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Amatorius
It didn't seem fair, inherently. I wanted to be the one. I wanted to penetrate. I wanted to hear the plea,
and the cry, the hoarse whisper of passion. I wanted to be the cause of it.
***
When it happened finally, all that I had learnt, all that I had known, seemed so much gossamer;
silken threads of thought and feeling. All the pain and jealousy; all the argued sentiments; all
the advice lay in a crushed heap of lamentation at my feet.
"You don't want anything to do with that," my mother and her mother's mother had told me,
denying my very existence. Generation to generation instructed their girls to lie back and think of England.
So, for years that is how I thought of them - thousands upon thousands of woman compiling shopping lists,
cataloguing future chores, disconnecting their minds while their men consumed and exploited them: doing
the despicable, using and abusing them as a means to an end. The women lying there, unseeing, unfeeling,
unyielding to their lover's touch because they, like thousands before them, bestowed their faith
in womankind. And why should their own sex lie to them, betray them?
So, when it happened finally, I didn't expect to feel, didn't expect some emotion quite other to
what was physically happening bestow itself in my heart. This was not a corporal union purely. The look
of love in his eyes, the startled compliance, the abandonment, gave what his burgeoning cock could not.
No one told me it could be like that: that I could be the taker and that in the taking I could also give.
I had learned that his member served as an awesome weapon used against my kind. I had learned that I would
have to fight for my freedom, for my personality, for my very soul and being. It would be a lifelong struggle
just to be a person.
I didn't know that any man could be as trapped as I, and that I could be the one to remove his shackles
of inhibition and set him free.
I didn't realise that I could place my own manacles upon his person and that with a joyous shout he would
accept them and that I in turn would long for him to clasp me about the wrists and hold me down against my folly.
***
But in that moment, poised above him, lingering labia like a petal to the stem, I knew that it was not he
about to penetrate my being, but I about to take him into some hidden part of me; a part of me that could not
be reached by touch alone. And with a sadness overwhelming I realised it would never be enough.
For just that one bright moment we could be as one, until the headiness of passion would extinguish
like an exhausted flame and we would once again remember that we were not one but two; individual,
fragile synchronism. Yet, continuously drawn like a moth to the flame, we burn once more before we play out
completely in this world.
No one told me I could be his guidance; that I could see such desire in another's eyes, or hear his desperation
in his voice, articulating that inexpressible hunger of our hopelessness: the nameless and unspoken reason that
we reach for in our souls but touch only for a moment in orgasmic madness, blind to sense and sensibilities.
In that instant, we part at the peak of our alliance, realising that the togetherness has not been
in accomplishment but in the trek and that once we reach definitive we split asunder. This is a journey
undertaken in the moment of the physical expression of our affection, and this is the journey undertaken into
a future quite unknown. It is the journey never-ending until left to travel on alone… but no one told me
this journey could be so sweet.
That I could guide his hand, watch his face contort in passion and in the sweetest kind of love for me.
For in that moment I have no doubt that he feels love, no matter how fleeting the instant. I have no doubt
that I exist for him and he for me. I have no doubt that we communicate without the need for words, unless
spoken with unconfining lust and idolatry. In that moment, I have him enslaved. In that moment, I am as
enthralled as he.
[Latin: amatorius, from amator, a lover, from amare, to love.]
Sharon Maria Bidwell is a writer from the UK and her work - poems, articles,
short stories and novels - have appeared in print and online publications.
Web Site
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