Breasts

I often dream of breasts. I understand that this is something to do with comfort, maternal care, a mother love, the comfort of milk, fulfillment of the desire to feed. None of these explanations can diminish the low groan in my groin when I think of breasts. The shape and the texture of them, the perfect weight, rested in your palm, the joy of a nipple twitching towards an erection. The ache in the back of my jaw when I remember that strange adult suckling that can overwhelm a girl. I see them nestled into someone's bra, the twin globes swelling towards my attention and I imagine lifting them out of the nest of cotton and silk.

I will not go to the Bath House. I will not be alone with the breasts that are so close in their pendulous exposure, that I could reach out and gently cradle. Sometimes when I am lost in the flesh on flesh, my own breast is close, hanging into the mouth of the man I am with. I lean and push my tongue into his mouth and there is my nipple and my tongue can touch it. My own breast a poor replacement for that of someone new, but with my eyes closed I can suck and I am sucked and the pure sexual surge of the shape and taste of a breast is an amazing thing.

In the light of day there is something a little disturbing about the idea of a breast. It nudges against the line between the adult and the child. It is a complicated place, an interface between the infant and the very adult world of sex. There are other parallels, the swallowing of ejaculate, the suckling on a penis and the milky white warmth at its conclusion.

She put her nipple in my mouth and made me taste it, the sour milk, the bitter sweetness and the sore cracked flesh of a breast that had once been soft and firm against my cheek.

Is there nothing that can be enjoyed without this underlayer of unsettledness? Is there no pure pleasure or purity of sadness or joy? Bitter sweet like her milk. Bitter sweet like the very act of sex, like the love I feel for my lover and for all the other potential lovers who are merely friends, for all the children who will one day grow up to be lovers, for the old and the infirm who long for the pure pleasure that their memory affords them.

There is nothing but a series of complications. I am suckling at the breast that is my life and swallow the bitter sweetness that is my share of it.