place.
Flash of Exasperation
“Do you want me to stop by after work?” he asks with earnest caret-shaped eyebrows.
“No, I’m not going to be home,” she says distractedly looking for her keys in her purse and not at him.
“Oh? You’re going out?”
“I have some running around to do, errands,” she replies now looking at him but still half attentive.
“Do you want some company doing errands?” he asks, still earnest.
“No. I have too many to do and…it’s just best if I do them alone,” she assures though with her head again buried in her purse.
“Are we okay?” his earnestness now morphed into deep concern, brows furrowed.
Exasperated, she turns to him now and complains, “Ugh, yes we’re fine. Why do you have to ask that all the time? You sound so insecure and…I’m sorry,” she apologizes in defeat. “That’s not where I wanted this to go. We can get together when I’m finished,” she concedes.
“Do you know what time you’ll be finished?” he asks with renewed courage by her concession.
“No, it depends on how long the line is at AT&T and when I get to the market,” she replies with a hint of dullness back in her voice again.
“Well, do you know approximately what time? afternoon? evening? night?” he persists.
“NO! I don’t!” she barks at him. “Listen, you are going to have to be flexible here if you want to get together. I will text when I am done. If you’re free, we’ll get together. If something comes up for you and you’re no longer free, then we will get together some other time,” she rattles off as she exhales slowly.
“Okay, but I really don’t want to do anything else. I’d rather see you,” he confesses resignedly.
“Well, then you’re going to have to wait for my text,” she reminds him rather shortly.
“I don’t get why you won’t tell me when you think you’ll be done, I mean just approximately.”
“Not I won’t. I can’t!” she counters with heat rising in her face and tightness forming in her lips.
“Well, what exactly do you have to do?” he tries her with careful curiosity.
Sighing deeply, “Oh really now. Do I have to go through my to do list?” Exasperated, “Okay, I have to go to AT&T to exchange my phone; it doesn’t charge. Then I have to pick up a turkey I ordered at the market before it closes. Then I have to bring Mark to and from soccer practice. I have to make dinner. It’s already 2:00, so this discussion is just eating up valuable time. Why don’t I just go do what I have to do?” she glares at him with growing impatience.
“Okay, so you don’t have any idea how long all of that will take, huh?”
“For Crissakes, no!!!” she shouts, slamming her keys in a loud crash on to the floor.
“Wow, you’re so angry. Are you sure we’re okay?”
(Door slam).
Still Life Flash of Pre-Sleep
Evan lies next to me, his pillowed head in the shadow of mine. I am reading, elbow-propped, turned away.
We are prone, bare, having just settled into bed for the night. Humid heat of a New England summer makes flannel impossible and silk torturously sticky. We sleep this way most nights four seasons long.
His body is serpent shape mirror of mine with inches of space between us, creating the comfort of a cooling air canal. We are art in symmetry.
His hand, open palmed, smooths across the contours of my hip, waist and shoulder, smearing heat like oil upon the line of curvy seas in the imagination of his hand–port to starboard to port again. The slow rhythm of his caress lulls my lids to half mast as the warmth and tingling skin sensors combine, dance me to lullaby languor. These are the moments.
I stop reading to softly lower my head to the pillow, ever so slowly, avoiding the slightest ripple in the water of his soliloquy wave. I hold my breath the whole way down.
Releasing, exhaling in measured silent wisps of warm air through my teeth and the pebble O my lips make, anchor hits bottom, the sync of his hypnotic oar undisturbed; it continues to brush the still of my anatomy’s ebb and flow.
I breathe just enough air to live, causing not so much as a flutter-by in the sheets. If I fill my lungs too deeply, selfishly, I will signal sleep’s onslaught, killer of this powerfully peaceful moment of breath, body and hand. No dream could be better than this. I own it–to the coral depths of fibrous memory.
credit: http://mystery756.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/hands-on-body-loving.jpg
Cellular Flash
“What did you say? You whispered,” she says softly raspy-tinged returning from a lull in vocalization. They are relaxing now in exhaustion-peace, under the blankets, warm, woolen and wet with sweat, cum, grape seed oil and Pink lubricant. They have been lying together like this for a long while now stilly on the edge of slumber.
Her face is half under the blanket nose to chin, while her eyes rest slits to the air, mouth twisted into her lover’s shoulder molded to the contours of shoulder and nape of neck.
“Oh, I love you too, baby.” She tucks her head further under the blanket so that her eyes are now covered and closed.
“I think I have always loved you.” She says it out loud and the muffled words resonate in the stifled air as she thinks about how that’s true and not true. She is sure there was a time when she didn’t love her, didn’t even know her. But she experiences her like a roundness that encircles her whole being from before time til after its cessation. She can’t put the feeling to words, articulate the depth or expansiveness of such a knowing. But she continues to search for words, foggily, as she lies there inside the growing humidity of breath, body heat and dissipating oxygen supply.
She thinks, “It’s like a light…. Hey, a light! I can see a light, yes. Wait…” She is stunned. Her breath pauses stuck on the inhale for a long 5 or 6 seconds. Her eyes widened in astonishment, her mouth an anguished “O” of recognition, she tears away the blanket in a swift swoosh, cutting the warmth of the now suffocating air and razoring it with a cool streak of newly realized air, fresh from the surface where her love lies now awakened by the sudden explosion of motion….
“Are you checking your cell phone?!!”
A Flash of Affection
What is that sticking out of your ass?
It’s your vibrator.
Why is it there and who said you could use it…there.?
I was cleaning out the bathroom like you told me to do this morning before you left for work when I came across it.
So how did it end up in your ass?
Well, when I was cleaning the sink, I looked under the sink for a fresh sponge since the one I was using was dead. While there, I came across your lipstick, hairbrush, deodorant, hair remover, tweezers, face lotion that smells like you when I kiss you, and then the vibrator…I just got…you know…longing for you.
So you stuck my vibrator up your ass?
Well, yeah. It felt good, like being with you.
Because I’m a pain in the ass?
A lovely pain in the ass I love so much, who makes me feel the warm, ecstatic oozing flow of cum after you touch me where I tell you when I tell you even when that touch spot shifts and moves all over the place for the 20 minutes you are working away at me feverishly trying to ebb and flow with my building, plaining, edging, ebbing, building, plaining, building and exploding, releasing, ahhhhh into the warm syrup of surrender. Yeah, a lovely pain in the ass. I love you.
Yeah, I love you too.
In the gaze of the other 
