by Roy Mitchel
(05/23/07)
The bag was full to bursting, little bits of delicates, and not so much so, visible through the wide gather and a tightened twine. She was leaving after fifteen years, for good. She had left me before, a weekend, a week, a month or two, for various "esoteric" pursuits. An Ashram in India, Burning Man, Taos...but now as she hauled the heavy canvas bag (unbleached, of course) over her back, I was sure she would not be returning.
I looked at her thoroughly one last time, "You going to be ok?" I asked plainly.
"Fine, " she smiled, "you?"
"I'll be fine." I was lying through my teeth, but I had given up fighting. She was a rare bird, and she was hunting herself to extinction.
"I know it isn't recycled, but I packed a grocery bag of fruit and a baggie full of trail mix in the tote by the door. I figured you would be leaving as quickly as possible, I know how you hate goodbyes." In fact, she had never said goodbye before. It was part of "the understanding" always leave the door open.
"If you love something, set it free and all," she smiled.
Her sly candor bled through her thin eggshell disguise. It bled like a hastily sutured wound, still leaking from the frankenstinian stitches she had been applying across and over each other all her life. The only time she showed any real emotion was when she came, and according to her that was only with me. Was that why she kept coming back? Was that the only reason my bed was the only place she felt truly comfortable?
I could not resist one last effort to keep her, to hold on to something I knew I could not have, "I hope you don't miss me too much." I said, a wink in my voice. There was a tear in my heart but I wasn't about to confess the deep bond I felt for this woman. This woman I hardly knew.
"Of course I will," she looked at me, slightly less inscrutably than usual, "That's why I have to go."
"I see," I said, but I really didn't. I moved closer to her, the initiation of gentle combat. "I'm sorry dear heart, but I really don't understand."
"That's another," she said as she tiptoed and kissed me on the lips, barely brushing.
She tickled the hair under my nose, the very hair that upon returning after her first time away, I grew as a literal cover. A disguise against the man I once was. The wash had not yet hit and I counted her among the many women who came into my life and stayed, for a while. She was different, she lingered, much like her scent on my cover.
As she moved to the door and I turned away, unable to hide the rush of emotion that came with that simple gesture of the brush of lips against lips, I remembered the sound. The gentle semi-quaver of her shrill, and the visual of her eyes closed and her head tilted back as she tipped over the crest. And after I came back from overseas, I remembered the smell of her on me, the smell of sweat and pussy she left on my mustache. I remembered the only time she ever got angry with me, the day I shaved it.
Every once in a great while I liked to see what was under the mass of thick, rigid, salt and pepper hair. I had acquired the bottlebrush after spending some time in Dubai. I was recently released from service, bored and alone for a month as this boil grew on my heart, the same boil that was in the process of surgically removing itself through the gateway into my home. The custom was one I adopted quickly; being honey almond of complexion, I fit right in and the 'stache was the final accouterment. It was a disguise, from myself and my feelings, the immersion into the least free of societies. One governed by ancient rules regarding gender and class.
I had taken a consulting job with a company that made replacement parts for military aircraft, I hated the job but it paid well. My pension paid the remainder of the mortgage and I lived off my dwindling savings. I needed a diversion and a source of income. I had made many friends during my time in the Navy. Duty stations and stops along the way provided me with hours of conversation with both diplomats and dilettantes. The friends I made kept me informed as to what was actually going on in their home countries as well as provided me with connections I would reluctantly call upon later.
It was a society that kept men and women far apart, away from the temptation to make two beastly backs. The perfect place to mend the wound she left when, after only a month and a day, she left. With a note that said, "Miss you, see you in a while," she was gone. Not a trace of her remained except a single strand of jet-black hair, carefully placed in the case of the Mobius strip pendant I bought her. Gone. Just gone.
When she returned, not surprisingly a day after I did, she bore a scent that reminded me of desert sage and rosewood. She had returned from her venture clean and pure and I never asked where she had been or what she had done. I was jet lagged and groggy when I answered the door. I really hadn't expected to see her again and at the airport had set up a date with a woman more my age and speed. I did not expect to be properly fucked anytime in the near future, I was quite wrong.
