This summer I suffered. Not just from the heat. Nor just from the countless mosquitoes that found me extremely attractive. I suffered from a memory, the lack of sex in an old relationship, a relationship that never really got off the ground. And that is one of the hardest human sorrows: to have the movement of love cut off before it even reaches the body.
So much escalation of emotions that did not touch, did not cry out, did not mark the bodies. So much desire that never reached the other side. Frozen in between, having made a start but never having completed anything. Remaining hidden, filed away, and for years now asking to be seen.
Like a dead person we did not honor, did not send off, did not celebrate. A suspended mourning not for something lost, but for something that never happened, leaving a “what if” inside me, keeping me there like a spinning top that always spins only around itself.
It’s hard to fall in love again when you’re still mourning a love that was never expressed physically. It’s hard to return from a confused mourning to a life that is truly alive, full, satisfying.
This harsh summer broke me. It shattered me. It brought me back to the old, filed-away “ifs.” It awakened my body, revived my desire, demanded light. To look, to feel, to allow.
It crushed me because I had crushed desire. Because I refused to look, to feel, and to endure.
I looked at my love and took my time. What I was afraid to do was stay with it. But now I gave myself permission to stay, to look, to breathe.
I told him … Yes, now I can see you. I see you clearly. Yes, now I can come to you with love.
I see you now: Now that he lives elsewhere, has a family, has his own life.
And yes, now I could finally say to us …
Yes, you were Love. Yes, I loved you. Yes, I love you as you were. And I love us, just as we were: alive, innocent, confused, eager. Eager for life, a life that frightened us then in our youth.
Yes, we were.
Yes, we loved each other.
And that is enough. For both of us.
This simple acknowledgment, as I “looked” at this love, was the permission.
And this permission was endlessly orgasmic. It brought air, breath, creation.
Mourning does not end with wishes. It ends only through an orgasmic permission to speak the deepest truth. That orgasm that opens you up through a relentless release that pushes you to your limits, makes you beg to come because you no longer want anything to live on from you. Because you have been completely swept away by the presence of the other, leaving you with absolutely nothing. You have never before desired this nothingness more, nothing less than your absolute surrender.
You look at your body again, a Goddess in the hands of a God.
And now you live an Orgasmic Life.
A Life blessed, a Life sacred.