Opaque

“Ours is the strangest meeting of my life,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because, I think you know me."

I would meet him every week. Get togethers, always with other people, that weren’t platonic and for a long time, not consummated. But the consummation was in the complicity; that we agreed to meet when I was not to be had.

Language is not transparent, but sex is.

He didn’t need to be inside me to see my infidelity, to see the sin of my new friendship. Sex was everywhere between us. There was sex in how he looked at me, sex in how I felt around him, sex when he put me down. Sex when I fought back up. Sex, and it’s sad uncontrollable movements in how we struggled just being near each other. Sex, in it’s service and it’s selflessness in how much I admired him, how desperately I wanted him to need me.

Sex, in all it’s intimacy, in all it’s glory, in all it’s human disgustingness.The alive vulnerability that is pushed through your body, fluids expelled onto another person.

I felt shy, desired and controlled when I was with him. I spoke with a higher voice, my breasts grew and I only felt beautiful in a dress. I became a woman just thinking about being touched by him.

The concreteness of genders stood between us like a person.

Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other would it take to make love?

Finally, a week before everything changed, I let him make love to me. There was a violence in the way he touched me, but a gentleness in how I moved with him. I thought of Leonard Cohen as every breath we drew was hallelujah.

The first time he climaxed, pressed up against me in his bed with no sheets, my heart began to race. It hasn’t stopped.

In the beginning when I was with him, I was trapped in the feeling found when you use a word in a sentence that you can’t define, but it sounds right. I didn’t know what we were. I had a feeling I knew what we meant.

Still, I find myself locked in suspended breath, wondering what would have happened had it all turned out differently.