Shouldering 2009

The audience will meet me when the book comes out. It will be published through Text Publishing. I love Text publishing. It will be marketed. I will trudge and talk and appear at things and on things. If it does well I will have three months of this and then I will be dropped back into relative obscurity.
Still, this is a book about me. It is a book about my sex. My physical sex, the furious vagina that I have described in such intimate detail. You know the scent and the texture of it. You know that one labia is slightly larger than the other because of an early fall onto the box of a speaker. All this you know or you will know when you read the book. I will stand in front of you all at festivals, on television, if I am lucky, on radio. I will talk about fucking and being fucked. I will talk about the times that were hard to write about in the privacy of my rainforest retreat.

I am prepared for this, and yet there was that unsolicited comment on my blog post that I have deleted now. There was that other comment that greets me every time I look at my blogger account. There are unkind remarks that paint me as a slut, or an old boiler, or a piece of meat that might be feasted on by any passing bogan and his pit bull. I will have to stand up and soldier on through all that. Then, of course there are the bad reviews, so many of them and I would be better off not reading them, but of course I will. I am already hesitant about my own abilities. I read a bad book and I think I may be a bad writer. I listen to a podcast about bad apples and I think that I might be poisoning my workplace. I remember how one or the other of them said that I was unattractive or too playful to be loved and I believe every bad word, somewhere deep inside, a splinter worked in through thin skin and lodged somewhere like a clot travelling through my bloodstream, waiting for a small pathway in the brain before it will unseat me.

I am prepared for my audience to comment on my looks, my weight, my brashness, my craft and find me lacking and yet, I know that I am not so strong that I will remain unaffected by this. I have built a wall of people around me to protect me from them, Anthony, Christopher, Katherine, and Chris, with your new strong pillar of support I feel like I might be ready to stand my ground. Too late if I am not because I will be naked in front of the world. I am shovelling the cement of care around my base and I know that you will all stand by me.

Here in a new year, I nod towards the sure fort that I have chosen, take a deep breath, and I begin it.

things I talk about when I talk about sex

Lubricate A then insert into B or alternatively C. Keep D and E handy in case you become exhausted by the mechanics of the thing. Repeat, perhaps, if you can be bothered. Refer to diagramme or instructional video if the thing runs out of steam.

Simple. That is all there is to it.

There are other things of course that I have spoken about when I was talking about sex, but here, I have removed them for the purposes of this demonstration.

things I find sexy

To start a book and finish it.
To sit in a cafe working on a story.
When my writer friends are recognised for their work.
To come across something beautiful in an unexpected place.
To see a small gesture of care from an adult to a small child or to someone they barely know.
A flower opening
Insects in the act of pollinating
fish and eels and earthworms
snail trails in early morning sunlight
The first mouthful of a meal that has been prepared with care
lying in the shade and looking up at the sky.
Fresh mown grass
Jelly, silken soft tofu or the flesh of a lyche
wind on my skin or a variation in temperature
vanilla scraped out of the bean
sticky rice balls with black sesame seeds
the scent of a rose and the feel of a rose petal on my upper lip
watching dark gather.

Sad people in other people's houses

Itchy in the world. There are people who know how I feel. Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Annie Proulx and sometimes you although only in your stories and not in the real world it seems. I move around the world and I see other people pretending. They mostly rely on cliche. There are conversations that occur and nothing is really said but everyone leaves and seems relatively happy with the empty words and the pat responses. It is how we learn to be in the world. Sometimes I play the game for a while until I cannot bear it anymore. Then the honesty returns and people stop and stare and change the conversation.

With you I am always honest. I have never lied to you intentionally. I have started as I hope to continue.

I wander lonely in a world of other people's houses. Even my own home is not mine, it is slowly being transformed into somewhere where I must be restrained. Clean surfaces. Pristine benchtops and nowhere for me to hide the crime of my clutter.

I retreat to the complicated honesty of our conversations, a shelter of sorts, and one that I have built up over a steady period of months. This is a place where I walk naked and won't be judged. I am not judged. I am astonished by this because I judge myself so harshly.

Outside the shelter of our conversations, outside the warm hug of my marriage, outside in the world of other people's houses, I walk, lost and lonely and misunderstood.

sexually aroused by your story

So I read your story and I am aroused by it.

It is a story of two brothers and neither of them spend much time undressed. There is a shower scene but I didn't even imagine him naked. There is one passing mention of sex but it is just a word without images attached. Still, I am aroused by the sense of distance that you have managed to capture so perfectly and by the slow stages of editing, each word removed making the whole thing just a tiny bit better, the blossoming to perfection like an overblown flower abandoning it's petals leaving something stark and lean and almost perfect. I am aroused by your potential to write more stories and perfect them before my eyes, a strip tease of removals that I will be gifted with. The idea of a novel by you makes me physically tremble. I read Chris Ware and I say, there you are, in the panels where there is nothing but the edge of a sleeping face.

And if you touch my work, if you undress the over-wrapped novels that I am so fond of, it will be impossible for me to contain myself. I may become annoyingly hyperactive. It will be irritating and I apologise in advance, but I am aroused by the thought of being edited by you. The idea of your careful knife slicing back syllables has me undone. Is there anything more intimate than this act. Is there anything harder than the anticipation? You have read a paragraph or two and I am ready to drop any adjective I own at the ground before you. I am ready to stand bare and lean and vulnerable.

I wait.

I shudder.

Stuart's underwear

Stuart's thighs drip sweat into the coffee-scented heat haze. His arms tense and strain as he packs coffee grounds, hefts the implement, pulls another thick dark shot of coffee. It is all clang and clash and he reaches for yet another short black glass and the scent of his sweat is acidic. Viral rabies snarls in his blood stream, gnashing it's cellular teeth, causing him to twitch and groan as he sets down a cup of coffee in front of a particularly insistent customer.

Somewhere beneath his shorts there is a damp layer of cotton, ripe with the exertions of a barrista on Christmas eve. The air conditioner has started to blow hot air, and the customers are worn thin by their chafing against family members they rarely see. Stuart's underpants prop up the hurly burly of yet another day. It is their second outing and he is itchy with the juices of 48 hours of stress, but it will be worth it.


Later, at home he unpeels the whole sordid dampness of them from his skin which has begun to chafe and scab up. He opens the zip lock bag, deposits the underpants into it, seals it, dates the little white label on the outside of the packet. 23 & 24/12/08. Christmas Eve.

He deposits the bag on top of a pile of other similar bags each with their own crusted over pair of underpants. People will pay good money for this. He shakes his head and slips into a fresh pair of knickers.

Ours is not to reason why, thinks Stuart as he cracks another beer.

religious holiday

The mono-religious holiday where there are more instances of domestic violence than at any time of the year. When more people in rural Queensland clean the family rifle a little more vigilantly than usual and blow their own head off. When people crash their cars. When emergency rooms at the hospital are run off their feet. When children cry because of their disappointments. When adults cry because the are reduced to children, when old wounds are ripped open and new ones are created. When people wrap overpriced presents in green and red because of a marketing campaign by Coca Cola that suggested that these were Christmas colours. When shop assistants snap at each other like tethered dogs. When sex is performed drunk and without adequate protection leading to a rash of september babies labored over in the heat of a new season. When husbands and wives grit their teeth at the oddness of in-laws and crack their jaws over the failings of their own parents and siblings. All this because of a biblical story. A religious fairytale that I have never actually believed.

I know I am all ba humbug and I know that people start to be nice to you on Christmas Eve and that is nice of course, but I am feeling sad about my family. A strange and haunting distance that is just underlined by other families who come together and act like they really like each other. I feel more like an alien at this time than at any other.

So merry Christmas to the orphans and the outcasts among you. Stay off the roads and don't play with weapons. Drink a little, but not with any gusto. Look at art. Listen to music. Read a book and remember that there are people out there who you have chosen to be your friends. We will survive the season and I will see you back at work after two days of public holidays.

keeping sex out of it

So how do you keep sex out of it. I do try. I know that this friendship is not of a sexual nature ultimately. I feel a kind of familial pull towards him. I have the kind of attraction that imagines whispering together under a sheet or lying on grassy spaces pointing at clouds. This is a clean kind of love that has that longevity woven through it. It is a connection built on a love of solid things, colour, sound, texture, words and ideas. There is no possibility of complications. And yet I still misinterpret a little twang of admiration, feeling it turn deep in my belly where it becomes all mixed up in the visceral juices. A quick acknowledgement of innocent care is spelled out by a pulsing contraction. I am all mis-wired but I have learned now how to live with this cross-communication. You do that thing that I find iresistable, flexing your powers of nerdy concentration as if you would not know the effect that it has on me. I turn, predictably, into the restless swell of sexuality which develops hot and steady like dough rising. But that is fine, of course, because that is a feeling I can live with. I turn back towards my ever-beloved boyfriend and use that swell of pressure in a relationship that is maturing like fine wine. This is about me and not you but I enjoy you anyway. You make my skin peel back and feel naked. You make my mind rattle. You tolerantly turn back and make contact despite my worst behaviour and I feel like I might be made of the same stuff as you. And I want you to remain with me for many years but that is your call. For my part I will continue to keep sex out of it. It isn't hard. Have you seen my boyfriend? But I hope I never let go of you and I hope you never run off, forgetting me, and I hope there is a happy ending after all, even though I don't believe in happy endings at all.

admiration

so I am still jealous of his way with words, and his heart which is so much more constant than mine. I read about his love and longing and it is completely free of bitterness. My insecurities betray me. I am a creature of jealousies and erratic passions. I spend much of my life wondering if I can be liked at all. He seems so ploddingly solid on the earth. One foot in front of the next, one story following another and I admire him for it. And I wonder how he can be so good to me when there are a crowd of people hanging on his every word.

music

I do remember.