Wherever she had been, whomever she had been with splashed upon her palate of sexual illustrations the indelible ink of aggression. She had been so gentle with me in the time we shared before, so caring and tender and even when I took her from behind she splayed her arms in a way that signified surrender, I had no choice but to push into her deeply but gently. She had come back a different woman, one who was hungry in a way that went beyond passive acceptance of my incursion through her front gate.
She had never given me head before, although it was part of my sexual repertoire to do it for her, I never asked for my own. I was happy to give of myself for her, happy to taste what she offered. When she came back, she demanded it, told me to eat her, to make her come. She told me to give her my cock in her mouth and when she took it she devoured it voraciously. When she bent at the waist and spread her ass for me I was shocked, I didn't know what to do. The clue came when she cupped her hand under her sex and dug deep, collecting the copious wetness that lie within, reached between her legs and flat-handedly slapped the goo on her asshole inserting a finger in the process. Instinct took over from there.
I lasted twelve hours that day. I came, countless times, but her physical control over me was so great that my issue was apparent only twice, she knew when to back off, when to slow down and how to get her own in the process. Someone else had taught her, I assumed, but she wanted to "feel" it with me.
To add to the confusion she talked. She talked to me about where she had gone, who she met, hinting at the details but never getting specific. She told me about a man she met on the way to Sedona, a sculptor and a painter. The way she spoke about him gave me the impression that he had been part of her sexual education on the journey down. To reconstruct a time line would have been pointless, she had no concept of linear time and I could not translate from her speech any construct of such. But from the way she described her journey I figure it took at least a week to arrive in Sedona, maybe more.
"He smelled like leather and sweat," she told me. "Yet he showered every day, sometimes two or three times." She said this with the incredulity of a child attending the circus and watching an elephant shit for the first time.
The little details of his routine betrayed either a deep concentration on his "way" or an amount of time spent that seemed far longer than the month she was gone. Either way, the dispassionate tone she exhibited was a far cry from the deep want and need she showed me. Was it a cover of some kind, a ruse to hide the connection she shared with this man? The end of the conversation about him gave me the answer. When I noticed a lack of nomenclature and asked if she had ever gotten this guys name, she simply shrugged, and said, "Don't know."
That she had noticed the smell (and probably the taste of him, but she never mentioned that aspect) the intricacies of his routines, and the stops along the way but never acquired his name was a small triumph. Conversely, she made a point of beginning every sentence directed at me with my un-shortened first name.
"Samuel, do you know that the flowers in the desert after a rain leave a scent in your nose that I can still smell? Samuel, did you remember to get organic milk? Samuel, fuck me deeper, deeper..."
Anyone else would have had me crazy with the way she consciously began every statement to me, every question and request, with my given name. Somehow I had snaked my way into her consciousness, Diantha, named after the Greek word for Divine Flower, called me Samuel so often that I began to enjoy the sound of my own name. She would climb aboard me, impaling herself upon me and ride me hard, calling my name as she took from me. She was slicked with sweat and wet with want as she danced her pelvis along mine. I knew my heart was in trouble when the simple sound of her voice calling my name gave me a eerie chill.
We settled into a routine for months after that, looking back now it was actually more than a year. But the time with her flew by so fast, so many stop-time still photographs interspersed with shaky camera focus blurs, that marking time was impossible.
She things did so many to me I barely remember. I do remember her fellating me so deeply that I swore her lips wrapped around my pelvis. She woke me in the middle of the night to shower and fuck her, wet and hot, on the plush carpet spanning the distance between my sink and toilet. And one dark moonless night she took me outside rode me in an armless resin chair under the stars. She pissed with abandon after disengagement and smiled at me as she did so. She was without modesty around me, belching and farting and giggling, scratching, masturbating and squelching behind me as I feigned sleep. She was unpredictable, wild and loving and I still didn't know exactly who she was.
I am godless, always have been. But feeling the time slip and slide in recall made me realize that I had managed some connection to the greater whole. I felt spiritual in the most uncomfortable way. I lost control of my ability to mark linear time, the mainstay of my sanity throughout my life. She took me out of that and rocked my perception. There were days that I smiled at strangers and bent down in grocery lines to retrieve dropped coins, there were days when I issued platitudes and endearments. At first my coworkers, few friends and relatives thought I had entered into the beginning stages of dementia, I was constantly asked if I was OK. I was the subject of debate and conjecture. Eventually the fears were alleviated, always after they met her. It was funny watching the light dawn, the facial contortions that lead to that "ahhh" moment, once or twice I actually laughed as they realized why I was behaving the way I was. At the time I only knew it was because of her, I did not know why and I'm not sure I do now.
