So it keeps coming back to this. Me mistaking the idea of sex for some heightened emotional state that is overwhelming. My emotions are heightened. This is a given. I am blighted with a genetic inheritance that makes me swing like a kite in high wind. All the colours are brighter at these times, all the scents too sharp to pass by. When my skin is touched or brushed by it is as if you have torn open my flesh and placed your hand in the gore beneath. This is how I am, unmedicated. This is why I can write.
But sex gets mixed up in it. Sex becomes love. I love, overwhelmingly and somehow sex tangles in the mess of it and it is almost as if romantic love could be possible, when I know that it is just a myth.
When we have sex in the afternoon it returns to its rightful place. Him and me. Easy, fun, interrupted by scraps of conversation, snatches of laughter, carefully placed compliments. This is easy and nice. All the rest is fiction, Romeo and Juliet, Sleeping Beauty, as if a kiss could be transformative. It is only lip to lip, the exchange of spit, some teeth. For a moment there was a fantasy that errupted from the wheeling kite of my emotional unbalance. I do not believe in love. Not that kind of love. I do not believe in kisses that can wake a girl from slumber.
Shh shh shh - I whisper to Beauty. Settling her in to bed. A kiss can not make me beautiful after all. I am just me. I am just this sagging, fading, mess of miswired nerve endings. I am the plain but loyal friend, the less than perfect wife. Not beautiful, but sharp and tuned in to the joy of my own body. Maybe this is enough in the afternoon with the sun on the bed and that quiet familial lovemaking that is fine, not mythic, but servicable and full of the everyday chatter of a life that will surfice.
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