Tech No, Tech Yes

I like the in-betweens.  Dawn and twilight. Trees are half illuminated and half shadowed, half warmed and half chilled. Eventually, emersion in light or dark follows, and the hours spent overindulging in sun or shadow.  However, I like the balance the inbetweens offer --living, trembling in both for the short moments. This speaks to me. Living in half moments.

He called. Just minutes ago.  Aroused, wanting to hear my voice to move his orgasm. He wondered if he made me wet. Male or female, we all like to know that we make another damp in some way, be it the sweat that breaks on brow or the sweat that pools between legs.  It validates something.  Which is partially why I had invited him back into my life only a week ago. I like to think it was metaphysical because I like believing a great force other than our own vices or virtues moves us to action. Or maybe I just like not having to accept all the responsibility of free will.

It was the cusp of my spring break after a particularly negative, chaotic three months of life, and I wanted something completely disconnected from my life here, something reaffirming the sensual and attractive within me that I was having trouble finding on my own. So, the “hi”. A simple syllable texted across the ocean . . .Ohio to London . . . and here he was, again, in my life, occupying a same space the only way the sun and moon do: one waxing and the other waning.

I remember first meeting him and writing about him.  Three, or four years ago.  A fresh, young, hot man who liked to play as hard and naughty as I did. There was a bit more--the conversations that brought life to life: pr work, military service, dog love, only child. Younger. And I wrote about this young man who brought heat and spring to a chilly autumn woman.  He brought a budding then. He would love that. An exhibitionist at heart, he loves any attractive exposure. 

Presently, he had been pronouncedly on my mind for that week before I texted him. He was at the back of my mind when pursuing a doomed relationship with a slightly older man--a first. That having crashed and burned a few months back, work issues that had crashed and burned in sync,  he shimmered in and out of being the way a shadow does when the sun weaves itself among clouds. I marinated in the moment, last summer, when he sent a text reigniting the connection. Flattery works like five drinks. I floundered in the moment in early October when he cut away--my crass tongue taking toll.  The very emergence of his person in my mind eclipsing the reasons the connection dissolved twice before, would always dissolve.  So I initiated reconnection-- a first. I thought he’d be the fire to help me phoenix myself. 

And for him, it is as it always was.  Pseudo-Sex. The need to feed a release when beer drunk and falling into bed at night or sleep drunk and needing a twitch in his morning to switch-on into the day.  I cannot fault him and I know he is mystified by my lack of immersion in the fantasy. After all, this time I had invited him back for what he thought was on his back moments of exchange. Fair enough. I thought so too.  But a discontent lingers on my brain the way chili pepper does on tongue after the satisfying salsa, like those minutes that transcend the labels: not day, not night, not twilight, not dawn . . But seconds of in-between . . .vague somethings . . .ushering something in and something out. No more, no less.