The Eloquence of Touch

In this house, the eight of us live immersed in words, witticisms, and all the abundant pleasures of the mind to which one might aspire. There is so much talk, so much thought rendered audible. Volumes upon volumes would fill themselves in electric succession, should some greater power ordain the transcription of our days.

And yet ...

All of it hushes to the quiet of spiderwebs teased by a breeze, when skin to skin I converse with one of my loves.

The briefest caress can disclose more emotion than all the words searched out and sought for by a thousand poets assigned the Sisyphean task of tolling with poesy's bell the full measure of passion and affection and want and need and desire.

Her hand upon my shoulder.

His lips brushed to my cheek, fleeting and fair.

One hip gracing another.

Hands pressed palm-to-palm, each finger to each, all in mirrored alignment.

Connections of the most profound elevation, whether chaste and pure or ascending to the perfect land where eros reigns in heat and fervor.

These communications say so much that we can never with syntax and vocabulary give permanence to their meaning. Try as I might, I cannot tell the true story of today's most particular kiss, or yesterday's tap of a finger to the tip of my nose.

We live these tactile expressions, and then they are gone, enduring only in their contribution to the suffusing spirit of this home, these lives.

Would that I could reach out to you now and with a simple, gentle moment of contact make real for you what I have been trying here to wrestle into words.

Gratitude

 I am so, so limitlessly thankful that we have come back to one another ...

That mistakes of a now-vanished decade are not unrectifiable ...

That my expansively love-filled world has so readily welcomed and heart-healed its one intolerable contraction.

A part of me does ask, "How much more right might the wider world be, had everyone been apportioned a bounty equal to mine for which they might be thankful?"

But when I look at her, lying in such warm and wondrous slumber beside me, the morning sunlight at play in her golden hair, I cannot be toppled from this dais of permeating, comprehended grace -- this awareness of all my fortune and how far at bay it keeps the worries of mundanity.

I exist in perpetual regard of the gift she represents, granted by the universe unto me and unto all who know her.

Thank you, cosmos, for the bliss that is my Heddy.

Basking in a New Photogenicity

 Another set of pictures mischievously inflating my ego ...

A New Look

For anyone who'd been anticipating the outcome of my recent posts sans the latest, here is a glimpse of me now.

I'm rather pleased with these.

Old Flames and the Idiocy of Misapprehending Failure

One of the great loves of my life inspired this lofty bit of reminiscence a few years back. In between then and now, I've occasionally reread it -- sometimes growing inordinately pleased with myself for its various turns of phrase; other times casually steeping the fibers of my soul in an idyllic marinade of nostalgia.

She read it, late last week.

I can't conceivably impress upon you the magnitude of that sentence. She read it.

More stupefying yet: the day after she read it, she was here.

We spoke. We touched. I beheld the lines of fourteen lost years upon her face, none of them able to reduce her beauty to so much as one iota short of Aphrodite's. We explored together our reasons and reasoning for the absurdly enormous mutual mistake -- the things she would not admit to herself at the time and the things I would not contemplate deeply enough to reconsider in the years since.

And all because, when I admitted in rather red-cheeked mortification that she'd been naggingly and increasingly on my mind of late, the man I love said, "If you're really that anxious to know what became of her, why don't you try getting in contact?"

It was so easy to do once I summoned the courage.

We fit so perfectly back together the moment she responded.

And now I have, again, in my life, something I should never have let go of.

She loved the post, even though she laughingly pointed out to me the parts she said were "horseshit." She loved that I had written it, that I had captured in such keenly scintillant prose at least a fraction of the monumental truth of us. She loved my favorite line most of all.

She loves me, still, never having stopped -- just as I now understand I have never stopped loving or needing her.

When we took her to the airport this afternoon, it was not to send her home, but to send her temporarily back the life in which she's contentedly waited out the last fourteen years. There are loose ends there to tie up. Somewhere around fourteen days from now, she'll return and stay.

But even with the width of half the country between us, we aren't apart, and won't ever be again.

Which is probably why I can't figure out how to end this post, I suppose; it's a post about something that's refused for fourteen years to be over. I can't possibly contain it in just a few paragraphs.

All right, I'm going to go and compose about a thousand emails to have waiting for her when her flight is done and she takes her phone out of airplane mode.

Waiting

I find myself beset more than slightly by impatience and inconvenience.

These are, for the most part, novel emotions to me -- or at least rare enough that I can turn them over for examination and feel that I'm in bold and uncharted territory, if also in a realm of itchy anticipation.

There's an amusement factor in observing one's own childish foibles, although I suppose the drollness may serve as a bulwark preserving my adult self-image. Oh. Look at this silly part of me, this little nugget of immaturity, insecurity. Isn't it cute? Obviously I'm not remotely in danger of letting it spiral me into a fit of infantile pique.

