Rose

I have an image of a rose, petals unfurling between parted thighs. The sheer joy of dipping your head to smell it. The velvet of the petals nestling against your upper lip.

I chanced on a tender scrap of pornography last night. A video just like any other but this was different somehow. The two men seemed to like her. One of them dipped his head and tasted her. Some kind of pleasure in the cunnilingus. I remember my first love, now dead. His joy from going down there. His excitement. A never to be repeated love of oral sex. I wonder if it is just me or if all men come to it reluctantly. He wouldn't participate in penetrative sex that one. He made me wonder what it was about me that I couldn't be breached. I couldn't ask. I was young and insecure. He had an answer surely, but he died with it. So I am left to wondering, why did you never enter me? Is it because all else can be kept at arms length? Is it because you do not want an intimate connection? Keep it light. Keep it play. Is it because you never had the heart for it? Or because to leave the bed to get a condom would mean to change your mind about the whole thing.

Too late to ask when he has died. Too late.

So now, with the memory of his lips and the echos of good pornography subsiding, I begin to wonder about cunnilingus and all the worries about my inadequacies surface. Am I too strong tasting? Is this, again, too intimate an act? I imagine the petals of a flower opening. The soft velvet. I would dip my head and taste. I would stay there for the longest time. I would learn the machinations of my own sex by scent and touch and taste. For you, does this seem unclean? The differences between us are underlined. And there is a sadness. but it is a small one. We have other things.