Time bent as she fucked me. The hours spent in her cunt, her ass and her mouth felt like days, minutes and fleeting seconds. She seduced me with the fear of losing myself in the jetstream holding her aloft, above everything. When she came she soaked me, and she came so often that I could not tell where one ended and the next began. She especially loved to take me standing behind her. She was as tall as I was, about 5' 9," a perfect fit in so many ways. As we coupled in front of the full length mirror in my bathroom I could see her breasts, pendulous and dripping with sweat, circling little invisible planets, showering space with the dewy saline that poured from her. Legs weak and slathered with her scent, she pushed back at me urging me deeper, nudging at the mouth of her cervix. I came so violently within her that I could barely stand. What felt like two hours had taken little over 20 minutes.
Through her and her sex, I had managed some connectivity to the world at large; I had become a 42+2 if only for a time. I was becoming aboriginal, keen to the orbit of the planets and the movement of the earth beneath me. More than once I had awakened in the middle of the night queasy from all the input. If a human animal was meant to be this connected, this aware and instinctual it was not I. I relished in the sensual. Shopping for fabric with Diantha I was mesmerized by bolts of velvet, so much so that she bought me a yard of the plushest magenta and placed two patches under my nightshirt, one over each nipple.
Each trip out was a feast and a fear. Sometimes things just struck me so immediately that I was blown back from the force; a whiff of lilac, the roar of the wind, or a jet engine overhead, the distant backfire of an old classic car or the imaginary whinny of a horse that I remembered from my childhood in Montana. The world was raw and I was like a child and for the first time in my life, this twilight, I needed help, counseling. But to whom would I turn? Diantha was a life example, not a priest, not a psychologist. The synchronistic flow that was overwhelming in my life needed the direction of another, an intellectual spirit guide. All the while my rational mind was screaming. "Bullshit!"
I couldn't think of anyone I could turn to, any lead toward the path I was traveling parallel with. Of course I didn't know the path was just beyond the rush of trees to my left. I could hear the voices there but the din of everything else made distinguishing them as such impossible. I knew I was close but the blinders were firmly affixed to the sides of my head, so I could only see what was ahead. Like a good soldier, I trudged on.
I found my "help" in an old friend Mitch, a Gulf War vet who I had known for many years. He used to write me letters after the war, telling me of the desolation and the stark beauty of the desert where nothing was supposed to grow but somehow life, of a sort, flourished. Scarred by the sirens of drill after drill and the infernal roar of the missiles he was set to monitor, he was discharged and sent home. His life after that collapsed. His wife was unsympathetic towards the broken man who returned. Her father was a Vietnam veteran and faced horror upon horror, all televised and documented in the consciousness and the history of the nation. The less documented and more subtle "hurry up and wait" of the war he came home from was not. Blessed are the peacemakers.
He came home and left again. His travels taking him to the spiritual centers of the planet, Tibet, Mecca, Mt Fuji, the Desert Southwest of the United States, looking for something to believe in after his country, and his wife, had failed him. His trauma not recognized by the general public or any of the doctors or priests he sought out, he had found a bit of peace from everywhere he visited.
Mitch called me the night she left again, another short note left with no definitive date of return. We met a few weeks later, supped and drank at my favorite Ethiopian place, a taste I had acquired during my travels. He existed a far cry from what I remembered or expected. When I first met him he was brash and thin, young and angry. The man who sat across from me that night was different but the same. He hadn't the air of bravado he once thrust out into the world, his military barreled chest was just slightly concave yet still strong and tight. He sat erect but not tall in his seat, and at almost 6 feet to my 5 foot 9, to see eye to eye with him was both a comfort and a shock.
"I'm sorry I haven't been better about writing."
He spoke softly but I heard every word even over the boisterous party of 20 sitting directly behind us. "I've missed your letters," he said softly with a sly smile. "I take it that you have taken up with some wayward butterfly? You look practically giddy with worry."