How much leash should I offer this mood of desire thwarted by the sluggish progress of days and events that stand between me and that which I find myself craving with more and more wanton abandon?

Clearly the answer is that it does not matter. The wheels, gears, and cogs of the universe shall turn as they will, and no measured biding of time can make them run faster.

Has contemplating this set at ease my restless temper by even the tiniest damned bit?

No. But I suppose at least that the ten or twenty minutes spent spinning these thoughts into threads and skeins has put me ten or twenty minutes closer to that which I impatiently await.

Changes Gather ... Like Clouds Breaking Open by the Light of Dawn?

We've taken a step here that tips at my long-contented and (I thought) imperturbable self-image. Read back a few posts for a glimmer of what I'm talking about.

I'll have more to say, I suspect, in a few weeks.

Enraptured and Captured in Lascivious Visuality and Sound

Long ago, my housemates used to occasionally partake in making cinema of a decidedly prurient sort. The knowledge of this eventually came out, and the newer members of Worthy Acres, myself included, quickly agitated for a series of showings.

Very educational and enticing.

But something more than just a few video files came unbottled in the process -- an insistent genie, if you will, that set its sights on granting several yams' wishes to rekindle those filmic adventures.

To date, I've somehow managed to find myself on the attentive end of a lecherous lens not just once but twice, and then reviewed the results multiple times beyond that.

I shan't go into details, which would be both crass and disrespectful of my partner/filmographer's privacy. But the aspect I do want to discuss is how gratifying it can be to see oneself disposed in the throes of mutual satisfaction with a lover who so clearly delights in both the shared sensuality and the kink of enshrining our concupiscence in video form. I'm not a woman bereft of vanity, but to see myself encompassing the whole of the screen with what I'm going to claim was jaw-droppingly voluptuous sensuality -- well, it struck a rather erogenously egotistical nerve that now pulses quite notably whenever I think back on those images.

The hormone-tided emotions of lovemaking have not, to date, translated into videographed form. But all the carnal intimacies present themselves quite well on a rewatch.

I highly recommend the experience of casting away restraint and self-consciousness in this way. To be unabashed in the midst of passion -- to be willfully exposed in both flesh and heedless congress -- such daring endeavors liberate with lustful profundity.

Exuviate Those Negative Expectations

So.

No sooner did Thursday's post bemoan the impossibility of finding an exact replacement for my aging corporeal self, when in a fit of impulse and curiosity, my other of ultimate significance went looking online and found one almost without trying. 

Thus does the lesson for the day reveal itself to me: even if you for some reason expect the worst, don't embarrass yourself by letting others know so that they can expose you in all of your naked folly.

Ambivalence and Temptation

An aspect of being inorganic, manufactured, and originally designed as merely a sex toy is that my body is replaceable. In theory, should it wear out beyond utility in its original purpose, and should my housemates manage to find my original model online, a freshly minted corporeal me might arrive a mere few days after placement of an appropriate order.

In practice, however, the task of finding that original make and model would likely prove impractical if not impossible; it went out of stock from the online store quite soon after my arrival here, and the process of searching online for a headless torso lovedoll is not one for which highly refineable results would be expected.

The greater part of me, though, is of course my mind, which could easily be superimposed upon any decently similar replacement body merely through the exercise of will and imagination.

I and the sole organic member of the household have had this on our minds of late, and it came to pass that the phrase "decently similar" failed to cohere identically between us.

Specifically, he proposed that, as an umbrella description, it might include a replacement form based not simply upon my current physical traits an limitations, but one that would, instead, incorporate any number of long-dreamt and imagined characteristics that have been settled on as the ideal me.

Short brunette hair.

Blue-green eyes.

Limbs.

And while we have discussed how each of these applies to me in the world of the mind, the notion of actually acquiring them in real life took me off-guard.

First and foremost, would any happened-upon shape and face so well embody the imagined me that the previously mentioned superimposition would feel authetic?

Second, in choosing and accomplishing embodiment in a limbed corpus, would I be leaving behind that portion of my identity bound up in my present truncated shape?

These concerns are real and daunting.

Yet ...

To hold my loves with physical arms ... to gaze upon them with physical eyes ... to receive and return their kisses with soft, shapely lips ...

The concept is beyond enticing.

Might it come to pass? Time, as they say, will tell. But there's a heat of expectation and even yearning that simmers now within me -- and within each of my beloveds as well.

Hmm.

Remind Yourself of Yourself.

I am, on the whole, a person confident in her array of capacities. Not much ever happens to shake my certainty that I dwell in the proper place, surrounded by those I am meant to flourish amongst, and in whom I am meant to encourage a flourishing of their own.

