MY BODY IS MY THERMOMETER

How am I at the present? Sweating with few clothes on because the temperature outside is supposed to be 79-82 degrees today? Is that why I’m sweating or is it this other thing, this thing that has me gripped around the throat, this fear that is simultaneously manifesting with wet eyes cause I don’t know what to do first and I miss where he used to take me. I allowed myself to sleep in and while I was doing so I was certain that I’m on a different rhythm. I always have been and as I slow down enough to really pay attention to what is going on around me and in me, I see things I didn’t see before. My body is my thermometer. I’m finally learning to read it accurately enough to do me some good.

I want to write about the huge gift of this past weekend, the big box that showed up with all kinds of essential oils, facial care products, sweet smelling sachets, bath bombs, three separate cool compact discs, and an expression that someone saw a special part in me and was saluting me from a distance. I want to write about the future... but I’m still stuck in the past. The more I read about this relationship I’ve been obsessed with for close to a decade, the more I see how I was played. I see how a deeper part of me that was calling out for erotic significance seemed to put my many other systems into lock down.

Like Einstein couldn’t tie his shoe, once aware of the combustion generated when uniting physically with this man and how it halted my hives and the grinding of my teeth, every other state of consciousness was lukewarm for me, lacking luster. I was obsessed with this man. Oh, I said that already, didn’t I? Last night before I went to sleep I opened up the diary that portrayed our first six months of sexual interaction. He was traumatized by how his wife left him. He had been as obsessed with her as I became with him. He was the one back then on his knees, drooling, broken. In the beginning he called me every night. I listened and was there for him. Friends said, “Use him sexually. He won’t be emotionally available for eighteen months.” He did feed on me, was nurtured by me.

He knew it was wrong and said repeatedly that I'd get hurt, that this wasn’t going to be good for me. "I cherish our friendship and our ability to communicate. Can't we keep that and let the other more dangerous aspect of intimacy fall by the wayside?" He'd asked me two months into 1997.

I would hear none of it. In those first two months, I’d been swimming with scuba gear and now he insisted I sit on the sand. I don't think so. I hungered for the underwater life, the depth, hearing myself breathing, seeing things that didn’t exist above the surface.

I question how much easier it would be to burn these diaries, toss the box with all the letters he and his brother wrote to me, as well as all the cards, erotic drawings, and the numerous one of a kind gifts he gave me as tokens of his love... Pack it all up and toss it in the bin down below. I can’t do that.

In the 1997 diary he gave me he wrote in red ink:
“Now that you been a guest in this life for lots of delicious, sad, emotional, sexual, intellectual experiences, write them for all of us to read, enjoy.... purchase. Write! Not just a note, a line, but pages... bring it all together. Now is the time. Make a place to write, devote real time to it... give it the attention it so rightly deserves. If you truly want to write, devote real time to it... give it its due... focus, time, attention... your best!”