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{the alliteration of love and lust} the provocateur For two years now, she has been my erotic ideal. She, alone, has symbolized the aim of my erotic intent. The intended high-fashion of my pen. The slow grooming of every sophistication around the hearts of love and lust that I have ever won for my self. She was untouchable. She was not something I was supposed to have, or even kiss. She was merely something I was supposed to want and ache painfully, silently – invisibly for. But now, we are laying in the still of shattering night, on her bed. My fingers are drawing lines of conviction on her back, up and down her tiny spine. I am kneading her thighs. Her calves. I am touching her skin. Proof that the disappearing girl has reappeared from the darkest of night. Proof that my heart of eroticism is beating, alive. Truth is: She was here all along, only mythically beyond my grasp. And now, I am touching her skin. Every now and then my noise machine goes silent and I can hear her breathing. I stop my trace upon her body only to stand in the wind – to force the memory of anything else back into me, including breath. + “A man’s sexual choice is the sum of his fundamental convictions… The man who is proudly certain of his own value will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest… because only the possession of a heroine will give him a sense of achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. He does not seek to gain his value, but to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body.” - Ayn Rand + I first saw her standing on a stage. Two years ago. And while I sometimes think I remembered everything about that first night – truth is, I remember very little. Just the monuments: I remember the heat spiraling from her. The heat that intoxicated me and made me actually question whether or not the stage lights were on, or if she was radiating all that light from her tiny body alone. I remember her bubble gum voice coming through the speakers. And I remember the terror that climbed over me at the thought of saying a word, any word, to her. But for some reason, I felt compelled. If only on the premise of: If you see something beautiful, act. Now. Beauty is fleeting. And sometimes, a dream at best. I remember one other vision that I would take with me for so many weeks and months and years after that: she was wearing thigh-high stockings. Cut-off jeans. Over her shoulder was slung a sea foam green guitar, but it could have been any color – for I saw very little apart from her being. I have never owned a true celebrity crush. But I have crushed on many things that were larger than me. Still, this was the first time I had ever stood in front of something and been so paralyzed by my beating eroticism and heart at the same time. For the last two years I have wondered if this is my celebrity crush – that painful kind of infatuation that cries you to sleep at the end of endlessly long days. I don’t remember much about her initially, apart from seeing her one more time, performing. Desperately I wanted to say something, but knew no words. After her set, I was standing outside and then, magically, there she came – strolling past. Quickly, I mumbled something complimentary – that their set was good. I enjoyed it. Without ruining even one gait, she merely smiled at me, uttered some form of gratitude and walked into the night. With continents of experiences between us, I watched her walk down that sidewalk and disappear from my life. Then, without even a hello and, she was gone. Forever, gone. + Have you ever wanted something so bad, then received it? I ask you, what do you do next? If you are me, you are not the picture of Don Juan. And certainly, you are not Casanova the misunderstood savant of everything about the human heart. You are not the picture of everything romantic, that you had wished for your living self. Instead, you are stumbling over your words, and her body. You are laying next to her for the first time ever wondering if it is the last time, wanting all of her at the same time – but uncertain as to where to even begin. You are greedy because moments are fleeting and this may never happen again… Instead of ideal, you are wanting to put her perfect lips in-between your teeth and gnaw on them. Not for pleasure anymore. But rather, for sustenance. For food. For life. For every person who has never had this opportunity and for all the failures that are soon to come. + Unknowingly, she has been the breathing representation of that intersection where love meets lust. Beneath these lights she has walked for so long now, earless to my strong sentiments and invisible conversations. For the last two years now, she has lived only in an impossible, dreamed place: within hundreds of thousands of written words. She has lived in a place where hundreds of thousands of people have read these words, this place where her monument was carved as a picture in words. Here, I promise you, it has endured. And while no particular ode was written for her, nearly every ode I have breathed into these pages, was rifled in her mythic direction. Like a flare in the darkest night, imploring her to blink once. We are two years later now, and the strangest of things has occurred: I know where her front door is and I know the streets where she has been roaming for this eternity, on foot and by car. These streets, these doors, now have names. Lights of their own. Intersections of their own delight. This when, for all of this time, just her first name sent a wave of heat through my torso. This when now, this is bigger than a crush – this my life we are talking about. + Her body is holy. And if her body is a representation of some thing, one academically-touted thing, it is of something holy. For a love, that is holy. For a promise, that is holy. For a hope, that is holy. For a life, that is well-lived with integrity and dignity and the bounding joy of love – the body of everything filled with intoxicating lust. And holiness. Hers is the kind of body that you trace for her pleasure, but secretly for yourself – to learn its sacred curves and secret language, because of the virtues: of gratitude and grace and pleasure and want and everything bigger than you. If not that, then simply because you are unsure if you will ever even be close to something this perfect. This heartbreaking. Ever again. To this end, my whole life exclaims that I have laid in her bed! And when I eventually, clumsily crawl deeper between her hipbones and under her panties – the thought again comes to me: I am about to feel her heat. I am about to feel the wet, physical center of my erotic ideal. Then, I slide further down after the breath leaves my lungs and the memory of anything that ever lived before me… + It has only been a couple of weeks now. Nineteen days, to be exact. Since I saw her name again. Certainly, when I first saw her name again, I leapt and wrote. I had to. You can’t blame me. However, to my surprise, she greeted me warmly, and then – everything in my world began to spin as our words picked-up in length and frequency and profundity and before I could even count a beat in my heart, we