Kneeling between the speakers and the sound connecting with all those tone-shaped spaces in my spine and my joints and my groin. Little connections in my head, cells clapping hands and sticking, like the stuff of addiction, the music fusing physically.

So this is sex. More so than the furtive masturbatory moments which is physical and nothing more. This closing of eyes and opening up to sound is like romantic love. It is the taste of shapes, or colour that is all olfactory delight, it is the mixing up of things that is more about sex than sex itself.

He leaves for a while and I run for the colours that sink into the tips of my fingers and make my fingernails smell blue. I plug my headphones in and play music that is love. Love is how I feel and has nothing to do with anyone except myself. This big echoey space inside me large enough for music and art and literature to squeeze in beside my lover and the handful of friends I have picked to stay with me. You and the music. Today there is the music. Today therefore there is love and I said it to you in passing. That word, love.

I love you anyway without all the rest of the mess I make of things. That word love that is only about me ultimately and the giving over to something that is akin to song.

Laura's Underwear

I have seen Laura's underwear. It is just a thing really. You stand beneath someone, holding the chair that is perched on the table and she is wearing a short skirt and you get to see her underwear. This is how these things happen and seriously, there is nothing untoward about it. They are just white knickers, hiked up over one cheek like any underwear and I feel nothing special despite your quips that I might blog about it. Perhaps it is disappointingly romantic, but I am more likely to find an erotic charge in the coy glances across the coffee machine or over a nice afternoon scotch on the back deck. More interest in fact when I saw her art and understood that she had more to say than I had expected.

I know that she is young and beautiful and that I am nothing but my own sexuality hardened to a brittle crust around an empty place, but I can't bring myself to make any more of it. Maybe it is the season, the pummeling of the customers, the fact that I am an old leery lady by comparison. Maybe it is because I am making an effort not to sexualise my friends. Still I saw Laura's underwear and she knew it and he made a joke about it and it did indeed become a blog post and here that post is now.

lick it

I almost licked their computer screen. Ridiculous as it seems. I was lost in thought and the flat screen fell casually into my line of vision and the silver edge seemed soft and somehow textured and I found myself leaning forward. The shop smells like fuel and the men all have bitten-back nails the colour of tar and there is a certain disorder to their paperwork that appeals to me. This and the heat. It is probably the heat, but I leaned forward and I knew suddenly that if I hadn't caught myself then I would have licked the computer screen.

Am I alone in this? Is this some rare psychosis that turns every inanimate object into something I must taste or touch or take into my body? You are one of a kind, he tells me on the telephone, reminiscing. There has never been anyone like you. This is not comforting. I like to be unique but I do not like to be lonely. One of a kind, no one like you, when all I hope for is a little friend who speaks in my voice and nods and understands and does not judge me. Still, I have a suspicion that every once in a while, everyone has the urge to lick the computer screen at their motorcycle workshop.

face

one face bleeds into the next. One lover might as well be another. One crush relived, refined, revisited until I have sorted myself out. So this is not about you ultimately. As my memory of it fades I wonder how it could have swelled to fill up all the space. This balloon of otherness buoying me up against the drag and drown of a long and enduring relationship.

I see you again and I am not undone by you. I am tight wound and contained. I do not need you, but I like you anyway. In other circumstances it would be nice to have you around but tonight I could take you or leave you. You, him, the one before and the one before that. You are the necessary parade. I watch you leave with them and I hope you will not speak about me. I hope you will leave me undamaged as I leave you undamaged. This thing is just practice and play. The conversations about books and art and ideas are the currency that we will deal with in the long term. I build this play house on the firm sure ground of my own relationship. What we plant together may turn to weed or flower. We will pick what we grow but know now that it was planted in the sunlight and at a very sweet time.

damage

I mean no harm.

I like to think I am more dangerous to myself than to others, but you have thrown me. You have drawn me in an image that I do not recognise which is only appropriate as you do not recognise yourself in what I write.

Perhaps I am a bad person. Your message to me has made me question my own intentions.

I meant no harm. I can only repeat this mantra but it doesn't fix things.

Please let me learn from this. Please let me change into someone made of soft foam. Someone who bounces off the people in this world effortlessly, breaking no one. But we never change. We die the way we are born. We are tight packed unflinching piles of personality. I hunker down to my fate.

So I read your message and I fall apart again and I remember what being apart is like. I was apart so often when I brushed up against you. I cry, publicly, humiliatingly, ugly red eyes and cheeks flamed with embarrassment. I wonder if I should have walked away from therapy before this scene played out. I wonder how many more scenes I will have to live through. The girl who hates to be touched will be pummeled. All the people I have ever butted up against each with their thing to say, each with their hands reaching out to slap or hug or push me.

I meant no harm. Know this now. I meant no harm. I meant no harm.

leaving me

I have not forgotten him. I have not completely let go of the potential to lust after him. The fact that we cross paths nearly every day makes my thing for him less urgent. I still get to brush past him, touch him on the back or on the shoulder if he is kneeling down. I still get the visual rush of seeing him open the door and enter the shop, all silhouetted half-mystery half-familiar. I still want him at my side but we have moved on from the pointy end of my desires. He has taken it away from me with that sticky patch we hauled ourselves through together. Now it is almost always easy honesty, collegiality with a bit of visual stimulus thrown in.

Still he will be leaving soon and I have a little wave of anxiety because when he is gone I will miss him like an organ ripped out and donated to someone else before I am ready to part with it. I can feel the gnawing hole of the lack of him. The emptiness of heading to work each day. The possibility of an afternoon beer taken out of my reach.

I will work hard, I tell myself. I will slave over the jobs I have before me and then there will be no room to miss him, but the truth is I miss him already and I have flashes of potential goodbyes, a quick duck into the cupboard for an extended, and not quite chaste kiss, a pressing against him while we are counting the tills. All this can and should be re-interpreted in other ways of course, my careless expression of lust may actually just mean "you are going, and I will miss you terribly".

recontacting

It was good to reconnect. It was good to talk and know that I was not completely faultless. I embrace the guilt, like a good catholic although I am not one. Hair shirt. Cat o nine tails. I am sorry for your pain. I am sorry that all these years later you use the word 'damage' and remember the bad things just as vividly as I remember the good. There is no truth. There is only he said, she said. We take the story apart and facets of it slip easily into memory. Flat little slithers of truth lodging in us like a clot. Nothing passes easily.

20 years. A blink. A tired sigh. All of it dissolving into the beginning of what might become a friendly banter. And we have not changed, we two. And I have not changed. I am spike edged and full of hurt. Careful of me. I am not a bad person but there is poison in the spines and you should tread cautiously.

treading water

I avert my eyes. I could look but I don't. This is how you will know that I am relatively harmless. I could look and hold your gaze and the moment would be imbued with meaning, but I turn and make the coffee and there is time for you to do what you need to before I turn back. There are times when I have been impolite but this is not one of them. I am telling you now that I am mostly bark. I have bitten less times than I have fingers. And then, rarely to leave a mark.

I wait, hoping that you will remember the times when I could have pushed it oh so much further. I wait hoping that we will return to some kind of equilibrium. I wish that the warm rush that I have now associated with the thought of you might one day harden. I have leaped again, not for the last time, and I am in way out my depth.

Except you are there, a small stone suddenly, enough to rest on in this game of treading water, and our talking seems easy and full of warmth. I distrust it, of course, but I pause here in this brief conversation, and for a while I can breathe more easily.

Three hugs

The first hug, all spike and prickle and the bicycle between us to give me room from him and the echo of regrets dogging my wheels on the way to work.

The second not even a hug, but a hand offered over my shoulder and an irritation. Just a quick grab of my hand, a shake for politeness, but you hold my fist in yours and you squeeze it and you are drunk but you hold my fingers as if it were all of me and suddenly it is a hug, this little moment of extreme contact. Suddenly, with my back to you and the cab driver and someone else in the cab with us, it is an intimacy that could make me uncomfortable. You have rescued me from the inevitable dissatisfaction with this gesture.

Third is the easy way we pressed sweat to sweat and I knew that this was a lasting thing from the casual way we said 'see you later' and the nice sweet smell of you in my clothes. The smell on my couch, the smell of you and my fondness surpassing the possibility of sex that is in the air between every one of us if you think about it carefully enough.

These three hugs and more. Please more. Each one easier than the one before. Multiples of three. And all the love that we grow with each little press of the flesh.

You as sexual stimulus

You as friend. You as sexual stimulus. These things can coexist and I need not let the one impact on the other. You say you don't mind and this is a pattern repeated. How can you mind what happens secretly and in the privacy of my own loungeroom? In a past life I would meet the boy I had a crush on and it would take a moment for me to separate the sex from the real world relationship at hand. This new thing is clean that way. I sit at a table opposite and of course there is that physical association, you equals pornography equals orgasm and a quick return to a fairly heightened state of contentment. But this is nothing hidden or dark or worth beating myself up over. The image of you is a useful tool. The reality of you is an easy friendship. You smell nice and you have nice eyes and you are sharp and energetic and each time we meet you seem to look more beautiful. I lust, but it is nothing. I can hug you now without flinching. I could lie beside you without needing something from you. I have gathered you into myself and I imagine that we will sit comfortably for many years, separate stories, touching spines, but remaining within our leather bindings.

