"Touch"

I forget sometimes what I'm capable of with these words, these stories. My fingers fly over the keyboard and maybe it's funny and maybe it's hot but sometimes it just feels like an exercise, repeated with slight variations on a theme that is more likely to put me to sleep than turn me on. I know some people like funny erotica but I'm not really one of them. I can do it but it's usually unintentional, and if it's not, that's fine, it just doesn't feel as real, as important, to me. I was emailing with a friend about the challenge of encapsulating one's whole self into a page of code, a page that is at best something people will look at, then look away. I don't even know if I'd want to try to reach out from it any more than I already do. I've been enjoying the time all by myself, even when it's maddening and scary and a struggle.

I have to keep making it relevant and useful and interesting, keep reminding myself that I veered off that path that I was on and into this one which I could never have predicted. I know that not every story can be one I fall for, one I fondle, one I hold tight. I do value the things that are less laden, less fraught, less me. I like that I can go to some other place in my head and really write fiction, which to me feels like acting, or my non-acting self's version of it. It's trying on someone else's life and seeing how they go about things, it's figuring out what makes them tick, and it's good at taking me out of my own churning, not-so-pretty head. And sometimes that's a hell of a lot easier than figuring out what makes me tick, what I want, what the hell I'm doing ambling along in my 32nd year.

So I was looking at some old stories, and realized how easy it is to forget them. To look at the words and be brought back to something that seems ancient, even though it's really not. It's not bittersweet or even awkward, but so specific, so of a time and place that is past now that I kindof don't know what to do with it except put it away and occasionally unpack it and examine it and be grateful because I know that in so many ways, the person I am now would not exist without the person I was then. Who is the better person, who is the more flawed, is a question I can't really answer, I can only try to do my best to make my life into one I'm proud of, one I want to wake up for. I don't always know how to do that but what I can say about 2007 is, I'm trying, both with the day-to-day and the words that I am trying to take both more and less seriously.

And I guess the only thing I can strive for with any of my writing is accurately capturing whatever moment my head is in at that specific time. Not the future or the past, where my mind tends to want to go. I don't even have a word for the present, and it almost feels like dreaming, sleepwalking, turning around and a week has passed. I don't mind that, I just worry that I'll turn around a decade has passed and I won't know where it went.

So this is a little slice of 2003, from a story called "Touch" (though I was going to call it "Like a Prayer") that was in Alison Tyler's Naked Erotica.

"Touch" by me

Touch, or Like a Prayer

“Most profoundly, it [sex] is an act of opening up to one another. It is a sharing of energies. It doesn’t ask you to be a certain way. It shows you how you are.”
-- David Guy, The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the Paradox of Sex


While I’m inside of her, the world stops and nothing else matters. We are the only people who exist, now, or ever. I lose myself as my hands roam along her pale skin, and am completely gone once they reach between her legs, where she is always wet and more than ready. Even for me, sometimes the most talkative girl in the world, there are times that words fail me, and this is one of them. I have very little to say as I spread her open, as I reach literally inside of her, and even though I’ve done it many times before and will do so many times again, each time I touch her, it’s different, awe-inspiring and amazing. Each time it’s almost a surprise to find her so eager, so wet she is almost dripping and my fingers slide into her as if they were made to fuck her. Each time, it’s almost like a miracle, and in that instant that I enter her, all my doubts and worries slip away and my life is only about this simple, yet profound, touch...

With eyes closed and breath frantic, she whispers words that enter my soul, that stay with me, haunting me late at night as my mind repeats them and my body reacts involuntarily. She tells me secrets and needs and dreams, saying words I don’t think I want to hear until they sound so right as they escape her. She tells me I can do whatever I want to her, and suddenly what I want to do to her expands, racing from simple wishes to a need to consume and devour. An indescribable emotion, something like pride, or lust, or greed, one of those deadly sins we are not supposed to feel, bubbles up, as she lets me touch her everywhere, lets me take us both into uncharted territory. I scare myself a little as her words pump into me, druglike. My reaction is not what I would have predicted, but nothing about us is what I would have expected.

She is so beautiful, I want to climb inside her, live forever inside her beauty as she continues to open and open and open for me. She makes me want to put my entire self into her, to give her all of me and see what she can do with it, to keep her here, ready and open just for me, always. Every time she does so I am in awe of her, of how she can tear me up and twist me around and make me utterly lose myself inside of her, of how she makes the art of getting fucked one that requires true passion and discipline and devotion. She is not the kind of girl who ever lies there and takes it, but one who wrestles with me, verbally and physically, challenging me to push her to new heights, to test my own boundaries, to go deeper, literally and figuratively.