EP

paradise lost….

Dear Lady,

It’s perhaps not fair for me to greet you  in the morning with my heaviness of heart.  But I’m going to do it anyways. Press delete. Close. Log off. Whatever. 

Sometimes you need to speak.

It’s a beautiful morning here. It’s April, but there’s actually frost on the cars in the warming morning sunlight. The mayflies are out, which is a bit of a pain, but you get used to them, and they are a harbinger of spring. Things are green, the light is getting it’s rosy orange hues back. It is Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”  

I miss her.  

My partner went to work yesterday around 8.15 as usual. I took the kids to school. Fast forward to end of the day, one son has a friend over, the other works on an English project, I’m reading about theatre and gazing lovingly every now and then on images I’ve found on the web of Chloe des Lysses. Her body is so like my lover’s body — oh, forgive me  — ex-lover’s body —  and in my eye at least, they seem to share a kind of common “come get me” hunger.  <sigh>

I miss her.  

It’s close to dinnertime. I phoned my partner — who I knew wasn’t feeling at her best — she gets MASSIVE periods these days with the advent of menopause, accompanied by terrible cramping and frightening blood loss. I phoned her at 6 to see how she was doing, and she said she had one thing left to do. I phoned again at 8.30 and she said she was coming home. I phoned again at 10, and she told me to ring off because she was viewing time sensitive data — and her session would log out. She got home at 10.45, and the guys came down, and we all had supper with her. After all that, she and I go back up to her study so that she could practice a talk she had to give this morning. She went through it three times. I kept falling asleep — but I did manage to work the stopwatch for her. We went to bed at 1245. 

She’d move Gibralter stone by stone for work. That’s what her parents and her God beat into her since the moment she could think. But she’s never looked at me and touched the front of my slacks and said, “maybe it’s crazy, but I really want you.”

 My lover—oops, my ex-lover— used to send me txt messages that said “GYAOH.”  

Get your ass over here. 

My partner is a pretty good mom, though she has a little trouble with demanding achievement from her kids while at the same time resisting their individuation. She’s making the world a better place, she really is. Maybe I just need to take one for the team. She’s really a pretty amazing person — I have to tell you, I wish I was more like her and a whole lot less artistically inclined and complicated.

But as I look out the window of our home, I know I really resent making those phone calls. Before the phone calls, and before the kids, I used to be in the parking lot of the hospital, waiting for her to finish charting. And on the holidays before that it was “Where will we hike today?” or “How many mountains can we climb?”  and never a sleepy-eyed reaching for the infinite ache between my legs. My lover is a bathroom, my lover is the shower. The warm water running all over my skin makes it feel a little less desperate and sad.  And now, mostly without meaning to, I’ve slowly fallen over a cliff made of one small cumming at a time, one repression, one turning away, one dream. And when I wake up every morning with an erection, it isn’t her I think about.

My coffee pot has seen me masturbate, and weep.   

In April of 2007, I think, I got a phone call at work from my lover. Could we meet for a quick coffee? Sure. We met in a parking lot, and circled each other like hawks. No one could take the initiative to say “good-bye.” Our bodies were like magnets. The pull was unearthly, born of deep space, dark planets. ”Can we go somewhere?” one of us asked. “Yes,” was the answer. I went back to work, talked my boss into letting me leave. We end up in another parking lot, chatting, touching, being wistful and wanting with every cell in our bodies. Where can we go?  “It’s my birthday,” finally comes out into the air, like a bright orange oriole. Arms entangle, warmth draws near to warmth, desire meets the spark of holding someone close to you. We end up at my home. My partner is in Toronto, so the place is empty. I find a bottle of wine — it’s 10.00  am. We sit on the couch. We sip, we laugh. It is like becoming a waterfall. We touch. We touch some more, tentatively, nervously, like high school kids who want to feel each other up but don’t know how to start, or whom or how to ask for permission. We  kiss, touch each other in forbidden places. Unable to handle the sin, and the delight of it,  I play the piano for her, a song I’ve written for her. She has tears in her eyes. In ageless seconds we are making love in the living room, between the couch and the fireplace. She is tight and lithe and urgent. We cum. We make love again, a little more gently and sensuously. It is like singing together, walking hand in hand across a wet, green field, riding a toboggan together in fresh, deep snow. We tire, grateful, healing and sated. We go upstairs. I pour a bath. We get in. We get into the bathtub that I thought would become  a sex haven when my partner and I first toured our house with a real estate agent. There’s a little place to sit in the corner, built in, just totally designed and made for oral sex.  My partner reads in the tub. Demands I come in and chat. I accede like a cur. It is joyless, damaging.  

