Raw and Alive

At the gym, sitting on a rowing machine, pondering, not so long ago I was in this same room, Carol on the street below, waiting for rescue services for her car, just as well they were running so late, that’s how we got chatting. A tiny contingent event, and now a new world.

Pounding at the machine, the wheel whirring. Checking the dials, slowing down slightly, recalibrating effort to something more sustainable. Thinking about Carol. Excitingly different. There I was, telling Jane that all my sexual encounters felt like they had her at the heart of them, the intense ones anyway, and now here’s Carol, as unlike Jane as it’s possible to be, and just as intense. A sudden expansion of horizons, doesn’t happen often, thrilling when it does, raw and alive.

Pondering what makes her different. Attractive, electrically so for me, and getting more so, but not stunning, not in the way of men’s barroom conversation. Confident and forthright. The sense that you can go as far as you like, just so long as it happens to be exactly as far as she has in mind. And don’t force the pace.

The rowing machine getting tougher, before I had to slow down to my target pace, now I have to work harder.

Thinking about our conversations, our emails. How does she think of me? It feels as if I’m there to soak up all those repressed energies of hers, her locked-in ideas. Maybe that’s the thing that lies at the heart of sex. And I love it. So she offloads a complicated question, ponders as I try to answer, then another one. Then in bed she wants me do one thing, then another, like working through a carousel in her mind. Me, the willing, passive partner, absorbing her energies, letting her become whole.

Twenty minutes, hitting my target distance, just. Toweling off. Glugging water. And I remember doing the same with a woman once, loving her, but, unknown to me at the time, requiring of her just that she should be there, and follow my direction, unwind my overcompressed spring. And she could see my need, and she let me be. And the sex was wonderful, a dissolution of my tightly wound self. And I loved her. And still do.

If I hadn’t been so young and self-centred and stupid, I may have been able to hang on to her. If I saw her now, I doubt she’d recognize me. But here I am without her, and what I have is Carol. Lucky, lucky me.

So now it’s the other way round. I just have to try to ride this wave, her jangled energy, see what happens after.