VI - The Lovers

Drunken trysts in sweaty rooms. Bedsheets tangled round writhing legs. Gasps and breathless smiles and hazy eyes the soft soft blue of summer skies.
They never told me anything like this would happen. Yes they mentioned butterflies and lurching organs and the agony and the ecstasy yes. And the awkwardness and the moments never forced to crisis yes. But not this.
The smell of hair intoxicates like no drug ever made. The softness of lips and breasts and warm skin and the way fingers touch and tongues caress. All this I was told and more. They have told me nothing is better than the first kiss and nothing is better than falling hotly in love. Others have given me to understand nothing is better than shoving a lump of gristle into a cave of flesh. And I have gone out with these shreds of advice mashed into my own heavy thoughts and I have done what I could.
But I was unprepared for this. For the stripping back of the bark and the heartwood exposed as pale and foul as maggots in an open wound brought blind and wriggling into the light and I felt weaker and more pathetic than ever a truant schoolchild was before his mother.
And she says yes. Okay. I understand. And I know you and love you. And I knew and loved you last night and nothing is changed except we have more sunlight now and still there is nobody else who wants you more than me. Nobody else.
And I was released. I was cleaner than the sunlight that streams white-and-gold through the open sky. I was washed free of all the noxious sorrows that gnawed and squirmed and shat within me.
Of how love is great and how nice it is to be with someone you love I was told a very great deal. Of the tryst of flesh I was told everything but of the covenant of minds nothing was disclosed. Not just to give her body up to me but to take my worst parts and accept them and through her agency make me more whole than I ever was before. That they never told me about.