The First Orgasm

The wonderful thing about felt pictures is the way you can rub them on your upper lip and they feel like comfort. They are simple shapes cut out of bright colours. The felt sticks to itself with a satisfying grab. If you get too close all the colours blend into each other and the shapes disappear. A horse is no longer a horse. A house is not a house.

I have become obsessive about felt pictures. I lie on the scratchy carpet, pushing my body down against the short pile. The television is on, Playschool or Sesame Street or some other inane burble of music and rhyme. This is childhood. I beg for a can of mushed peas and carrot and am suddenly disappointed. I am no longer a baby. I am growing older. How is it possible that I no longer enjoy mushy peas?

What I do enjoy is felt pictures. Especially lying like this, with my hips pressed against the carpet and the delightful pressure on a full bladder, full of milk, no doubt, a lovely innocent pressure and the feel of sunlight burning a window shape on my calves. The colours are the best. Red horse, orange horse, yellow, all of a palate. I save the blues and greens for the other corner of the felt board. I hoard fish and cabs and grass and green houses for the cool colour end of things. I am sleepy and the colours blend into each other. They blend into the throb of a full bladder and when I cross my legs over each other there is an even greater pleasure. I can hear my mother clattering through the washing up. On television, they are singing about a rainbow, which seems significant as I gather all the fire-hued felt into it's appropriate corner.

Colour. I see colour. I feel heat and pressure and the edges of everything become indistinct. I hover at the edge of a thought. Perhaps I will fall asleep mid horse. I arrange the horses one next to another next to another. All the orange horses. Perhaps I will wet myself. Perhaps I will urinate on the scratchy carpet. The pressure builds, my eyelids droop, I see orange and red and there is a smell to it, a burned caramel sweetness and I breathe in deeply wondering what it could be.

When I fall over the edge of it I am surprised. Pleased. Surprised. It is as if I have succumbed to colour. I am filled with it, and full of the idea of smell. My skin is burning with all kinds of blue. The down on the back of my neck is sweet as honey. My body pulses in the aftermath of this transformation.

This is my first orgasm. I can name it now. I can re-live it. But back then, at the beginning of things there was no line between the colours and the heat and the scent. After this moment I fell in love with the process of making pictures with felt. I came back to this activity again and again and again and again.