Since that first day, since that real-estate moment, this jacuzzi bath has been nothing more than a caustic taunt and an embarrassment. No sex here, it says. We’re busy, or English, or something. We’re just “not,” I guess. 

The moments I physically remember from that birthday day are not the fucking, though I know and remember it happened. The moments I still FEEL are the ones where, sitting behind her in the warm water, my penis crushed against her tailbone, I stroke her skin and admire the way her long-ish hair decorates and accentuates her neck. I still remember the mild perfumed scent of her skin. I remember lifting a facecloth and pouring warm water and bath foam down her back. I remember quite self-consciously looking at myself and her in the mirror and thinking “this is what I’ve wanted since forever,” and knowing that we were going to make love again, and possibly again and again. It was like starring in the movie version of your own life — knowing at some level, I guess, that Hollywood always makes the movie better than the original story.  

I remember towelling her off, but the picture jostles, I lose a few frames, and then I remember turning her forcefully and pushing her against the wall, groping her with my hungry hands, crashing my cock against any part of her I could find. I felt free and invited. I zoned everything out — and all of my desire rose and crashed against my vision of her ass. Her willing surrender began in the way her fingertips touched the wall. You could feel her heat radiating backwards towards me, engulfing me, pulling me towards her. Be lust, she invited with skin and breath and bone, thrilling in her own desire. That’s ok. I’d never met that before. She arched her back and I entered from behind, caring only about finding the warm wet rose of her centre, and spraying it with my soul.

OMFG.  

AFter cumming I crashed forward onto her back. She turned, her eyes looking down to the floor, a half-smile on her face, her hands reaching for my hips, pulling me against her pelvis. I am home. “Aren’t we eager,” someone says, and I feel myself hardening again. We make love on the floor, and again — or more, or whatever it is —  further down the narrow place between the ensuite bathroom and the bed. My partner’s and my bed. The place where my wife and I sleep back to back. Where she cries and I comfort her, where she insists that I learn to talk to her more about my inmost feelings, where we make love once a cycle, if we’re lucky enough that the moon works in concert with ovulation day. I pull the blankets and covers down onto the floor, make a little rumpled cloth nest. We make love and fuck, over and over. Until finally, we sleep, nestled like spoons, attached by my dwindled dick, like some erstwhile umbilical cord. I am at peace. I am connected — connected, with, with EVERYTHING. I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to let go. This is who I am, and he’s never been outside yet, never learned how to speak or walk or play — so please God, no, don’t put him back in the box, please — NO! 

When we awaken, we both know she has to leave, that I have to go get my kids from school. It is wordless and so painful. It is a dark sword hanging over us both. I want her to stay. I want her to stay and take up residence in this whole life and house and dream that I have spent my whole life creating and wanting, and which I somehow filled with the wrong person.  I help her with her bra, a necklace. We’re holding each other front to front. This time I am not hardening, but I have no wish to let go, and I feel like we are bonding together like chemicals, or like flames and heat. I know inside my heart is praying that we are become inseparable. And my mind knows that is not possible, or even likely.   She looks at me, continues slowly to dress. I have to let go. As she bends to lift up her jeans she says, “You know, if I’d had one day like this with my husband, I’d still be married to him.”  

Yes, my love. I know.

Dear sweet everloving merciless hostile bastard cum-hating God, I know.  

I wrote to her recently, saying a few things — thank you and I miss you mostly — but also saying that in those moments eternal and, apparently, lost, she gave birth to me as a whole human being. Prior to that I was divided, torn by guilt and shame, restless, body-or-spirit-and-never-both, and forever alien to myself. With the touch of her heart, her lips, her body, with the scent of her neck and hair, and with the chalice of foam on her shoulder, she showed me I could be whole.  

It’s 2010. She’s wisely gone and I’m still in that room. I’m all alone and still believing naively that God, the Universe or the Great Pumpkin is going to remember the eternity of those moments, and honour them, and create the pathways we need to find our way back to one another.

“I grow old, I grow old, shall I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled?”

If I think otherwise, I not only lose her forever, but I also lose my faith in all things, the slender thread with which I connect to any kind of world I have any care to live in. I am a five year old child, lost in a huge, angry department store, knowing for certain that I will not find my way, that I will never be found, that the dark and anger are all too broad and vicious to escape.

I miss her.

I so miss her.  

And, every now and then, it’s too big to carry alone. I have to tell someone. Because she’s no longer here to tell.  

I’m sorry.

me

(reader submission. and really a perfect example of EP. thank you.)