I tried the web again, hoping for a more suitable dance partner for my evening alone at home but it was all veneer. I closed my eyes on the mechanics of yet another coupling and you were there, just a ghost of you, not naked, not lustful, just you, sitting opposite across a table, and I was done.

But you don't mind and I don't mind and you are old enough to tell me if you did, and I am old enough to know what is a breach of faith. There will be other versions of yourself as sexual stimulus. I will move on to someone new and untarnished sooner or later, but for now you will do. Thank you for yet another evening's entertainment. Thank you for tolerating my imaginary romance. Thanks again for all the years of friendship we have embarked upon, because when you as sexual stimulus fades, there will always be you as friend.

Return

I have returned to my sadness. I have returned to my regular masturbation. I am sad today, and because of this I did not politely log off before reaching for the comfort of it. I found a book and scanned the pages for something sexual. It was a book of sex but there was nothing of interest there. I heard the flat beep of another message and clicked over to read and answer it one-handed. The banal chatter, and me breaking my own rule and the sadness of it.

I became distracted by the search for sex that might also be beautiful. It was just words words words and he said 'so what do you think' and the fact that he asked was perhaps more erotic than the yellowed pages with their dog-eared corners and cracked spine. 'Should I do it?' he asked and so I put the book down. There was the flashing grey / blue of the square on the screen, a new colour, because you can change the colour now. It had a rhythm to it in counterpoint to some music I was playing on the laptop. And then there was his question. And him, oblivious. It was enough. I broke my own rule. Not in any earth-shattering way, just a quiet little blip and a rush of chemicals in my brain and I blinked and switched the little whirring thing off and typed, two-handed now, 'I don't know, I suppose so.'

And I felt less sad.

'got to go'

and I said

'yes'

*

I have things to do but I can't focus. I have a book to read and make notes about. I have things to plan and things to get done and I have become all slug and hibernation. I feel like I have done bad things and thought bad thoughts and now I have broken my own rule and I should be feeling bad about this too, but I am all full up with bad, and any more badness just slides off the top along with all the other things I could be sorry for.

friends

This is how a friendship forms, embryonic thing defined by what we don't know about each other. There are little intimacies, raised eyebrows, small twitches of our lips, smiles or grimaces or winks that comment on customers or communicate one thing or another and suddenly it is clear that we have a shared understanding that removes us from the rest of the staff. I forget that the boy is a boy. His age slips from him like a cloak he was wearing and he morphs into a person, a friend. I notice when he arrives at work. There is always a silent nod. We close the shop together and it is an easy thing to ask if he needs a lift home.

At first he is frightened of the motorcycle, he clings to me and I am a prickly creature but I tolerate this kind of physicality. He is light and barely impacts on the bike's maneuverability. When he settles into the speed of the thing, he relaxes back into the pillion seat and his hands are light and comforting on my hips. I drop him at the top of the hill and he slips off the bike easily I reach over to help him with the helmet.

"So what are you up to on Friday after work?"

and

and check this out here

Family

My mother will be reading my memoir as we speak. A crash course in Krissy's furious vagina. I wish my mother could just be happy for me for creating something unique and kind of interesting, but I don't believe this is the case. This is the final big hurdle before the fun part, the edit and the race towards marketing and publication. I love my mother very much. I would like her approval. I would like the approval of my grandmother as well, but I won't get either.

I am vaguely anxious.

Lean

In dream I lean forward into the cup of your hands, just my breasts resting there, warm as the breasts of pigeons, or baked bread. In my dream this happens silently and without explanation and your palms receive me without comment. I might just be stretching, leaning across the cafe table for this one moment when all is hushed and the world has ceased to move. There is no explanation or continuation of a theme. I lean, you receive my breasts and cradle them wordlessly, and then I move away and slip them back into my low slung top. It might never have happened, but it has, in this dream.

2008

Now is not the time to become squeamish about my lust for my friends. If I am to flesh out the modern story, this echo of my past that is played out in fantasy on a daily basis, then i must do so as boldly as I have with the safely distant past. These intensely private people that I fall a little in love with will become a part of the fabric of my book. Names changed, certainly, but even with a pseudonym they will be recognisable to those I am closest to. I know what will make the best counter-story, the infatuation I fell into several infatuations ago, the one that hurt most deeply, and almost killed me. The one that I am now so calm about, the firm friend who will probably be there at my death bed given that I have no children to see me out of the world. That incriminating lust that ripped at my world until I was a hollow thing filled with shadowy scenes of sex that filled me with guilt. I am still not certain that I can go anywhere near that time in my life. The shrapnel from that time would sting the living flesh around me now.

There is the one that I have written about, but tat one has eased without a climax that could ever be disclosed publicly and even though I am still a little in lust and a lot in love, I am not sure I have anything else of that story to tell.

There is the current one, my playful little toing and froing and I feel like I can be less gentle with this. It hasn't erupted into anything serious and it is well documented. Perhaps this is the safest path to take.

All paths must surely try my husband's patience, my wonderful husband, my love and lover. Poor man. Poor tolerant man. He tells me that I cannot write about our sex, and I will honour that. My vow to him. Because at the end of it all he will always be there with me and for me, and because we love.

pub

Stumble home drunk. I have built up a tolerance and yet this one time I had overindulged. It was riotous fun, the pub, and me sitting beside my latest crush enjoying the pure unadulterated joy of his physical presence and then there at home, the little confession.

Nothing to be worried about. I am content. I will not be running off and complicating things. I am content to sit quiet in my admiration, reveling in the occasional fantasy and the rush of lust.

Perhaps it was the alcohol or the late hour or my euphoria, but the misunderstanding buoyed me up. A mutual admiration. Someone that I liked liked me too. This has only happened the one time with my husband. The one great reciprocation of my life. I felt my self esteem swelling. I felt myself find my feet, feel more solid in them. I was attractive, and not just to the love of my life. I was admired and lusted after and I floated above it all. Too high. Too drunkenly high.

And for days I floated. I had less acid spite when selling a book by Leunig. I grinned at young lovers holding hands. Pretty girls stood at the counter and I did not judge myself against them. I was loved. I was attractive. Someone I lusted after lusted after me in return.

I will not do anything about this, I said to him in my ignorant bliss. I am content just to know it, and my joy obliterated his grimace.

A misunderstanding. A gross misunderstanding. He slunk around me for days harbouring a gnawing sense of guilt I suppose. His smiles were coy, and I misinterpreted this as shyness, a confession that perhaps he should not have made. An honesty that would leave us embarrassed one day.

Until he felt the need to put me straight. Honest man. Good man. I would not thank him for his honesty and yet, when the humiliation had dissipated there would be a quiet understanding.

He was a good choice. A noble choice. And yes, I would always love him, even when the sting of lust had dissipated, I would be left with this overwhelming sense of love and trust. This perhaps I can hold on to forever. This perhaps will link our fates together now and for a long time yet to come.

sex and sadness

Strange. I am happy and therefore my need for sexual pleasure is brief and intermittent. I have no time for pornography, brief little orgasms like hiccups. It is like the times I have been medicated. Antidepressants minimising the need to a few short moments a week. These moments are fine but without the glorious heights of the orgasms that are experienced in the midst of sadness and insecurity. Happiness has reduced my life to a surface gloss, icing sugar. Sweet and pretty and nothing too deep or too meaningful. Nothing seems as important as this unrelenting happiness.

I will have to trade it in for a dose of melancholy soon or my sex life will become ordinary and my writing will suffer. Today I will dwell on the troubles of the world, read Neitsze, McCarthy, read the news on-line. And eventually I will return to my normal sad and bitter self.

Natural disaster

There is a sudden natural disaster. So many dead that it is easier to count the living. This is the kind of thing that sorts us out, the ones who run around rudderless, the ones who rise to their natural ability to cope under pressure. It is one of those hypertheticals to give us some perspective on our lives. What if there were a sudden disaster? So I think about it, floods, earthquakes, war even. And that brings me to him.


Yes. I would like him to be safe. Yes I would choose to have him in my bunker, despite the fact that he sometimes irritates me. Yes I say I am over it and yet, in the case of a nuclear disaster I would not be over it at all. I say I do not trust him and yet, in the case of a major catastrophe I would choose to have him near me. I have put emotional distance between us but it is mostly an illusion. Reach out and touch him and I realise now that it is just a trick of perspective. He is closer than I pictured him.

I am very loyal despite myself. My fantasies betray me. I have not moved on, I am just protecting myself from the hurt that he is quick to meter out without even trying. I am just wrapping myself up in felt and holding tight as he buffets me roughly, hoping that my hull won't crack. He does not mean harm. He is just blindly going about life as he always has half care, half careless. He does not think to be gentle because he can't see the impact of his small actions.

He smells good. This is one reason to accept him into the bunker. I hold him into my body, a quick hug and it is a comforting scent. I am still happy to protect myself from his clumsy lies and his barbed-silences, but I lie on the couch and I breathe him in and I know I will not shake myself free of him so easily now that he is a part of my story.

Happy

I went to bed happy. I woke up and I was happy. It seems no one can take this happiness away from me. I woke up several times during my scant hours of sleep and my arms had gone numb from hugging myself and I thought that perhaps I would have a stroke from happiness. That my heart would be too excited pumping its blood around my body that I might fill up with happiness like a balloon and my skin would split. But it won't happen like that. I will wake up tomorrow and I will still be happy. I am the happiest that I have ever been and I just can't stop grinning.

do and say

Not what you say but what you do.