were talking. Really, talking. Finally, I was really talking with somebody. And more than that, we were talking about the profundities of life and love and want and lust and living vibrantly and what that means at all… And the wild fires of my life began to meld into one glassy exhale. Because she suddenly began to feel familiar. As though we were speaking about the same things, with the same voice, in the same musical cadence. And my eroticism began to find new light, new breath. New ambition. New possibility. …in love… + Beauty is not Barbie sitting on the shelf next to Ken. Beauty is about how a girl holds her glass. How she moves across the room. Says what she says, means what she means. How she synthesizes ideas, creates new formulas for perception. Beauty has never been about something stagnant and learned in a classroom. Instead, beauty is about movement. Eroticism lives at that intersection where love and lust meet. Eroticism is the fieriest of flames. The bluest of light. In this intersection where love and lust live, this place that I call eroticism, the beautiful moments have a possibility of life. Under this fluid streetlight, the profundities of existence happen. Some are sexual, some are not. Eroticism is not about sexuality. Not explicitly. Eroticism is about every titillating thing that happens before a sexual encounter. You can lust after an idea. An event. A possibility. A girl. A thigh. A moment, on a girl and in the world: in an ideology in a book, on a beach, hovering over a cliff. Eroticism is about the want you have when you encounter an idea more-holy and bigger than you. Eroticism is this sensation of, “aha!” Eroticism is about the anticipation of want. The anticipation of need. The anticipation of every thing you have ever wanted, or what you could become. Just the same, you can love everything under the umbrella of life. And really, you should find those things which move your entire soul to the sharp cliffs of this earth. I say to my self: put yourself in this space. Strive for this fire. This heat. This birthplace of true, complicated passion. Anything less is really unacceptable. And then, I look up and there she suddenly, miraculously, is… + For all of this naked time where she was but a wavy line in my timeline, she has represented the height of my eroticism. And now, she represents that pointed possibility of breathing unimaginable life into this intersection of love and lust, this birthplace of passion. In all, she is the paralyzing flame of my red wine lips, wanting. Needing. Almost having… if the alchemy has been stirred in your favor. I have spoken it aloud to strangers and friends alike: She is the sexiest girl in this Queen City. But then, the strangest of sequences begins to unfold: In a correspondence of thousands of words it comes to pass that: she is not only the sexiest girl I have ever seen, she is brilliant. She is the best kind of intellectual: she is unsuspecting in her presentation. And what I begin to see in her is intellectual integrity, the one rounded element that has eluded me in all my intellectual relationships. It is this that I have lusted after for so long, since my childhood bones began to break in shards more apparent to my heart than anything else. How this began: She writes. I write back. She writes. And I begin to fall, steadily, quickly, unwavering, into a massive military complex that, at first I don’t want to identify as such – but then relent, with ease and call it: love. And then, in only a couple of days – I am sitting before her words and the heat in my body is swirling, pulsing. And it comes to pass that she is, indeed, more than any other I have known: She is the Michelangelo of my erotic ideal. She is eroticism. + And so, for the first time ever, we are sitting next to one another. (Certainly, she did not remember me from two years before, mumbling on that sidewalk after her gig). I am thinking to myself: This is my celebrity crush. This is the one girl that I have ever pointed at and said: I want her (my intiution is not sharp enough to explicate a thesis, because I only feel this). This is the first girl that I have seemingly haphazardly pointed at and said: I want her and nothing else. Finally, remarkably – she is sitting in front of me. And I know: This is my one chance. This is my moment. She is smiling at me as I shiver before her. I do not remember what comes from my mouth, except for the fact that every phrase is shaky and I hope with all my frail timbers that something will magically impress her, about me. When she is not looking, I breathe and pull myself together and put my invisible hands together in hope that my prayers will even make sense at all. Then, she tells me to sit closer. Again, I try breathing (because really, I am not suave, I am only me). Then, magically, I am touching her. Her hands crawl into my lap and I am the painting of gratitude. And alas, obese love. I am the picture that I want of me to be hanging in my legacy’s image: I am every deadly sin wrapped into one. I am, alas, the embodiment of everything bigger than me: I am Beethoven’s symphonies molten lava into Mozart and a perverted Dali moustache grin painted on Rothko’s dying face. With every small touch on her tiny body, I tingle. Her fingerprints leave small explosions on my leg. Her hand slides closer to my heat. At first, to test. Then, she leans in and the intersection where love and lust cross in the dead of night expands and soon, a small, nameless universe is born. And then, as though we want to share a secret, she comes closer and: I know it is going to happen. It has to happen. This is my one chance. This is my moment. If it is to never happen again, it is happening this once… I don’t so much kiss her as she kisses me. Averting any confusion, we kiss each other back. Again, and again… + Still, days later and I have been shaking, intermittently, from that first encounter. Shivering. I think about this reality, and the large facts that say: You kissed her and she kissed you. And where this could only happen once, my primary reason exhalts and I tingle in delight. For this may only be the beginning. For where I once knew my eroticism by only one name and one small intersection of love and lust, I am now forever changed. I now know my supreme delight by two names, an alliteration, her names alone – the unspoken singular being: love. Beyond anything of physical pleasure, it is a new born child and stamped in fact: I am in love with this girl. Mad, deep, life-altering love that begats new symphonies. New plays. New paintings. New paths in the wooded hills of my songs. For my erotic ideal is even more complicated than I once imagined. And I am still learning, teetering on a brink of possible disaster that I may have never really known. Still, with all possible struggle and beauty alike, I am standing in the wind, head-on – believing that I may have never wanted anything more. And so again, I ask: Have you ever wanted something so bad that you could not shake it from your waking life for years? Then, in a burst of unexpected light, it came walking into your life with open arms, possibly even wanting you? I ask you, what do you do next? |