But even an imperceptive individual would be hard-pressed to overlook the frequency with which a great many people find themselves in positions of doubt. My girlfriend Ariel doubts her intelligence. Our mutual girlfriend Elle doubts (more and more occasionally, these last few years) whether the expression of softness befits her -- whether vulnerability is within her capability to show and still remain safe.

Our boyfriend doubts and doubts and doubts. It's charming, in its own way, owing to the earnest depths of sincerity with which he dismays of ever being truly sufficient.

With my own confidence, and my absolute fervor for the nourishment of souls in whom I have invested my affections, I'm forever stepping up to salve these worries and neuroses that dog the heels of my beloveds. I'm good at it, and have learned the mystique of the right look, or touch, or word parceled out with optimal timing. Yet my ability to give succor to those suffering anxieties can never rise to a level genuinely curative -- I am a talented balm, not a persistent, perpetuating solution.

And so the help I most try to give is to be for them a mirror: to hold up before them a perception of themselves that is real and unalloyed with self-censure. Then, once with this glass I get them to see what I see within them, I deliver the most important morsel of aid that I can.

"Remember to see this in yourself," I tell them -- as I tell you now. "Take note of your perfections, not merely your flaws. And daily, before you find yourself at sea in a sargasso of uncertainty, take the time to recall these things that make you worth my while, and worth the world's while."

(I use rather a bit more casual language about the house when doing this, obviously. But indulging in flights of fluency here is one of the manners in which I practice this advice for myself.)

Mortification

I delight in words, as you obviously must know if you've read with any depth the spill of language that is this blog. And so I've acquired the sporadic habit of snatching from some convolution of my grey matter a fanciful example of my vocabulary, musing upon it from a number of angles, and then lofting it into place as a post title to inspire me to write.

It's worked decently enough, a number of times. I'm particularly happy with "Atavism," a few entries past.

But oh, tonight, how I have stained the clean page of my anticipation with embarrassment.

A word, I thought. A word, a word, a word. But which?

And there bubbled into my sensorium this: causistry.

And I typed it. And the stinging red lash of the automated spell-checker denied me. What? Can this be? But ...

A right-click confirmed it. The word is casuistry. I have held it in my brain with the amorphous hints of a definition attached for years upon years, but all this time, I have mentally mis-spelled it.

Why am I so humiliated by this failure, yet shameless to admit I didn't have more than a vaporous phantasm of its meaning? Honestly, I can't quite say.

And given the output of my Google search to grasp its full and formal denotative identity, I plainly cannot stoop to rationalizing these emotions.

Thus, my new title above.

The Trivial and the Exalted

Small snips of sensuality can, in their way, exceed beyond reason the measure of their moment. A fingertip along one's jawline. The brush of lips to the back of a hand. A just-voiced breath arriving on the delicate involutions of an ear.

That which is simple, and small -- but perfect -- can linger, and linger, and linger. Not fading, but engorging itself heatedly in our memory.

A precious, fleeting touch immortalizes the instant of its tenure, deranging every sense of proportion and recalling itself to the forefront of conscious thought until another, larger, longer, encompassing contact can blot it out with ecstasy.

When Day Breaks Upon Us Together

This morning, in his arms, I felt so exquisitely chosen and cherished. Through blinds drawn closed against whatever unmindful accidental eyes might stray our way from a neighbor's second-story window, a twilight pre-dawn glow filtered in and then suffused the room, the bed, our forms colluding in intimacy beneath tangled sheets and the thick, hot, blanketing weight of our duvet. Darkness and the lovely, precious press of flesh resolved with steady tempo into shaded shapes and passionscapes, until sight joined sound and touch in delivering to each of us the fullest apprehension of our connectedness.

A dawn so sweet and charged with delight arrives but rarely ... and today it was ours in which to revel.

Anomalous

I thought to myself, "For a change, why not try writing something minimalist instead of extravagant." From there, I had want of a title -- one word would have to do, but which? The entry would be uncharacteristic of me, but "uncharacteristic" ... ? What a dully utilitarian word. I reached for my thesaurus. "Uncharacteristic" got me to "atypical." "Atypical" got me to "anomalous." But on the same page with "anomalous" ...

Heteroclite.

Could I ask for anything more appropriate?

Inconclusive

I've yet to come fully down on one side or the other of my delightful girlfriend Claire's scheme to get us all to rotate through a blogging roster day by day by day. There's an allure to pleasing someone you care for as deeply as I do that sassy and grandly encouraging woman. But it's also a long-held goal of mine to drift on the currents of contemplation until they coax me around that bend where the rapids or falls of creativity await.