This is what he thinks of me. I am not the nasty girl I imagine myself, full of hate and anger and passion. Instead I am embodied. I am the solid hard worker, the loyal friend and lover, the guilt driven supporter of the underprivileged. I am a noble doormat. He strips me of all my fire and erratic energy with one sentence. He takes away my anger and aggression, my sharp tongue and my sharper wall against the world with all it's embedded spines and broken glass and electric charge. Why would he love me then this way? This plodding slug, all sugar and spice. He only sees the half of it, which is probably the way it should be.

I have shown the dark side of myself to a select few, the cold ugly place all slippery with thoughts of hurt and hurting. I have chased these few away from the solid warm glow of my love for them. I have extinguished my own love with a dousing of unrestrained honesty.

I don't trust what you say, he tells me. Most people are full of shit. You are full of shit.

So I haul myself back onto his pedestal where all my most polite aspects are turned towards your view. He doesn't read vaginas and I now know why. He does not want the truth of me to tarnish his image of a girl he loves.

In act I am a saint. I support, I love, I am kind, I will never let you down.

But listen to what I say. There is another story that I am frightened to play out. This is a cautionary tail. Now you have been warned.

Themes

What happens when we can no longer communicate.

It was a theme I returned to so often when I was younger. I dreamed I had my lips sewn together. I painted the image again and again. Without my mouth sewn up there would be an open and silent scream, that old dream where you shriek nothing but silence into the heart of your panic, your teeth crumbling to sand, a dream of the desert and parched throats gaping like dried fish. This is the dream then that I come to when I think about this book about the brain. Strange place of flesh blood, ideas leaping across watery crevasses.

This is the beginning of something I was writing for my other place, my brain book, www.mybrainbook.blogspot.com I navigated away from it and when I came back this fragment of text was gone.

I had liked a piece of it that I couldn't replicate. I liked "shriek nothing but silence into the heart of your panic" I wanted to replicate it but this was the piece that I couldn't find in my head. What I came to was something else, similar, but different. I wrote the post. I scheduled it to go live in a day or so and then I clicked over to the vagina page 'furvag' as it has been dubbed by a few who read it. So here it is, this fragment that I have rescued and yet it is not out of place here in this strange place of flesh, blood, ideas leaping across watery crevasses.

It has been a good day in a way, Very fractured, fragments torn from sleeplessness and woven into a wasted day, but some things have happened some of which belong on mybrainbook, some of which belong here, but as I am sharing ideas across the sites I will outline them.

1. John Hughes has been longlisted for a major award. John Hughes is my latest literary fascination. I believe he has made a cameo in both my current on-line writing projects, where literature fires up my lust and my writing simultaneously orgasming on the page and in my flesh.

2. I thought about the possibility of falling out of fondness for my latest obsession. I felt a little jet of terror break through the clot that had been formed by my turning over of our imaginary relationship. I felt the easing of worry and insecurity. I felt comfortable with myself, not beautiful, not charming or beloved, but unwatched. The relief and loss that I experienced was neither good nor bad. I sat in the uncomplicated ordinariness of my life and realised that I would survive without it. Not thrive, but also not wilt.

3. I saw people through my tired and unwatched new eyes and realised that I stood up just fine. My constant self comparisons were unwarented. I am fine. Not great, but fine and all those other people are also not good, but fine. Some of them are pretty. Some of them are sharp and quick-witted, some of them have friends hovering around them and some walk alone and quiet. So I am here now. On edge, but not fallen yet. Hanging on in there. Hanging around. Hanging my hopes and dreams on other people's judgements of me.

And this is how it is.

ditched

I may have shrugged off my current emotional ties but I still have habit. Habit drags me back to the same fantasies despite the fact that I have no heartfelt commitment to it. I turn to the same fantasies, finally, when all else seems pointless and barely worth the effort. I have been practicing this fantasy for months and it may take a while to free myself from it. I dream of you too, but for once it is not a dream of panic although there is an element of pointlessness and frustration.

I have sex in the wind and the hackles rise on my lower back and you are there with us, despite myself but I am almost free of you now. Won't be long till you are ditched as easily as you would ditch me.

There was this time.

Restless, lighting a cigarette off the one before, my fingers already itching to roll another as soon as this one sparks. Boots heavy on the pavement and my feet making a little indoor swimming pools for my socks to soak in. Summer night heat. Sun still trapped in sticky tar as the road slumps restlessly back to sleeping, woken sporadically by the rumble of trucks. Me and the stray drunks stumbling home and the furtive kids on the run and the truckdrivers rattled by their uppers and distance. Just us then.

So I am walking through little pockets of heat like it is a still creek and the sunlight is dappled. It is easy then to imagine the streetlights as daylight and I keep to the dark, dark patches between where it might be cool, but it isn't. Hair hiked up and staked in place with a stick snapped off a tree. Neck sweat wet and it is 2 am or it is later, earlier. I have that odd early morning sensation of sea-sawing between the day to come and the day before, both equally eventful in small ways. I have seen flowers spiral to the ground. I have stomped past a girl crouched in the gutter crying. Someone running for a train and the drama of a door sliding shut only seconds before her hand could touch it. I have seen a fight, not a fist fight, but a pushing and shoving and a grabbing of shirts. These things have marked yesterday and will continue to lay a trail into tomorrow.

Boys. Drunk boys. Three AM boys. I put my head down, I become a trajectory. I have somewhere to go. I am tempted to look at my watch just to underline this point, but I don't have a watch and where would you be going at Three am if not home.

I don't know where home is anymore. I lean towards Petrie Terrace, Spring Hill, Auchenflower, places where the ones I love are sleeping, but I will not be seeking them out at this hour. I am not going anywhere particular. I am just walking.

They fall into step with me. Drunken step. They are a synchopation of trips and slurs and laughter. They are all brash chat. Out late honey. Sweeeet young thing. Girly girly. Watch out for unsavoury types, warn the unsavoury types. Beware of drunk boys, say the drunk boys.

I pick up pace. No point realy. No use running from three boys. I have never run particularly fast. I am a talker. I will negotiate my way out of this one. This is what I think.

This is what I say:

Them: Where are you going little girly girl

Me: Home.

Them: Funny, we are going there too. Home to your home. Home with you.

Me: Ah well, I'm not going home immediately.

Them: Well you are going to our home then.

Our home. Their home. So this, again is it. This is another kind of it. I know how it feels to have your hands pinned above your head. This will be different. Better, perhaps. They are strangers, easily forgoten. I know the hurt when someone takes your body and your pride and your self respect all at once. I am raw from it and yet, here, with this new threat so close, and beer bleary at my back I feel that there is nothing left for them to take. I have been taken. There is nothing of me to be careful of.

I turn around and they are there in front of me. They are a sway of sweat stink and beer stink and man stink. Three stinking men and I can bare them. Whatever they will do I am up for it. If they kill me what then? If they rape me, well haven't I already practiced the fine art of surviving. If they spit and piss and shit, then it will just be part of this endless day and night and day and another to follow and more and I want it to stop now and I want it to be over now.

Me: I am going to walk back to the city now. I am alone and it is dark and you could drag me off the road and do whatever and you probably wouldn't be caught, but I am going to walk back to a bar where there will be people to look out for me and I am not scared. I want you to know that I am not scared of you.

I push past them. I smell the man stink on them. I feel their damp skin. I am alone and I might die in a minute or not yet or much later and I don't care.

I am all boots and pavement and puddles of summer heat in the air. I am resigned. I am a shrug. I am untouched and unharmed and unmolested.

At some point I turn back to look and they are gone. All bark perhaps, but I am hurrying suddenly. I am scared. My hands shake. This wave of fear comes on suddenly, and when it is over I am standing outsude the dull thud of a bar and I can start over. One foot in front of the next. Almost Four am. Almost another day. A future, another wade through hot sun sweat and airconditioned oases. This is my life now. This is the way it is and the way it will be. I turn again. No place to go except forward into tomorrow, and I walk on.

No Current Crush

One of them has left the country. One of them is just a fabrication. All of them are a distraction, a wheel of stone to hone my fractious emotions on. The ones I truly love, I love completely and there does not really need to be anything but care and respect in those few precious relationships. The ones I don't love are just passing faces. The parade. Today, without having slept, I can see how little they mean in the scheme of things. If I am not loved then that is all well and good and fine. I need nothing from you. Stay or go, it does not matter to me now.

Today my ego is not fragile, it has dissipated. I am me. Here I am. This is it. Look, or don't look, I don't really care.

Without a current crush I feel somehow flat. I will have myself to contend with. I will be less than distracted. I will see it all with the kind of clarity that rattles me.

It is all fabrication really, this looking outside of myself. It is all smoke and mirrors. I am just finding things to put in my way, things to give me a moment of relief from the truth. You? You have your own story and suddenly I don't need to know it or to understand.

Life, ultimately is about distracting ourselves from the knowledge that there really is no point.

obliterarted

Despite the sex that is metered out when you can't sleep and there is a storm coming. Despite the always pleasant warm afterglow and the sound of the rain and the wind slapping other people's clothing down off their balconies and onto the awning in the coutryard. Despite the tranquil sleeping face of my lover and the idea that I have made it through another difficult day.

Despite all this, there is nothing sexy about going to work at 5am to move all the furniature back into place and count the tills before the day begins.

Impossible.

Isn't it impossible for you to follow the scent of your errant desire because you have a husband?

Impossible? No. There could be a different ending to this story, one steeped in rage and sorrow and regret. A moment of passion surely, I have lived it in the twilight space every night before sleep. I relive it when I fantasise. I have abandoned the safe but soulless trawl for pornography on the Internet for now. I have a headier drug to see me through, my daily fantasies that have made the dream more real to me, made the urge more urgent yet.

