Memories

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other's bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. How do they come to the come to the come to the God come to the still waters, and not love the one who came there with them, light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin? These are the true religious, the purists, the pros, the ones who will not accept a false Messiah, love the priest instead of the God. They do not mistake the lover for their own pleasure, they are like great runners: they know they are alone with the road surface, the cold, the wind, the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio- vascular health--just factors, like the partner in the bed, and not the truth, which is the single body alone in the universe against its own best time. Sharon Olds

How I wish to share that poem with my friends. How I wish it wasnt true. I used to have this poem memorized. For I felt its what I had to do to protect myself from what I thought was the right thing to do. I so wanted to feel "Love", but in college for me anyway that didnt exsist. So I thought I took the next best thing. Sex. And over the time I completely seperated the two. I still cant put them back together again. But, I'm sure one day they will meet again and I willl feel and see sex with love. ANd love being sex. And sex IS love.

Perhaps I was just protecting myself from being hurt... again. So many things. So many oddities about my past on them showing up now in my now. Much like that Sharon Olds poem, I run, with my shoes and my cardiovascular health. Alone.

But I'm not alone anymore. I have a loving husband. He I love. I feel it somewhere within me a love that I never thought I would feel, a love that I always tried not to feel. I dont want to be hurt anymore. I want to feel that love grow. I want to hold his hand for eternity. Me and Him together. And our cats. A little family of love.

There is still a lot of hurt to be rid of. A lot of walls that are keeping me back. Holding me down and not letting me see, what I'm truly capeable of. I just want to be free of the pain of my past, the pain of the mental abuse, by the hands of people who "loved" me.

Safety and companionship and love ..within my husbands arms, is all I desire.