by Alissa King

Created on: March 03, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

It has something to do with the moon. I went to a movie and they were doing it. Came home, turned on the t.v., they were doing it. Walked outside into the wet, cold night, where the clouds blocked out all the light in the sky. Thought I was cured. All the wet, swampy, steaming, buzzing, croaking things were silent. All the naked pinks and purples of early flowers were shrouded in the dense fog of night. At last...

I breathed in the reprieve, and then my fingers touched the cool, soaked wood of the deck railing, and my body started to tingle, hidden places springing instantly to life.

It has something to do with the moon, or maybe, as a hint of spring begins to work its way into nature, just a hint, just a tease of the season to come, I am heightened. Sex, sex, sex: It's like a snowball beginning to roll slowly down a hill. That sensual hussy nature is waking up, and soon sex will be everywhere.

I have been busy. I have been sad. I have been concentrating on more important matters. The body doesn't care! She waltzes to the ebbs and flows of the tide moon even while my heart stays silent and heavy in my chest, taking no part in the dance. My body wants to live! And like an animal, (because essentially, that is what we are) my body disobeys the strictures of heart and mind and she beckons, ever more wantonly. I see it in the eye of a stranger as I slide past to take my window seat at the next table. I read it in the smiles of the man at the check-out counter. These are strangers! But my body sends messages to theirs, and I begin to think I must choose some suitable companion, or my body will do the choosing, and I will find myself entwined in the arms of mere convenience, swept up in the fever of empty, sudden attraction, acting out nature's imperative.

It is good and it is bad to be alive this way. We have minds for high sentiment, loyal attachment, faith and longevity. Our minds are designed for eternity, but the flesh is transient. It knows it is transient; the body gets its little stint here in creation, and then returns her borrowed molecules to the sand. Being a creature, a creature with nerve endings and limited time, life is of the essence expressed quickly, passionately, forgotten sooner in our separate square inches of skin. We have memory of the mind, not the skin. All sadness and sentiment belong to the mind. Love is inside, but sex commands the externals.

Tonight I owe no one my loyalty. It's just a stubborn preference for a love long gone that keeps me busy'. I'm going to close my eyes, and give voice to these desires: The need to touch, to be touched. The want of a man, his planes and angles, the timbre of a deep voice; strong, certain fingers. I want to know another intimately, to be known just as intimately, to claim with the softest brush of lips against belly my little piece of creation to hold. There's too great an ache to not taste the extent of what life has to offer.

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