(Here’s me playing the piano naked while Zelda sleeps on the couch next to me. I call it “Me Playing The Piano Naked While Zelda Sleeps On The Couch.”)
Today I’m thinking about writing and sex along with exhaustion and mindfulness. Sexy right?
One of the things all this writing about sex does (at least on a good day) is to help me get more comfortable with my vulnerable places. It helps me find my wounded and hurt places alongside the ones that are filled with more comfortable emotions like love. But all of those emotions live in my body in one place or another, and digging them out, writing about them, and sharing them can lead to all sorts of physical sensations as well as internal ones.
Most teachings on mindfulness or meditation remind us that challenges, difficulties, loss, and suffering are often our greatest teachers and I believe that to be true. But learning is a tiring endeavor and there are days when I’d prefer to learn through joy and ease instead.
But it can help to look at that exhaustion as something positive. It means change and growth and it means I’m probably writing the correct things. Or at least trying to. It means I’ve done hard work and it means I’m still doing it.
I like to think that sex lives in its own box. That it exists alongside the rest of my life instead of wrapped up in it. But of course, it doesn’t work that way. When I think back to that glorious afternoon in the hammock with my hand inside Jessica’s jeans, I also remember the house I grew up in and my father sitting in the window. When I think back to my first attempts at polyamory and open relationships I remember my ex-wife, my cats, and my first real apartment. And even when I think back to meeting Piper (as I’m doing now) I remember moving in by myself, struggling with grief and depression, and coping with severe physical pain for weeks on end.
And that’s what makes it worthwhile. Sex with her is a reminder of every string and connective tissue that made up my life in that moment. Sex with him leads me to another place, other smells, and sense experiences, and those heart deep feelings of wonder, curiosity, and fear. Even if I isolate it, the rest is still there lurking outside the bedroom window or hiding in the kitchen. Even if all I remember are my hands around Tanisha’s throat and her lips pressed against my shoulder as if in a still photograph, my body remembers the rest.
There are other lenses of course. There are other ways to look back, to remember the smell of autumn or the excitement of reconnecting after months apart, but sex is the one that works best for me. Maybe it’s the sense memory or maybe it’s the reality that every intimate experience requires more of me than I often like to admit.
But in that exhausting vulnerability, that beautiful memory of taste and touch, and even the painful sorrow or regret, everything is there all at once.
And on a good day, and maybe today as well, I can let that exhaustion comfort me.