But Nobody Warns You of That (day 114)

My orgasm grips every muscle inside of my body so completely with decadent, transcendent pleasure that it wrings cutting tears from my eyes. I want them and I curse them. I want all of it to come and come and all of it to please, please stop. I let myself go with the flow of all I’m made up of, the mysterious and cherished, grand and intimate. The feeling is bigger than I am. Too astounding to explain or even experience without the accompanying sensation of a kind of free-fall from reality. From safety.

This feeling of total annihilating bliss. I die and I die and I die against his steady nakedness. Our brazen gleaming nakedness. There is silence and softness of breath. There is the white-flower blossoming tree beside the open bedroom window, moving lazily in the evening breeze.

To someone who believes she is not worthy, the sheer sweet beauty of this life can feel wrenchingly unbearable. Just as pain would. Just as hurt or fear or apprehension would. I have no words yet for this newness in me. Of me. It feels like a beginning although it also feels so familiar I know I have done it before. Be born. Be alive minus the chemicals.

I think about this as I step out onto the patio, goblet of sparkling lemon water in hand. The evening light is a glimmer of golden peach droplets which twinkle like a million stars just fallen from the sky to alight on the new spring leaves of the swaying trees for a while. The air is perfect and smells like rain mixed with sun mixed with dark fertile soil.

And as I take it all in, everything inside of me begins to ache. Because I can bear witness but I cannot hold onto it. I can watch the evening sky change and turn and dazzle but it will only last so long and there is nothing I can say, or write, or snap a photo of, that will convey this overwhelmingly haunted yet alive feeling which swells inside my chest. I see the beauty and I long for it at the same time.

I slide my sunglasses from the top of my head down to rest in front of my eyes and I light up a cigarette. All the gorgeousness is paralyzing and yet tears again flood my eyes on their own. I can’t bear it, this quietly ecstatic life. But I don’t check out. I’m in it now. I’m here for all of it – the pain and the grief and the melancholy. Perhaps the wildest twist of all is that it’s the goodness you’re not prepared to feel. The magnitude of the regular magic. The promise of the pulse of potential in every goddamn living thing.

It’s the absolutely mesmerizing wonder of being here, being any part at all of the enchantment of this pure evening, that grips my veins and tugs at me to please have mercy and down a shot of something to take the edge off. To soften the glare of it. The pierce of this glory that shatters my soul. Something inside screams for escape from the way the beauty hurts. And nobody warns you of that.