You want to feel safe. You also want to feel soft and sexy, like you're drowning in your sensuality, like you're lost in the hands of the six strong tanned men you saw earlier playing volleyball in the sand, who have all come to your blanket to make love to you because it is a known fact that you are the most breathtaking woman ever to set foot on this topless beach, and when they toss you one to another and stroke you and reach inside of every part of you and turn you inside out and make you sigh oh! and then oh! and then oh! again and again you are sure you were brought into this world to explain sex to the universe and that the profusion of orchids along the roads and the rooftops and the walkways everywhere on this island bloom solely because of your oh's! and the joy and wonder of living so deeply inside of your sexuality.
But first, you have to feel safe.
And who can do that for you? Over the last three days since your escape from the bad dream of American politics and all the sad news of the world -- the news that is so appalling it has no way of being filed away in your brain, but has to be tacked up on the bulletin board part of your heart, left there to look at, to say why? -- you have learned to love the feel of coconut oil on your breasts in the sun, the glint of your nipple ring reflecting near the tribal rose tattoo on your left breast. Even when you wander down the beach to the bar to get just one more pineapple aftershock, past the men who look like they're going to reach out and swat your behind in your red bikini (and secretly you wish they would) -- even lost in that kind of enjoyable lust, you still don't feel safe, so you've had to tuck away in your heart the dream of the two tall men.
For one brief moment on the way here you felt a little bit safe, before you climbed down the steps of the plane back out into the sunlight. Always a little crazy and different inside your most secret mind, you're the opposite of the normal person with a fear of flying -- you can't wait to be pressed back into your seat as the plane takes off. You take a look at the pilots every time you get on a plane -- some of the most competent and calm and powerful people in the world, overflowing with the right stuff -- they control your destiny while you're up there, and that's a turn-on for you. You have so many standard pilot fantasies you could write a book. And it's always both pilots, good-looking or not, short or tall, young or old -- you've always wanted at least two men at a time, if not three, or four, or more, not at all like the average girl always seeking the One. When you're hopelessly deep in these fantasies, you remember that some people say there are "two Americas" that we live in, but you suspect you fell deeply into the third one a long time ago -- maybe it's a world of the have's, the have-not's, and the have-hots. Because even when you're being serious, and you know that you wake up every single day of your life thinking about what really matters?, and how are the children?, and what needs doing next?.... but still, no matter what direction your brain travels at sunrise, the rest of your body always blows in the wind toward touching and fucking and kneeling and sucking, getting so wet, and imagining, god, the imagining -- if anyone could read your ordinary thoughts, they'd lock you away with the crazy women who wanted too much.
Right here on the beach, right now, in the always-sought-after present moment, you still want to be safe, and in your dreams you want the ones you can't possibly have, the two tall campaigning men named John with the great hair and the red ties, the men with the killer smiles, the men who debate against the dark side, the men who love their sexy wives, the men who spout words like integrity and honor, and when they do, it shivers you right down to your toes, because just like the sound of a train in the distance, everybody knows it's true.
But your final day of escape is almost over, you've sent all the ordinary friendly guys away, and now it looks like you are alone, it's just you and your desires that transcend ordinary sex; you and your questions, there's so much that you question, but the biggest question is always one of lust. You try to meditate quietly before you get dressed to return to your room, always attempting to control desire, always trying to remember the cause and effect reality of karma, the Buddha's maxim that sensual pleasures are like saltwater; the more you indulge, the more thirst increases. But it's getting late, and like every evening since you've been here, all the sunsets are breaking records for their beauty, and if that's not a sensual pleasure, what is?
You wonder if the Buddha was just wrong, or lonely, or bitter? You can feel it all, which is how you know you're alive; this is your time of day, the promise of the dark, the immersion into possibility, the perfect vanishing point where dreams meet reality. When you finish your meditation and open your eyes, you blink once, then again, at what you see -- it's all coming at you, everything you ever wanted, your own million man march, and right up front, intense and strong, are your two tall men who will keep you safe. You think you may have died and gone to heaven, but no, your empty aftershock glass still sits beside you so you know you‘re still here. They are coming toward you, and you can see that your personal march of a million strong men appears to have rules: everyone is soulful; there are no pasty white men with sneers like the ones who rule the airwaves; no bigots; no fools; no men who don't understand that to admit to mistakes creates wisdom and honor and fate. You are on your knees, helpless, you are one with all of the women who have ever fallen under the spell of a powerful man; you understand the Monicas and Chandras and every other young girl who has given it all up to reach for what she needs.
Your million man march spreads across the horizon as far as you can see, blocking out the waves, haloed by the sunset, and all of them are smiling directly at you, or maybe it's a little lower, directly at your nipple ring. Help is on the way -- the whisper reverberates across the sand, and you're thinking that with this kind of help you could probably do six impossible things before breakfast, save the world, cure AIDS, and still have time to roll in the surf with all of them from here to eternity.
Your two leaders have their shirtsleeves rolled up, ties tossed in the surf, and they are smiling, they never stop smiling, and they are strong, and true; they are touching you and laughing, knowing, and then they are pouring down on you slowly, so slowly, like a bottle of Heinz ketchup flowing just right, and the color of your terror is subsiding, from red to yellow to the palest of pinks, a Paris Hilton pink, the pink that everybody loves, the kind of pink that makes the world safe for a little girl, spinning, laughing, dancing to her favorite song, a little girl with nothing wrong.
The night is filled with stars that won't stop shining, men who won't stop falling into your arms, passion that shakes down every slogan of love, and you are coming, and coming, into a place of joy, because these men who are on top of you, and on top of the world, know that hope is on the way, and you're sure you're going to be the last girl to die for their charms, and there is no mistake. There is nothing you would not do for them -- you will drown in hard work and sacrifice and follow them to walk out onto the water, where you'll find at sunrise that you're no longer even really there. It's eight years in the future, and you are sexy and safe and loved, and the future has turned out exactly like you dreamed, you can hear the cheer, you can see that it has always been true that your future belonged to freedom, not to fear.