It would not be impossible, unlikely maybe, but not impossible.

But I count the losses and they are troubling, the loss of honesty first, and I am a creature made from razor sharp honesty, slicing the skin of my friends, glinting with multiple truths. I would blunt myself in the lying. I would lose my edge. The loss of something beautiful. My love. The simple clean respect we have for each other. The long quiet care. We are each a mystery to each other and yet it seems to work best this way, our differences draw us closer and remind us that our opinions are not the only opinions that matter.

I would also lose the sex. Although I bemoan the frequency I do not doubt the quality. We have made something together that is an indulgence in pure joy. Quick mostly, full of laughter and tenderness and most importantly lust. There are patterns that we find comfortable, but an endless palette for variation to practice in between. There is nothing wrong with the sex and I would long for it if it were to be taken away. There is also the visual gift he brings me every morning when he takes off his clothes, every evening climbing into bed. The little electric shock I feel when I turn and catch sight of him and realise that he is still beautiful, more beautiful. He is exquisite and his beauty is a fine and wonderful thing and it is gifted to me.

Another loss, not an insignificant one would be our friendship. This is the thing that I crave most from you. Not the passion that I dream of, not the reciprocation of that passion although, of course, it would feel nice to be lusted after just a little. I am eaten away a little fish nip at a time by the idea that your friendship is brief and fleeting and thinned out by an equal fondness for almost anyone else you meet. If there was ever an exchange of passion between us, even this thin oil slick of care would be gone. We would retreat from it. We would feel exhausted by even a hint of what we once shared.

I continue to edge up to the line and to reach my toe over it, testing the waters in a different pond, the pond where you are, playful as a dolphin, darting from friend to friend.

Is it impossible then? No. Maybe not impossible, but improbable, and no, it will not move into anything that could not be told in a chaste sentence. My hopes for it are simple. We will hug. We will lie side by side and gaze up at a clear sky and touch like children do, an easy tangle of arms and bodies and laughter. I dream that we will be able to lie and hug in a kind of familial way. I will slowly feel more confidant of your friendship, the oil thickening, the insecurities abating. I want to know that I have become somehow important to you.

No perhaps we both know this is not about sex, but about intimacy. I have found the love of my life and that is not diminished by the love for a friend, a confidante, and if I complicate the purity of it with sexual longing, then that is just me tiptoeing over the line, shaking my life around, keeping the edge on it. Truly I just want an intimate friend and at the moment I hope it is you.

So you tell me, nothings impossible, and now, I suppose it isn't.

body

He touches my body and he tells me that it is perfect. He touches a soft belly, thighs that are strong and large and round as a woman drawn by Robert Crumb. Breasts too, that are frightening in their Germanic abruptness, dimplings and stretchings and stray hairs.

"Real" he tells me, as he touches the curve of my back "and I love how you move, how your body is greedy for me. I love watching you orgasm, feeling it. Your whole body changes. I can see it happening in your skin."

I have not looked at my body for so long. I have been trying to ignore the obvious, that my friends are much younger and more beautiful than I could ever be. I desire them. I look at each one, and despite their own failings I find myself attracted to them. The one with the beautiful eyes, the one with the gentle hands, the one with the sharp intelligence, the erratic flame who will never burn out. In different circumstances I could find myself in bed with any one of them and would not be disappointed. They are beautiful, each in their own, perfect way.

He sits back on his heels and tells me that he loves watching my body when I abandon it to pleasure. He says that it is exciting for him, makes him want to start over, even sweating and exhausted as he is.

I must want myself. Who will ever want me if I do not want myself.

Today is the beginning of a new thing. I will face the mirror fearlessly. I will move myself out of harms way. I will see myself through his eyes and I will enjoy it all without finding fault with it.

Made up sex story

Just felt like writing fiction for a change. Here it is - kk

June smoothed her skirt down. It was too short. Most of her skirts were too short. Her lipstick was all wrong too. Bright red. A drawer full of different shades of red. Blood red, passion red, cunt red. All her various shades of porn. She had been in the business for far too long. Her wardrobe outed her.

She had bought a new pair of tights, dark ones to hide the obscene length of her legs beneath the short skirt. He had seen her legs of course, but somehow even the idea of a date made June feel more naked than she had been this afternoon.

He was not the best-looking man in the film. He was slightly too tall and angular. It made him seem thinner that he should be. In between takes he put his glasses on and looked a bit like a nude librarian with the ridiculous length of his penis semi-flaccid between stick legs. It had shrivelled completely when she approached her, wrapped in a towel, smoking.

She was not supposed to smoke on set, but this was a water sports scene. The crew were subdued, glancing at June, nodding politely, bringing her towels and glasses of water and averting their eyes when she lit up a cigarette.

He was nervous. He hovered close by for a while, looking down at his long toes whenever she caught his eye. She noticed the colour rising in his cheeks. When he finally stood beside her, the colour climbed back down into his chest, his whole upper body flared red. He was nervous. She stood, smelling of his piss and his semen and he glanced shyly up at her face, blushing, his hands shaking slightly.

"There's this restauraunt," he said, "It is nice. I would like... Would you like... I was wondering..."

The first AD called for positions and the crew moved wearily to their positions. One of the fluffers hovered behind them, a young girl, an up-and-comer with attitude and an eye for the director.

"Time." the girl said brisquely, and he turned toward her and raised a finger.

"Are you asking me on a date?" asked June.

The fluffer rolled her eyes and snapped the rubber glove over her fingers.

"Yes." he said, "if you'd like to, I mean."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

The girl squirted lubricant into the cup of her hand and stepped towards him.

"Come on big fella. You guys can canoodle later," and she took his penis firmly in her hand and June turned away from the fluffing, feeling herself suddenly shy.

marble

I was about to ask him a question and I felt myself hit the wall. My wall. My barrier. I found something that I could not bring myself to ask.

They say I am brave. I have heard it so many times, but this unmasking of my sexuality has nothing to do with bravery at all. I am a hollow thing and sex is all on the outside of my skin and sometimes I hear the wind aching through me, a soft lament, air rattling through long open spaces. I thought there was nothing inside, until this happened.

I was about to ask him this thing. And I stopped. I couldn't continue. It was a physical holding back, the question too big and unwieldy for me to handle. So this is something, some little marble, a secret, rattling inside in all that emptiness. And I am not brave, because this is such a small question and other people might ask it in passing as if it were nothing. For me it is the heart of everything. It is the kernel of madness. It is the tap-root, so deep in it's footing that I will never unbury it.

It is not about sex. Sex is the shiny veneer. Sex is what you see. What you see is not me. I am this secret rattle. I am this one small moment of privacy. It rises up like heartburn and I vainly attempt to swallow it down.

Families

I am visiting my family.

My memoir is about them in some way. It starts in their too-tight hug. There are moments when i detail my life when I was living under their roof. It makes me nervous but I must tell them about this somehow. I should let them read it.

It exhausts me just thinking about it. The fights we will have to have, untangling which parts of my own life belong to me and which ones are theirs to censor. Of course I won't budge on any of it. I am a stubborn creature when I choose to be, but I will not abandon my work because they tell me to. I will lose whole chunks of it to make the thing cleaner and more tight. I will listen to the friends I trust who tel me what is working and what is not, but I will not play with the truth to spare them. My family.

This sounds cruel but it is a slippery slope. If I lie for one I must keep lying for all of them. And what I value most in my life and in my work is my honesty.

Instead I will dig my heels into the ground and take the blows as they come. I will weather the idea that they may never speak to me again, despite the fact that this hurts me and I will be sad.

So I am visiting my family and maybe I will tell them what I have been working on and maybe I will return in tears, wiping my helmet with the back of my glove, frustrated that I still can't see the open stretch of road before me. Six hours on the road, one night, one confession, then six hours back.

I feel exhausted just thinking about it.

crush

One day I will develop a crush on someone who is capable of having a crush on me in return. This all achieved from within the safe strength of my marriage. "I love my husband," I will tell him or her and he or she will nod sadly and say, "I know. How sad it is that we did not meet and part twenty years ago." We will sigh and perhaps hug and inhale the glorious otherness of a separate human being. When we glimpse each other there will be a quiet smile. I know that I am attracted to him or to her and she or he is attracted to me in return. Together we understand that this attraction will be taken no further, but it is comforting to know that it is a shared thing.

The thing about a marriage is that it is never enough. No matter how good and strong and infused with lust and familial surety, there is the drone of day to day living no matter how hard we try to see each other as independent individuals. He becomes something of mine. I become a part of him. Sometimes we barely like each other but there is a history of fighting and returning to each others arms. Sometimes we return to each others arms out of habit.

He says that I am beautiful but it is not me that he is seeing. He is seeing a multitude of selves, me as a wild young cat pacing in the cage of our life together, me as the sad and troubled creature wrestling with her demons. Me as the exhausted slug who can not raise herself to any kind of passion for home renovations. He is talking about the beauty that is inherent in any story if you follow it closely enough. I am not beautiful for myself alone, I am a part of a continuing narrative that he is committed to seeing through to it's conclusion.

When I shake myself free of the current obsession I will find someone who actually looks at me and notices the things that are beautiful for this moment alone. Someone who reads my work. This is the most important thing. Someone who falls in love with my voice first and then who sees me and finds the rest of me irresistible, all that balled up energy, the squat and sassy flesh, the sharp eyes and whip of a tongue.