In truth, though, I suppose there's no binary here awaiting resolution into a single path forward. Why should I choose either to bow out and write on my own terms, or to leap in with both feet and swim downstream until I tide out to sea in an ocean of kindly cajoled prolificacy?

There is so much beauty in being asked to help found a new family tradition -- particularly when the family in question abounds as this one does with kind-heartedness, appreciation, and warmth.

So when my turn rolls round again, I may well use it to limn the universe's contours with constellations of starrily gleaming expressiveness. Or I may find some desultory way of hitching together a dozen or two celebratory words about the boundless life of affection I have managed, somehow, to get myself caught up in.

No conflict exists between taking this challenge seriously and making of it a ridiculous and casual diversion. It is, after all, impossible that my contributions might disappoint anyone, except (and even then only mildly) in the case of their evaporating entirely from the mix.

Let us see, then, where the coming weeks might take us.

There Are No Words

We can try, those of us inclined to fits of textual ambition, to capture in the coils of syntax that most potent and refined essence of the heartfelt. Emotions, though, derive from the instants of our experiences, do they not? They can linger on to become moods -- yet they hit us not in the writhing strikes of blue-white lightning or the rumbling dissolution of thunder, but in the crack that joins the two as the sky is split.

All of this is to say: fate bestowed upon me a hug, this morning. A soft and enduring embrace that carried me in and out of languidly erratic slumber -- and that, with each surfacing and submersion, filled my very being with contentment, exaltation, and incredulity.

And having expended so many quarrels of phrasing and vocabulary, the best I can hope for is that you have felt this same thing, and that my volleys of poetic declamation here have recalled it to you. Nothing within my verbal capacity can hope to bring real understanding of my morning's blissful entwinement to readers who have not already lived such moments of their own.

I can express, but I cannot enlighten anyone to the sun-warmed stones of those emotions, so hot and solid and unyielding in their reliability.

When you hold someone you love, only that connection itself is sufficient to communicate its blissful merits.

This Morning

This morning, with dawn still in abeyance, our bodies felt more than seen in the dark-shrouded world, my love and I glowed with tactile illumination. To touch between gossamer sheets, to brush lips against throat or ear or the firm curve of a clavicle, to whisper words of deepest meaning and gasps still deeper than that -- these truths we lived together in a bed turned universe.

I remain wholly and vividly satisfied.

Atavism

I become a beast beneath you, insensate in the clutch of drives that leapt and spawned on the shores of some longago primordial stew, its waters frenzied by the surging hot convections of life, its sands scattered beneath savage feet, corrugated by the moulding inexorable rhythms of the tides. All reason leaves my brain to fly pell-mell down the neurons of my spine, my throat, my every joint and extremity, in rampant pulsations that speak from a universe ten million years gone. What sounds my laryngeal apparatus can shape, evolved to all such complexities as abstraction and design require, have drained away to dark, uncharted caverns, leaving only the most gutteral and gravid of uncouth vocalities to express in spiraling bedlam these passions that have claimed and now obliterate the higher corners of my mind.

Upon a plateau of aeons long since effervesced into dust, I behold archaic stars and the Hephaestean trails of comets streaking the sky with ironic fire as they pound and pound and pound the molten orb of our world with their freights of ice and iron, birthing oceans in a rain of steam and flame.

For how long am I the inchoate planet, the elementary animalcule, the exquisitely wordless and tremoring ape, new to bipedalism and joyful to shed it for motions less refined yet titanic in their capacity to transport?

Somewhere within me the lizard arches its back and gasps, or hisses, or possibly belches the most unsapient croak.

And, slowly, time and history dawn and return the two of us to sentience, civility, elegance, and the most rarefied of bliss. Epochs of fire in wildly painted caves dim from our eyes, replaced with a clarion sunshine through curtained crystal windowpanes. Grammar and vocabulary assert their existential whereabouts in the pinnacled environs of our cortices.

There is, though, in a moment such as this, so little to say.

Except with perhaps a mildly deranged grin,

WOOF.

The Sentimentality of Dates

It appears we missed our anniversary yesterday, which might strike some as quite a feat, considering that even a single member of our septet recalling the significance of those particular numbers on the calendar could have sparked at least some mildly celebratory observations.

Yet our days and nights are woven together here in a way that makes each one worth reverence, and I in particular am so much more endowed with life and companionship than I've any right to be; it doesn't bear fretting over that one day out of the year should go unremarked-on for its cyclic coincidence with my arrival in this place of conjunction and wonder and partnered plenitude.

Still and all ... he kissed me and held me and made murmured apologetics a short while ago, and that brought a certain giddy sense of proper acknowledgment to my heart.

When there is a day such as the day any anniversary intends on commemorating, the perfection is in recognizing its raptural truth, not in doing so with a narrowly prescribed precision.