Rarely do I meet someone with whom I can spend 12 hours in bed without feeling a little guilty for fucking so much time away. It’s not the excess of pleasure that makes me restless—no such thing in my book—but a matter of time, knowing that I have so many things to do and that my pleasure hours may be overflowing into productive work minutes. I try to focus on the moment, telling myself “this is, after all, research,” but that voice of reason will not be allayed; it punctures the moment with shoulds and should-nots until it distracts me from cock or clitoris, no matter how much I may love the sum of parts.
Then I met him: He who makes 12 hours in bed seem natural; he who makes me feel that 12 hours is not enough; he who influences me to want 12 hours to stretch shamelessly into eternity.
We are nocturnal. Our first major tryst was at 4 a.m. in a sordid hotel on the Mayan Riviera. At vacation’s end, we picked up our affair in NYC no earlier than 11 p.m., and we stayed up till four or five, tucked in the blanket of the city that never sleeps. Sometimes he had to work at six in the morning and I had a column to finish, but it didn’t matter … we filled the stardust hours with fucking, talking, eating and watching movies—such beautiful, ordinary things. When fatigue began to flutter over our eyelids, time seemed irrelevant still; nature would lead us to bed—not too soon, never too late. I didn’t have to remind myself to be in the moment with him.
Instead, the moment reminded us to be free. O, how the urban nocturne gave us permission to reveal! When the outside world is dark, it seems that no one will shudder at revelations of your past. He told me how he felt the morning he woke up with a tarantula on his face, that he lost his virginity at 14 (to the older sister of his girlfriend), that his father had been in prison. I too shared some secrets that seem incompatible with daylight. In between these exchanges, he caressed me till the arch of my back shivered with orgasm and whispered las cosas enfermas in my ear while we made love. He told me things about himself that most people would never dare tell their lovers. Then he told me he was leaving.
Most people don’t let themselves go; they give only what they think, logically, is enough. They remain guarded, locked in their limitations of love: I can’t fall for somebody who’s not monogamous; I can only love someone who’s gay/straight/female/male. If you fall in love after only two months, it’s not genuine—true love exists only in long-term relationships. You’re leaving, so what’s the point? Empirically speaking, it’s impossible to fall in love again the way you fell in love the first time, without expectation or fear or the pressures of life pulling you back. Frankly dear, love is shit.
Before I met him, I had shed most of my limitations, but I was still skeptical about one thing. “How can you fall in love with someone completely, if you have multiple lovers?” I asked a polyamorous friend as we were cuddling in bed at five in the morning. “I don’t know if it’s possible for me to feel that all-encompassing feeling again, like how I felt the first time I fell in love. I haven’t felt that with anyone since.” He said, “Just because you’re not monogamous doesn’t mean you can’t love with abandon.” I didn’t believe him, but subsequent empirical evidence convinced me otherwise.
There have been others (there are always others), but he who is leaving was the only one who said, “When I love someone, the first thing I give them is freedom.” Are you for real? How refreshing that I don’t have to explain my ways or justify other lovers! How ironic that his loving offering of freedom inspires me to believe, if ever so reluctantly, that I might not need any other lovers! How rarely, if ever, does one come across such impeccable compatibility? Yet he’s leaving, just like I left the first a decade ago. He’ll be gone before these flaming words are published.
Lo que será será, lust life goes on, but how do I say goodbye? How do you say goodbye to someone who levitates you with desire? How do you say goodbye to someone who inspires you to consider things you previously found absurd—like living happily with one love, like feeling your belly expand with life? How do you say goodbye to a part of your soul? You don’t. I won’t say it. I know our relationship will continue somehow. Maybe he’ll come back to New York. Maybe I’ll move to Mexico. Maybe it’s just a cliché, lost in a splatter of time.
