So Good It Hurts

The sex was so good I’m pretty sure I saw actual stars glistening all around us, shooting and exploding into the darkness. I could feel the heavenly rush of chemicals coursing through my entire body, sending me into a kind of delicious euphoric shock that was waves upon waves of pure pleasure.

Not a bad start on a rainy Sunday morning, as I crawl out from under his slumbering body, pull on my sweats and head down for coffee.

I used to tell myself I could only write under circumstances of extreme, or at least sufficient, melancholy. But ever since I discovered his talent for delivering multiple orgasms, I’ve changed my perspective on the whole situation.

They wouldn’t have you believe it but a writer can write from a place of sweet, sweet pleasure. Or at least I can, which is news to me. Eventually it will all dissipate, of course. And I’ve not told him this because it’d surely collapse his spectacular hard on, but even in my most ecstatic state there is a deep feeling of loss inside of me that just will not let me go.

Ever since I can remember, I have carried an uncanny sense of everything slipping away. It is as though my soul is a thing which dwells just below the surface all the time, and it is watching me as I crumble, minute to minute. Skin cell by skin cell, the life within me is being shed.

We fall into lust and disregard the danger of forgetting that when push comes to shove, we are on our own. This kind of thinking does not make me a hit at parties. This kind of thinking is the kind you tuck inside your tight ass jeans and wrestle with in the silence of your own solitude.

The trouble is that solitude is all there is. You are the only one inside yourself all day, all night. The difference for an artist is that we dive into that abyss instead of trying to bury it by filling it with unimportant shit. We can’t help it.

We want to get to the bottom of it because we know that that abyss is who we are. We know, too, that there is no bottom. This presents a kind of problem we desire to solve and not solve. We want to know the end and we want the end to never come.

When you crave the emptiness they think they are trying to save you from, you learn to become two different people all the time. The one who pretends to understand them, and the one who swears to god you never ever will.

The coffee has kicked in and my fingers are flying across the keys as I punch down some philosophical bullshit just to get the chaos out of my head and onto the page. The writing is the only sacred space. I don’t need self help and I don’t need yoga and I don’t need church. What I need is a life centered around the one thing that doesn’t flinch.

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Photo by Rachel Coyne