The Almost Virgin Experience
“I’m looking for an experience.” You measure experiences like they’re marks on a wooden scale, the kind you and I remember from matched childhoods. And it makes us both laugh. But I hear the anxiety under your eagerness, the lust beneath your fretting.
We talk of these things, of shared pasts, of possible futures carefully avoiding the idea of convergence. Sometimes this means comparing where we diverge. You comment on all that I have seen while I listen, pondering all that you have, but never been able to name.
I tell you I’ve read the first chapter of many, many books once. Of some, just a page here, a paragraph there, not even the first always. A passing glimpse of what is but lacking context, it could be anything really. You’ve read one single book thoroughly from cover to cover and backwards and upside down and fine print and even the print under the print, the words between the lines in the invisible ink of imagination only.
We talk for hours, every exchange foreplay. Whatever happens will be just a metaphor of us. “I don’t like hickeys” you tell me “but biting is okay.” “What about scratching?” I ask, a question that leaves you dumbfounded. Is it because it never occurred to you or because you’ve never had the language to describe fantasy? I watch the idea take root. And I wonder how much to dig in to make this grow, how much will break you. Eventually, I let chemistry decide.
And by the time scratches show, there is a wall between us thicker than clothes, distance and language. Maybe that’s the price to pay for mingling in one another as if we were nothing but pure ether.
Later when we pass, me having shed worry, guilt, attachment and you, having collected the experiences you craved, our eyes meet. This time, we both have skin and names and boundaries. But our eyes are the same. Ether starts to leak. And one of us turns away, wondering if the other understands the thing we never say,
These are just things that get said between bodies, things that happen between people. Lust knows no morality and neither does language.
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I’m Ramya Pandyan (a.k.a. Ideasmith) and I’m on Twitter and Instagram.
