It’s a funny thing, desire

Sometimes you’re just restless. Sometimes you’re aroused. Sometimes you just need your partner like a shoe needs laces, like without her you’re schlepping around half falling out of yourself and trying to avoid the cow patties.

That’s how it is for me tonight. I’ve had fabulous sex since coming out. Incredible intimacy. Heights so dizzying you need an oxygen tank. And yet… that isn’t it.

Today we went for dim sum with part of my family. I was closeted for 25 years, and petrified that coming out would cost me the things and people I held most dear… my family, my friends, my work, my children, the relationship with my soon to be x-husband (I prefer to think of him like one of the XMen rather than an ‘ex’).

We had the sweetest of moments today… me, my honey D., my parents, and my hilarious sister and her husband – my beloved brother-in-law – and my niece. We went walking on the Richmond riverfront, and right there at the entrance was a gorgeous sign: West Dyke. My sister offered to take our picture just as my parents walked up. Everyone erupted into laughter. I could have fallen on my knees and kissed the earth for the gift. I never, ever would have imagined such acceptance. Such joy.

It was only part of a gorgeous day. We shopped for educational  stuff for our girls, now loving school with happy parents and D., who LOVES homework. We scored a treasure trove of funky clothes for us and distant family at Value Village. We blogged, and had fabulous coffee at Wicked Cafe, tried twice to get into the sold out Slumdog Millionaire at two different theatres and ended up spelunking in Vancouver’s tinseltown instead, scoping out art from the mundane to the inspired to the truly awful. We shopped in the funky Chinese dollar store, trying to avoid melamine. (Is there melamine in post-it notes???) Blissful happiness.

She kissed me so deeply at one point I thought I would fall forever into the memory foam pout of her lips. Told me I was beautiful. Caressed me. I fought my desire for her (untimely in an African, go-out-into-the-mud-hut kind of way) and tried to stay cool. We’ve got a lot going on. You never know.

We came home and grokked, chilled out, enjoyed the peace and quiet and the snores of dogs strewn about the house. I wanted her so much I felt fragile with it. After years of not feeling desire, to be overwhelmed is still not so much a novelty as a fearsome thing at times.

And then it’s bedtime… playtime with the pugs and terrier, sorting out the heat issue (my feet are leaden blocks from a parallel universe, most likely a meat locker), getting settled. Finding out she’s tired and cuddly rather than entranced and amorous. Crap.

Hey, you know what? After reaching 46 and finally, FINALLY, falling in love, it is truly all good. Every cuddle, every pull of the blanket off me in the middle of the night, every fart, every misfired synapse. I mean, could I get my ego out of the way? Expectations can really kick your derriere.

Or is that all it is, ego, a need to be wanted? After 30 minutes of gnawing on it I realized it was more than that. As Ivan Coyote says, “a want is a need”. I need her. I need to connect with her in that most intimate of ways, on the very day another part of my family took me in as the full meal deal, a real dyke. I need to know again, carnally, what it was I missed out on for all those years, dreaming and never having. Afraid to even imagine it.  To feel the fullness of the love and desire and fulfillment and closeness that threatens to unravel you, send you stumbling into your life shoeless and wondering, a heartbeat away from a faceplant at any given moment.

I think of D. in bed, wanting only sleep, and closeness, and acceptance for where she is in her moment; wanting love, even, of a different but no less valid kind (will she love me even when I’m not doing her?). I’ll heat my feet, and cool my jets, and be grateful to have such a wonderful, beautiful, transcendant problem as this midnight desire.

~ by qreview on January 25, 2009.