I am tired of putting so much of myself into people who are unmoved by me. I am tired of seeing myself reflected in their eyes, old and cynical and unlovely. I am just plain tired of setting myself up for the same fall again and again. There are lovely things about me. There are things that one might lust after. I am loyal and I am sensual and I am sick of hurling myself against closed doors.

I am happy in my marriage. You could never be as beloved as my husband. You could never be as beautiful to me. But you are turning down this little sliver of possibility, a quiet mutual attraction that goes nowhere, like a little glow in the bottom of a lovely sculpted fireplace, a place to huddle affectionately with no risk of the flame flaring into a greater passion.

Next time, when I haul myself up and out of this impoverished crush, I will fall for someone who can love me in return, a chaste and firm mutual admiration. When this happens I will know that I have made peace with myself.

Waiting

Waiting for feedback on a manuscript is not sexy.

I masturbate, as always but it is habit. It is just to pass the time. I am distracted from the act and I am irritated by the men and the women who are starring in porn. I cannot settle with them. I see their fakeness, their lack of performance skill in so many ways. Is my work like that? I wonder. So fake? So clumsy.

A busdriver mounts the curb when turning a corner and the bus thuds down onto the road and I wonder if my writing style is this clumsy. I wonder if a reader ever thumps down into the text of my book, suddenly aware of the driver taking an inellegant turn.

I read an awkward book and I know that I am awkward. I read a gorgeous book and I feel inadequate. I am being watched and I know therefore that I will be found ugly. This is the problem I face. My insecurities excavated and laid bare.

"Just tell me!" I shout at the wall when no one is around, "Just tell me how much you hate it. Just tell me how clumsy I am with my work."

I want them to rip the protective bandage off quickly. I want to feel a sharp pain and then know that it is over for a while. My own failings are glaring and sharp as an open wound. I am not the best writer that I could be. I am not even an adequate writer.

I just want you to tell me now so that I can have more time to heal later. I have no patience for the waiting.

sexy

The writing is sexy. It is something about the way he marries words and ideas. You can sense his intelligence, you touch it every time you turn the page. He has thought deeply, he has synthsised he has written a careful and thoughtful response. There is nothing copied or generic about this work. This is someting new.

I met him at a writer's festival. I spent the week drunk or hung over. I took my high-heeled boots to work and changed into an evening gown in the cupboard behind the counter, or in the toilets where I painted my lips bright red in the cold flouresence. I worked at half speed, blinking through the alcohol fug and knowing that I would have to dress up and aim myself back into a five day party at the end of each day. I knew I was getting older because of my exhaustion, but also because of my startling tollerance for alcohol.

He came into the bookshop. He perched, mousy quiet, in the cafe. He lurked in the fiction and the non-fiction sections indescriminately. He looked like a libarian, but a sexy one. I hadn't read his book and I joked that it would become my favourite. I flirted because I liked the furtive look of him but I didn't have much energy for it, and there was someone else to flirt with anyway.

"Someone Else". I read it. And now I feel like I have missed the opportunity to touch his hand. The hand that wrote it. There is nothing more sexy that the kind of writing that he is capable of. It is writing that I could never replicate. It is mostly head with enough heart in it to make me weep. I am all heart and sometimes I wonder where my head has been during the writing. I am in awe of him and therefore I am sexually attracted to him. I email him and he emails back and I feel blessed by this little interraction. I want to read everything that has spilled out of his head. I want to put away the pap that I must read to sell at Christmas. I want to spend my time with the authors that he is apeing. I dream in clean lines and I dream of a potential future where I learn to write as he writes.

old notes 5

Looking down at our bodies as we ease away from this first half-embrace, she will be noticing the untamed hair which contrasts so greatly with the finely combed patch, shaved to a neat triangle under her own belly. My labia spill out past their boundaries; my clitoris has already begun to engorge, peering out from behind the protective thicket, as if it were a little penis, eager to enter her. There will be juice dripping into the scented water; there will be twin snail-trails marking each of my thighs. I press her own thighs open slightly and marvel at the delicate neatness of her slit. My hands touch her inner thighs and come out scented with a hint of gardenia. I hold them under my nose to confirm it. There is not trace of human odour. I suspect that even her arsehole will be honey dipped.
She steps into the bath and slides back under the tap. A drip of water slips onto her pink-tipped nipple. I am leaning towards the pendulous drip of it and somehow, suddenly and without effort, I am in the water, surrounded by bubbles, latched onto the little bud of flesh. My thirst sated by a single drop of water. I feel it’s slow progress as it slips down my throat. I would drown in her. I am suddenly desperate to see the colour hidden behind the prim patch of hair between her thighs. I want to know if it is a match with the blush at her breast. I will dive for pearls. I let the nipple slip from my lips and take a breath. She anticipates my action and holds my head between the palms of her hands. She kisses the breathe out of my lungs. She is so gentle with her kisses but so insistent. She gives me her lips when I would have her whole mouth. There is no room for the insistence of my tongue.
She picks up the sponge and fills it with an abundance of lather. She squeezes foam against my neck and the slow tracing of its path has made me hard, every protuberance of my skin arcing forward. My flesh displays it’s desperation to be touched from the rash of goose bumps on my shoulders to the arrow tips that my nipples have become to the straining of my clit, and finally the little jet of juice that hisses out of me, colder than the steaming bath water, thicker, leaving a slimy trail across my trembling legs. I won’t be stayed any longer. My fingers slip under the suds. I wave them away because I must see her cunt as I touch it. My fingers slip towards her hips. I adjust them, pulling them forward, to where I will be able to look into the secret folds of her. My fingers spider across the neat patch of hair and I am touching it. I am easing the neat lips apart and very gently unveiling the sweet pink meat inside. She is perfect. Even the rugged little tearing of her hymen has healed so sweetly. I remember the day after this opening was made; her horror at the pain of it and the blood which fell for days after the fortress of her virginity had been breeched.
Now I touch the perfectly healed fabric of her hymen. I would have been gentler with her, stretching the delicate skin in slow stages. I demonstrate this silently, wriggling just the tip of my finger to fit inside. Despite the soapy water, there is little lubrication. I dip my finger into my own slippery ink and it is with these juices that I prepare the way for the intrusion of my finger. There is more juice inside. I tease it out with my slow stroking, spreading it over her lips and touching it to the tiny hidden head of her clitoris. I want her to respond in some way. I want her to make some sound or to move her hips towards the gentle rhythm but she is silent and still and her eyes are closed to me. I wonder if she is imagining that I am a boy. I know she has never desired women. We have spoken of this many times. Perhaps the juice of her desire comes from the imagined image of some other man. I want to open myself to her, show her how my cunt is a darker red than hers, show her how my clitoris extends with my desire. I would like her to slip her fingers into both my orifices and feel the wonder of the little contractions, which simultaneously work the muscles in each of the paths of entry. I want her to see how high and pointed my nipples reach when I climax.
I take her fingers and her nails are pointed spears, cutting the delicate skin inside me, but I don’t mind. The path is well lubricated and her index finger slips in up to the knuckle. It is a taste of her, but I want a meal. I want to gorge myself. I want her whole hand, a fist full of coy pink talons. And another woman might have begged for it, but I temper my desire to this hesitant finger, biding my time. Hoping there will be other forays such as this when I know that this taste will leave me forever hungry.
She is not a lesbian. This one time can be laughed away as her curiosity, a peek into a strangely foreign world. Her sense of self will not survive a second foray into this unfamiliar territory.
She stands quickly. The water slops over onto the floor, soaking into the bath mat. There are little clusters of bubbles making their collective progress down her skin, which is red in patches from the heat of the bath. If I lilted my head and leant forward, my chin would fit snugly between her inner thighs, my tongue would be within reach of the suds trapped in her pubic hair.
She steps out of the bath and covers herself with a towel and I say nothing as I follow her into her bedroom. I am too eager as always. She is settling her wet hair onto her pillow just as I am settling my tongue into the sweet smelling folds of skin. I find her clitoris in an instant and I know that it took her years to find this very spot. I am tasting the sharp tang of soap and highly scented body products. No scent of human flesh, no exquisitely salted slipperiness. I curl my tongue and thrust it into the neat little opening but there is nothing but the taste of bubble bath. My tongue becomes numb with this fruitless digging. I spit and she shrugs away from the only lubrication to be had. I drag myself up to where I can straddle her as a man might, hoping that this positioning will re-ignite the passions that moved her to invite me into her bath. I rub my vulva against her own, enjoying the slippery friction. She lies still, compliant. She will tolerate this rubbing but won’t participate.
Our moment is gone. I roll to the other side of the bed, pat her thigh gently to show that I am not offended by her rejection.
She slides silently off the bed and there is the noise of running water in the bathroom. When she returns to the bed the perfume is stronger. She has completely hidden herself from me. She pulls her nightdress over her head and the retreat is completed. What was offered is removed.
We lie chastely side-by-side and when she takes my hand it is an apology, not an invitation.
“So,” she says, turning towards me as if to continue a conversation that we have just begun. With this she completely erases the bath and the furtive touching.
“Are you going to see him again?”
“Who?”
Her nightdress is white, appropriately. There are little frills at the shoulders. She has been transformed into a little girl under her chaste white sheet. I am still naked to the evening air. It feels obscene. I pull the sheet over me and she tips her body away from me almost imperceptibly.
“Michael,” and I suddenly remember her gay school friend.
“Oh. Michael.”
“I can give him your number if you like.”
“Do you think I should?”
“Of course.”
Her words are pushing me away and yet he is her friend. Perhaps with this pairing she wants to keep me close.
“OK then.”
She turns away from me in the dark and it is settled.
I lie awake still aching for release even as her own breathing slows into rhythm with her dreams.
This is how the thing starts, in a bath with someone else and stretches out into my wakeful longing. I will go on a date with a gay man I barely remember because I want to be close to his painfully heterosexual female friend.
Talk to me about love and I will whisper of adventure.
I finally find sleep just as the sun is rising. Even as I begin the plummet into the abyss of dreams, there is a strange stirring in my stomach that has nothing to do with the alcohol we have consumed earlier.

