silent sex

'You can't write about the sex we have', he says and so he muzzles me. Instead, I write about desire and longing and sometimes love, which is not my natural state. It seems, that I have been without the actual act of sex since I partnered up and hunkered down but this is not the case. I have bought into the myth that we age into abstinence. My writing is nostalgic. There is a sense of longing. The glory days. The days of sex when now all I have is silence.

There is sex now, even now. Even when the younger ones imagine that it is all games of bridge and tea parties and bare foot bowls. You grow old and you have sex, still, not as often as you would like perhaps, but still, every now and then after much cajoling and mostly with a great deal of joy. One day, perhaps I will write about this. One day when I am sick of adhering to every rule that is set for me. I will do this because we have sex when we get old. My friends who are mostly blinded by the hot light of their youth, could never picture this. I need to draw it for them. I need to step out from behind the coy drapes that you have hung around me. I am not pretty I am not young and still I have sex.

Once I saw it at a film festival, older women making love. Older than me and I was creeping up to the age I am now. I heard the inward breath of the audience, old women do not make love without this kind of frightened gasping from those who see it.

We grow into our silence. We become invisible.