The Sagan Diary

SIX SEX

I must apologize to you. I am sitting with you and you are talking to me, telling me about the world to which we are going, where you and I will start our lives together. I'm sure what you're saying is important—critical things I need to know, about a place I have never been but where I will spend the rest of my days. I am sure you are telling me things I need to hear, but I must confess I'm not hearing a single word.

Instead I am intent on your face, and the movement of your lips, and the memory of how those lips feel when they are on me. While you speak I am thinking of the last time we kissed, and the subtle friction that took place because we were so slightly out of sync, the rush of blood flooding our lips to make them softer, and make us more aware of just how many nerve endings each of us were pressing against the other.

Your words arrive at ears that are not deaf but disinterested, because although what you say is some' thing I need to know, I know I can make you repeat it some other time. You will oblige me that way. And so I watch your lips purse and thin and tighten and repeat, knowing that the same motions can be used for other ends, and enjoying the memory of those ends achieved.

I apologize now because I am staring at your hands, which you use as punctuation—another layer of language to illustrate the point you think I am hearing, but which in reality is flying past my head and falling into piles against the wall behind me. I realize that this is not like me, that you prize my seriousness and my ability to focus. You should know I am serious and I am focused, just not on what you'd prefer me to be. It is your hands that have my attention now, their short and choppy movements at the moment belying their startling fluidity as they move over me, and their strength when they lock with mine and press them down as you press your body into me.

There is an argument to be made as to which of us is stronger, but in the moment is not the time for that. Your strength is a sign of your intent and your request that I honor that intent. I've made the same request, and in the same way. I remember that you've honored it as well, hands locked and pressed and then released, to move with intent, another layer of language, to illustrate a point I want to hear.

I apologize yet again. This is a total loss. I am so far downstream from whatever it is that you've said that it would be impossible to catch up, and besides I am focused on other topics, about which I intend to make you presently aware. I am sorry that I have been entirely lost in your lips and hands and the memories of each on me. But you should know that I am going to make it up to you, and let you put them to what I feel is better use than the service to which they are put now. I think you will agree that all things considered, the purpose I have for them is a better one for all involved.

Even so I apologize for the inattention. I also apologize for surprising you just now, by knocking aside the table inconveniently set between us. And now I must apologize for upsetting your chair with you still in it, and for knocking your head on the floor. I will do what I can to make you forget your pain.

Sex with you is unlike any other sex I've had. I do not say this like one of the restless virgins of literature, swept up in swooning tides of bliss. I am not the swooning type. And while you are good, you are not that good; your mere touch is not enough to transport me to fantastical realms of ecstasy, or whatever ridiculous phrase one would use to express such an idea.

Sex is not a holy or sacred thing or a physical ma-chine to express a separate emotion. I fuck to enjoy myself and to celebrate the fact I am alive. I understand the idea of making love, but it seems a bad way to go about it. I don't fuck to show my love. I love to show my love and let the fucking be its own thing. I love you and I love fucking you and I have no need to complicate either with the other. They are both true statements and they are both good. I am content to have them remain that way.

My sex before you was with my own, with those born as I was, who communicate as I do, equally adept at transmitting sensation and emotion whole and unrefined, over the same line as we send words. With us sex is not a matter simply of bodies, and of a pantomime approximation of knowing if what you are doing is working for those you are with. You feel what they feel and they feel what you feel, a positive feedback loop to take every thrust and pull and lick and touch, and magnify it until your nerves ring with your exhaustion, and the exhaustion of your partners.

It is needless to say what fun it can be. But it's also worth noting what it lacks. Being inside some-one's head heightens the performance, and it makes you aware it is a performance: moves choreographed to increase pleasure, focused on the mechanics of sex but lacking in connection, ironic when you consider that your lover is inside your head as much as inside your body.

The first time we were together, I sent toward you to bind our thoughts and realized that your mind was shut to me; that not once had your mind been as open as your body. That you had lacked that dimension in your sex and always had. I pitied you. And then you put your mouth on me, and your hands, and I had nothing to do but focus on how you moved on me, and against me, and inside me.

And I realized that you lacked nothing; that in place of feeling your thoughts reflected in mine, I felt your desire and your inescapable need to be inside of me, not only with your body and not with your mind, but with every particle of your soul. I laughed and came at the same time, and wept as I tried to devour you, to own you and be every part of you as much as I was myself.

It was something I had never done before and will not do with anyone else. You opened me to desire, and I desire not to desire anyone but you.

I regret to say that we have made a mess of the room, but I do not regret to say that you are inside of me. We will reconstruct the room later, but for now I want to focus on what we are doing, which makes me wonder why I am bothering to narrate this in my own head, observing me observing you inside of me.

Now I remember. I'm observing this because I want you to know how I know the nature of desire, that I have learned it from you, and that I question whether desire is truly what I feel. I have taken the time to read on the nature of desire and have learned the physiology of it—the rush of chemicals through the brain, tunneling pathways and new connections. But among this physiology, the psychology, the warning that desire does not stay, that novelty wanes and desire wanders, looking for someone new to attach to, or simply wanders off leaving behind something else that may be as satisfying in its way, but is not desire.

If this is true then I am not now feeling desire. What I feel for you has not wandered or waned or lessened, but has grown since the first time you pressed your mouth to mine and served your notice that you had desires of your own. I look at you now even as you are between me, and would push you farther into me until there is no space between us, no gap between where I stop and you begin, but a continuum and a binding, covalent and irrevocable. If it is not desire I do not know what to call it, save to call it love, which I already feel in different ways than this.

I am without a word to describe what I feel, if it is not desire and is not love. So I will express it how I can, not in words but in action, with lips and hands and bodies and merging, with sex and fucking and release.

I have never been inside someone as deeply as I am inside you. I love to feel you inside me, the physical complement to my spiritual state, expression made flesh of what I would say to you if I had the words. I press you into me, and draw into a kiss the lips that earlier had been speaking. I take the hands that had earlier moved in the air and bid you move them on me. Later you will tell me again what you had earlier said, and I will listen then, I promise.

But for now all I can say is that I apologize for wanting you, and in wanting you having you. And I apologize in advance for all the times I will want you between now and the end of our lives. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me I will make it worth your while, and will forgive you for all the times you will want me, and will accept your apologies, as you accept mine now.