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The Cunt

We bathe together before bed. This comes as a surprise to me. I was anticipating a place on the couch but she folds a towel onto the pillow beside her own and our sleeping arrangements are taken as settled.
The bath is highly scented with fat bubbles spilling over the edges in voluptuous clusters. Everything about this woman is perfumed, such a clash of scents that I am often overcome when she emerges from a shower with a thick white towel wrapped around her head, a matching white towelling robe spilling floral scent into the room.
I sit on the edge of the bath, finishing a conversation, poised to move away when the bath is full. She slips her skirt off before I have a chance to stand and I am struck by the perfection of the lace covering a hint of shadow beneath. She is wearing white lace knickers and when she crosses her arms over her body and tugs the shirt over her head. I notice how her bra matches the knickers. I have always been fascinated by the idea of matching underwear. Such an extravagant expense, such an effort to find the mate of the bra hidden in the bottom of a drawer, so much planning, such a feminine result.
My own bra is old and haggard, the lace edging trailing threads across the tight swell of my breasts. There are no knickers at all under the long black skirt, just a rabble of unruly hair. There is nothing neat about me, nothing matching. Even my socks are variants on a theme, dark grey and light grey slipped carelessly into boots with mismatched lacings. She bends to untie them and I look down onto the top of her golden head, always so clean, always so carefully died and I think – this is what a real woman is like.
When she takes off my socks, she folds them as if they were sacred objects. She sets them one on top of the other, a neat little cairn, an altar to my feet. The toenails are ragged. There are sock marks cut into my ankles.
When she stands, her little lace-covered breasts are in line with my face. I am afraid to touch them. They are fine and pale as china. From between the petals of lace flowers I see a flash of pink. Pink nipples and I imagine that all the soft places of her body must be this same colour, the inside of a shell.
She leans towards me. I can smell the fabric softener in the spun cotton pressed against my nose. There are petals on my lips. I open them and my tongue finds a way through the flowers to the hard little nub of pink beyond; the stamen; the seed of her desire; the honeyed protrusion at the heart of an orchid. I take a mouthful of flowers. Her breast is small and warm and bitter with the creams and perfumes that she rubs into her flesh. I suck until the fabric is soiled with my spit and then I reach up and push the riot of petals down and there is her breast in my mouth, so small that I am left hungry. I stretch my lips over the pale flatness of her chest as if I would eat her. I would eat her. I am thinking of the inside of shells and of the soft flesh of muscles and of oysters. I am thinking of salt meat and a squirt of seawater at the back of my throat.
She is fumbling with the clasp of my tatty bra. My breasts are spilling out into the twin cups of her trembling hands. The size and weight of them must frighten her. She pulls away from the hungry teeth and there are out breasts between us. I press mine against hers.
“Look,” I tell her, needlessly, because she is looking, noticing the differences, which are obvious. My skin is darker than hers, tan in the places where the sun cannot reach. She is china doll white. The nipples are hard and dark on the voluminous flesh of my own breasts. The aureoles spread across them, everything heaped on in generous servings. There are silvery lines cut into my hips which were once just as generous, but which have been starved into a more modest proportion. Still, even in this slim-hipped body there is the possibility of blossoming. There is a swelling, a leaning towards excess. I have forced myself into the kind of thinness that is fashionable but my flesh whispers at other possibilities.

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Meeting the First Fireman

He is not beautiful. I barely notice him all night. It is a dinner party and I have an interest in our host who is beautiful, but who isn’t a lesbian, which leaves her tantalisingly beyond my reach. When he is gone and she and I are curled chastely into our separate lounge chairs, she tells me that he likes me. Apparently we have met before, although I don’t remember the meeting. I shrug because it means nothing to me and then she leans towards me conspiratorially and whispers the words that finally pique my interest.

“He’s gay you know.”

It is a strange kind of flattery to know that you are singled out. A rare thing amongst so many who are all the same. The one person of her gender who is desired by this gay man.
“We went to school together,” she tells me, “he knew he loved boys even in grade ten.”

I try to imagine the two of them at school together. She would be more beautiful, glowing with hormonally charged adolescence. Before this, Michael has been invisible, now his proximity to a younger version of my friend has leant him some of her glow.

“Do you think I should ask him out?”

I surprise myself by asking this. I never stop to wonder if I want to ask him out. She becomes excited by my question. She shifts about restlessly in the warm embrace of her shabby student couch. She becomes the matchmaker, excited by her meddling in other people’s lives.
“I can ask him for you.”

The idea of her discussing me with him fills me with the same kind of excitement. I watch the gentle caress of her knees against each other and my imagination crawls up under the folds of her skirt and finds her damp, as I am damp.

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Pornography

In pornography there is a minimum of personality. The heroine is a nurse, the hero is a doctor or a patient or first a patient and then a doctor or perhaps two doctors... There are firemen, faux schoolgirls, and a bare hint of a story.
‘Hello, lady, I saw smoke, is there a fire in the building?’
‘I don’t know. I was feeling a little heat just now, perhaps…’
‘Where is the heat coming from miss?’ etc.
These are the preliminaries and I am sometimes amused into watching them, but mostly I fast forward, skipping over the striptease which does not interest me, skimming across the vanilla, the mundane until I find something meaty, ripe with scent and juices, something perverse and shocking, something made for masturbation, which is what I am doing as I watch. I am not interested in nuance, or in plot, subplot or character development. I like my pornography in short intense scenes. I like a climax, but more than that I like the rare moments when the actors drop the act. There are signs of tiredness, moments of true humour- an uncontrolled laugh or a torturous bending towards flaccidity. I am ashamed to admit that I like the winces of pain, particularly when there is good reason for it.
I remember a scene, one of the staples that I replay behind closed eyelids in the middle of some impassioned encounter. In this scene he is buried inside her up to the elbow and he is telling her to relax, just an inch more. She is lying over an anonymous man. Another man has his arm buried in her arse and because of the pained stillness of the scene, the anonymous man’s penis slips limply out of her with a wet sound. She barely notices. She is intent on baring it.
I am not proud to be enjoying such a violent moment. I never tell the men I am labouring over about the little slideshow skipping across the back of my eyelids. I am a strong woman who reveres strong women. This secret enjoyment is a kind of betrayal. So when I write my pornographic memoir it will be a shameful thing. An audience will see me naked, as I have never been. A leap-frogging from one betrayal to another, no plot or character development to soften the hard edged secrets. They will not understand that fantasy and reality are distant cousins. My woman struggling against the invasion on an entire limb is emasculated by its place in my fantasies. But it is real. I saw it on video. The camera cannot lie. Or can it?
We take my image apart step by step. I remember the raised arse, the spread cheeks, the elbow and the body of this man, protruding from a stretched and gaping orifice. How does he fit so much of his arm up there? The physical idea of it is shocking, enough to make one pause, rewind the tape, imprint the image in memory. But we have not seen the insertion of the fingers, knuckles, wrist, the slow progress of the forearm. Why has such a miraculous invasion been edited out of the video? Such a scene would b e money in the pornographer’s bank.
“Perhaps,” says the man whose arm has vanished into wielding flesh, “perhaps reality and fantasy have more in common than we at first thought.”
He steps back, our anal intruder, and holds his amputated stump up with a flourish. There is lubricant glistening on the puckered flesh, perhaps a hint of faecal matter. It still must be quite a stretch to fit the width of it inside. Perhaps the wincing was indeed a true moment snatched up by the camera. Some moke, some mirrors and a sprinkling of sweat. There is a true story in there somewhere. If you get into the rhythm of the thing you may reach a place of satisfaction.
My memoir is equally inclined towards the theatrical. This was a wild time in my life and I am prepared to share it. I stand naked before the reader and I hold my rubber cock in my fist and I tell you “this is my cock,” with such conviction that you may believe that rubber has become flesh.
Perhaps I didn’t wield this cock on my second date with Michael. Perhaps his name is not even Michael. Maybe all my lovers will raise their hands to catch the limelight claiming to be the real Michael. Perhaps there was no Michael, or, more likely, there were many Michaels one after the other in such fast succession that their images have blurred together into the one composite Michael. Pornography is about the stimulation of fantasy. A pornographic memoir is a stimulant for a reader’s own masturbatory pleasure.

To assure you that this memoir has its feet firmly set in the reality of my history may be a form of titillation in itself. Where is the line then? Where are the diamonds of truth amongst all the glass, or are the diamonds just zircons, a pretty fantasy. Is the truth just the top and tail, bad acting leading you into and out of the simulated sex – “so, miss? Did my big fire-hose bring you some relief from that smouldering heat?”

Truth or fiction, the next bit is just chatter to lead you into more fucking. Feel free to fast-forward to the man with his arm inserted into my upturned arse. Feel free to look away when he waves the stump of his amputated arm in the air.