I laughed, the first time in a while, "Giddy with worry? What the hell does that mean?"
"I don't know, but it sure sounded good, didn't it?"
His elfin giggle somehow suited this new man, had I spoken to him on the phone as opposed to in person I would have thought it a joke. I would have thought it was an old prank he used to pull on me, putting someone else on the phone and feeding him or her information enough to confuse me into believing that it was Mitch. One time he had his new Scottish girlfriend do the talking. It took many intimate details of our friendship spoken through her voice to almost convince me he had been to the Netherlands and not only received reassignment of sex, but nationality as well. I was quite gullible.
"So she's left you in a lurch I think?" He prodded slightly.
"I guess you could say that," I countered. "It isn't what she left with though, its more what she left behind."
"She fucked you well, eh? You were always a sucker for a good piece of ass, no offence meant."
I laughed, "Oh none taken, guilty as charged. Yeah, actually she did, very well, but its so much more than that."
"I see that, I'm not into auras or any of that kind of bullshit, but I can see it on your face, you look overwhelmed and well...off. She comes and goes, yes?"
"Oh absolutely, both." I nodded at the server as he placed the warm patties of flatbread on the table between us. "She did something to me, opened me up."
"A fluttering butterfly type, and at least 10 years younger than you."
"Fifteen."
"Jesus man, you know that when you were 20 she was only..."
I cut him off in mid sentence, "Please," I smiled," don't remind me."
"Of your age, or hers?"
"Both."
I tried so hard not to think of her as a child. She came to me as a woman and that is how I know her. In so many ways she was so much older than I was, so much more evolved. She handled me into handling her, sometimes roughly, sometimes tenderly, often both. I was suddenly violently pulled back to the last time she worshiped at my veiny altar. She was particularly uninterested in reciprocation that night, her mouth wetter and warmer than usual. Her saliva coated my cock in such a way that it looked like polished marble, strong, hard and indestructible. She laved at me, took me so deep into her throat that I feared cutting into her esophagus. Her hand making wet circles around my shaft as her mouth fucked me. Her hair, wispy, floated in the air as a feather with every deep bob.
"Hey," I was broken out of my dream-state by the voice of my friend. Carrying over some of the bliss I recalled I pursed my lips in a gesture of the kiss. Had we been closer I might have landed that kiss on his lips.
"Holy hell man, you were about to kiss me, that must have been some daydream. I can't even stand the sight of myself these days, thanks."
I was stunned, embarrassed and bewildered, "Just...remembering." I stuttered, knowing an apology wasn't needed. "Remembering how her mouth felt on me."
"You nearly had me there too, you were out there for at least ten seconds."
"Really?"
"Yeah, it reminded me of something I saw once in India. There was a small sect of Hindus that lived south of Delhi, I was so fucked up on hash I don't remember where. They were heavily into Tantra, very attached to the physical but transcendent at the same time, very odd for me and my hash."
He tore off a piece of bread and dipped it into the creamy shrimp and rice dish that had been laid on the table during my reverie. "They practiced constantly, they were sensualists, women and men. They sexed each other in plain sight and never showed any remorse or regret at getting it on with whomever they wished." He scooped another, and swallowed it almost whole. "I must have been inside at least three different women that week."
"What did it feel like?" I asked.
He paused, "You know, I never thought about it. That's the thing, it was the experience at that moment that mattered. I'm sure it felt good, I guess. I just remember losing all track of time and space, what felt like an eternity...hell, I don't know how long I was really there, come to think of it."
"Sounds familiar."
"Of course it does, that's why I mentioned it," the radiant smile returned. "I was properly fucked, but I don't remember a thing about it, you do, that's part of the problem. I looked at him quizzically.
"I had a really bad time of it in Iraq, worse than most. I didn't want to be there, I thought it was bullshit, not just the war but the stupidity of the whole thing," he stopped short of a detailed explanation and continued, "but I was already fucked before I got there, something was loose in my head. My wife never got me and she got me less after the discharge, but I never got me either. I looked so hard for anything to make it make sense, went back to church, prayed my ass off to anything that would listen, then I crashed. You, my friend would have fared better. You have never been fucked in that sense."