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I came across some stuff I had written years ago. I was going to make a pornographic memoir out of it;

The Phallus

It is difficult to use the thing for my own pleasure. The idea of it is pleasurable, the position he must assume for me to use it. I can rest my hands on his slim hips, I can hook my fingers around them, regulate his rhythm to my own, and when I tease him, slapping the lubricated tip of it against the pleasantly smooth skin of his arse I can bend over his snuggled-down body, whisper into the back of his neck. I have just discovered the back of my own neck and the goose-bumps that a whisper can raise on my skin, and so I whisper into that soft place and hope that he is tingling with my words.

“I have got it all slippery for you,” I tell him, more words from the repertoire of pornography that I secretly enjoy, “I’m going to slide it inside.”

His skin is clean and fragrant. Powdered and pomaded gay men are a cliché, but it is still a pleasure to taste a hint of cinnamon behind his ear. I kiss it wetly, my back teeth are aching to bite down into the exposed flesh but I restrain myself. It is new and I am still shy of him, sucking my stomach tight when he turns to look at me. I want him to find me attractive despite the way my breasts sway under their own weight when I move over him. I want him to bury his head in the pillow and bite down on it and to emerge from his climax with a look of wonder knowing that I am as good as any boy who has had him, no, better than them, more sensitive to his needs. Because of this anxiety to perform I must put aside my disappointment with the construction of this small rubber penis. When it emerged from it’s brown paper packaging I was impressed by the soft black leather, and the studs and straps. It was the best I could afford on a student’s budget, and it was immediately recognisable as a thing of illicit pleasure, but when I strapped it on there was a disappointed emptiness inside me, no rubber protrusion to sink into the softness of my own flesh and a pubic plate that chastely hides my clitoris, constructed so that even a finger could not sneak passed the leather barrier.

I lean in as close to his ear as I can. There is the stiff rubber between his back and my stomach and it is a feeling I like, I rub my body against his, in the pretence that this friction will maintain the hardness of it.

T is for Transexual

The transexuals I have met in the real world are ordinary folk. Some male to female transitioning people look like they might be your mother. Their haircuts are cheap and plain, they are to fat or too thin. They lack stage presence. They are, acutaly, like you and I only they are in transition or have transitioned and so their experience of the world has been informed by this.

I watched some pornography today where male to female transexuals pre-op, stroked their penises, touched their breasts, shook their round and sexy arses in the air in full view of the camera. They were exotic creatures, beautiful by the standards of the magazine-hounds. I remembered a documentary I had seen on people who like amputees, but what they really meant was people who like incredibly attractive women who are thin and blonde and shapely and have had a limb removed.

For my money I preferr the transexuals who look like your mother. I prefer the idea of them struggling to be a woman or a man in a world that has fought against their womanliness or manliness. I like the sharp smell of their struggle captured in the synthetic fibres of their homely frock. I identify with them so much more than the women with the wasp waist and the round arse and the perfectly structured tits. Their humanity makes them lovely.

Our humanity makes us lovely.

Bear Sex

At our staff meeting we talked about bear sex.

Sex with a bear.

On gchat with a fellow worker, sex with a goat was mentioned, and a horse.

I can see a pattern emerging.

There is something about sex with animals that I haven't quite got a grasp on. I was planning a short story about this from the perspective of a dog. The fact that I have never written more than a few sentences is telling. I can't seem to find the heart of it. What are we learning from this sex with warm blooded creatures of a different kind? Are we learning how to experience intimacy? The lack of communication is an interesting enough place to start. How do you tell this bear that you want to be hugged by it. How does the bear tell you when it does not what to be hugged.

I am sure there are many papers and books about the ethics of this and if I could be bothered I could read them, but for now, because I am tired, I am happy enough to just discuss this at the staff meeting, laugh for a moment, smile, because it is the cute sci-fi boys who have initiated this conversation. I spend a pleasant moment thinking about the cute sci-fi booys copulating with a bear. Then we have moved on to shelves that are over-stocked and the missing bag for the vaccum cleaner. The world returns to normal.

other people's stories

I am thinking of conducting a series of interviews about sex. I am keen to start writing up little scenes based on other people's sexual experiences. The true voyeur that lurks inside me is bored by my trawling through memory. I am interested in the memories of those around me. I want to quietly watch and report back.

I sat next to other people's bodies on the bus. I was repulsed and aroused by them. I saw them at their worst, still bleary from sleep, cold and damp and holding their umbrellas so that they dripped into the aisle. All these other lives pressed up against my thigh, my arm, my back. I felt sad for them, grumbling off to work, nodding to sleep, texting, staring out at the overcast sky. they dragged their variously complicated lives along behind them. I smelled their fights and their hopes and their disappointments clinging to their skin like aftershave. I became exhausted out of sympathy.

I took their troubles to work like something I had stepped in that couldn't be scraped off.

I would like to hear their stories, write them up. Compare and contrast. This may happen on Furiousvaginas. I need to think about this as a possibility.

Holding hands

A stray thought. A darkened cinema. The pleasure of his company. A settling into the scent of popcorn and chocolate and the whiff of someone else's hair oil clinging to the head rest. The plush seat, large as a hug, red, but fading to brown in the lightlessness. And at some point, perhaps in the trailers when the movie has not yet sucked us both away from the real world, we hold hands.

It is a simple thing, this knitting of fingers, a careful lacing together as if for a moment we are carefully tied. Just the thought of it is an erotic charge more powerful than the thought of climbing into his chair and mounting him, of placing my hand in his lap and testing the hardness there. The holding of hands makes the other possibilities seem like child's play. A simple basket of fingers is enough. I feel it deep in my groin. It is visceral.

I am certain I have never held hands like this in the cinema. I have sat beside someone and the longing is a graze that I can feel down one side of my body. The holding of hands is too intimate a thing for me. I know I have done the other, the careful fingers placed strategically, even once, for a second when the cinema was deserted, I shifted onto his lap and took him inside me before adjusting my skirt and settling back in my place. But the holding of hands is something more than this. It is a gentle thing, a gesture of care and I wish that I was brave enough to try it for myself.

sex on the page

All the sex has ended up on the page. There is nothing left in me. I am exhausted. Today there is no sex. I masturbate because it stops me from being quite so sad, but I have no heart for it and when it is over I am still tired. The endorphins are hidden from me.

I wore my low and strappy dress to work because of the heat. Suffocating heat. I couldn't breath with my chest covered. Someone commented favourably and I remembered that I had been hiding my breasts at work and that they used to be a trademark of mine and this made me tired as well.

I have left my sexuality on the page and all that I own now is a body which is unweildy and cramping my style. I could lie in bed for a week just to sleep. All the sex is squeezed out of me, bound up with an elastic band, shrouded in bubble wrap, thumped down into the red postbox across the road. I have no sex left. I am sexless, and yet here is my blog stamping at my heels like a whingy child and some days I just want to kill it. Some days I want to abandon it on a bus or leave it in a car with the windows wound all the way up. On summer's days like this particularly when I am all sweat damp and heavy with dissapointment.

Weekend Away.

Me and the beautiful people. I am always welcomed by them and yet I feel the distance. So I sit in their ever-present glow and I am quiet. They have sex with their own kind. There would be something wrong with one of them finding some vague attraction to someone like me. It would be like a human crossing the species line and fornicating with a pet, not unheard of, but unlikely. They sit on the beach and chat with me and seem genuinely interested but I feel like I am watching them from behind a glass barrier. They are TV personalities or characters from a book. They are shiny and well-mannered and much wilder than I could ever be. Still they were nice and the weekend away was interesting and I did some things that I enjoyed and all this should be enough for me.

H is for Hetero and Homo

I was sitting in the beer garden. I was with my gay male friend. There were a group of Dykes at the table next to us.

"Heteros." It was just a word, but soon it became a chant and we stood and we left. I didn't want to leave. I was young and fired up and I wanted to down my vodka and parade a string of my female lovers before them. I was reminded of the times that I had been with gay men, or with women at a straight bar. The kind of abuse that would be thrown in their direction.

Hetero and Homo. A way of defining sexual identities that are fluid and flexible. What if he falls in love with him who is in love with her. It is a tricky thing to label people by their current sexuaal inclination, because there will always be a tomorrow and tomorrow.

H is for Harem

I know that this is irritating for you. I mention your harem and you bristle. This is how I refer to your adoring fans, the women who invite you to view art with them, and to eat, and who send you things in the post.

I would not even have included this post because I know how you will feel about it, that tired old argument dragged out and waved in front of you again. I feel you groan and shake your head. You have tired of me. The joke is old and was once, maybe, and only once, a funny moment. Now it is a whole string of moments that predict a pathology.

I want you to be loved because then you will be happy. I want you not to be loved because then I would have no competition for your affection. I want both of these things to exist in the world without conflict. It is an impossible desire, for you and I to be happy in these opposite ways. I don't know how to love someone else's boyfriend safely despite the fact that I am someone elses wife and steeped happily to my chin in that affection.

G is for Gerontophilia

I was at a party the other day and I was surrounded by people my own age or older. Beautiful people. Not the squeaky shiny beautiful young people that I shy away from at parties. These were folk who possessed a certain grace. A calmness that can only come from experience. The lack of this kind of calm is perhaps why I find myself surrounded by young folk. When I am with older people I feel Naive. I feel that they have discovered some secret that has somehow passed me by. I am more comfortable with the scatty inconsistencies of younger people that remind me so much of my self.

Gentrophilia is a passion for sex with people older than ourselves. It has it's roots in our parental relationships, a kind and loving father, a mother who was absent and therefore we are seeking to replace her in our hearts and with our bodies.

I wonder then why most of my friends are in their twenties. What does this say about my own parents. What does this then say about me?