As the second course arrived I realized that this meeting was no accident, the timing, the person and the place, none of it was preordained but something happened to both of us that caused us to be here at that very moment. This realization was my first real surrender.
"I'm sorry I wasn't more available for that," I looked away, genuinely ashamed.
"Don't be, I managed better on my own. It was tough, very much so, but it all worked out."
"You were saying, my problem is that I remember being fucked properly, I'm not sure I get why that is a problem."
"It is now, it won't always be."
"Ok, now you're just doing that riddle-talk I fucking hate so much, she..."
"...does that too?" He said grinning like an idiot.
"Yeah she does, and it makes me crazy."
"Good, a little crazy is good. I have to meet this woman."
"The hell you do." I bared my teeth, part smile part warning. We both laughed.
It was small talk from that point on, the message, however effluent, was given and on some level received. Separation of shit from water. I was far from the point of understanding though the intuitive insight was there. As I walked him to his car and grabbed him for a warm and deep hug, I kissed him on the cheek. "Thanks."
"For what?"
"You know what."
I watched as he drove away and out of my physical life once again. He died that night, rounding a corner too fast on Interstate 95 home to Rhode Island. On some level I think it was on purpose, so I didn't mourn. I had thoroughly mourned the passing of the man I knew long ago and it was past time for sadness.
When I got home, safe and sound, she was there. Waiting on my bed open legged and wet. "Welcome home," she said. Sex with her had changed again, it wasn't rough and tumble, nor was it warm and tender, it was transcendent and astral. I don't remember a thing about that night.
She stayed with me for seven years after that, the thought of her leaving never again crossed my mind. When she did, I accepted it for what it was. I did not see her again for another year.
I had many "dates" in that year of her physical absence, learned many things and taught a thing or two myself. Countless women, I lost track after the twentieth, graced my bed. Some a time or two, never extended, never even semi-permanent. I properly fucked every one. The intensity of my sex made them weak, exalted them and drove them away. The entire time I felt nothing of my body, only the fleeting connection to a soul and an idea. They all made a point of thanking me, but my ego had long gone away. I was a shell and an empty vessel. I was no one and everything.
As I held the door for the last of them a yellow taxi pulled up to the end of my drive. What stepped out of the back seat vaguely resembled my dear Diantha. As I had grown young and vibrant in my mid fifties she had become ancient and frail, weak and powerless. I met her half way down the drive, my latest conquest forgotten as my focus honed in on the woman I loved, the only woman I loved. She reacted to me with a smile and said nothing as I helped her past the threshold and into my home. The ratty old bag she had carried and kept had been left in the cab as it drove off.
She looked like she had been in Pamplona and had taken the wrong side of a bull to the face. Her eyes were swollen, her beautiful delicate little Greek nose twisted. Why she had come here and not gone to the hospital I did not know, but she was here and I needed to tend to her.
She said not a word in almost two weeks, my ability to mark time clear and definite. I brought her soup, slept beside her and read Chaucer to her, all the while she acknowledged me with sighs and smiles. I didn't need to know what she had been through, just that she was getting better and that she was safe. I bathed her, baptized her and held her hair as she vomited. I cared for her body just as she had cared for my soul.
During that time we did not once touch each other in a sexual fashion. Every movement was a great effort for her and she was not arousing to me in any way shape or form. My love for her had grown beyond sex, beyond the physical manifestation of the sprite spirit guide of carnality. She was broken and I mended her. Just as she'd mended me.
The first time we made love was slow and deliberate. She was no longer able to control my coming so I took over that role from her, I lay in her for hours, sat with her over me for hours more. We kissed deeply, slowly and with a hunger that was not rushed. Love is not rushed, and for me, this was love. We made love every single day, the same way every time. I was never bored with her, never hungry for a new position or a new kink. I had grown young and patient and she was older still, older and wiser.
For all intents and purposes we were married, we had always been. And until the day she walked out of my life for good, we lived as husband and wife. And the bag? I retrieved it from the cab company, with help from another old friend, some muscle, and 50 bucks.
Now as I watch her leave, walk down the same drive I met her on six years ago, I can't help but wonder why. Why I seemed so much a gravitational body that her planet could not resist. Why, even now was I more than willing to let her go, and why she always needed to hold on to that stupid canvas bag.
