It has been so long since I have gotten some good lovin’.

Seriously, I am not cut out for celibacy.

A question posed by PTLawmom in a recent post got me realizing that this past three months is the longest in my post-virginal life that I have gone without sex.  I haven’t even kissed anyone, I’ve been that pristine. Sex is one of those things that you are supposed to be able to live without.  I took it for granted because it was always there.  Now I am having a terrible time not scratching that itch.  A DIY attitude towards sex is just not working for me.  I tell myself that I need to feel the solidity of a human body against mine, that I need to be hot and sweaty and salty and satisfied in the arms of another.

My unchosen state of celibacy has got me lusting after all kinds of random strangers.  This evening after work I got on the bus and this tall handsome young thing gave up his seat for me. It was one of those seats lining the back of the bus which face the center, and he stood in front of me in the aisle, facing forward, his thighs at about my eye level. I couldn’t stop staring at those thighs, strong as tree trunks in a pair of grey pinstriped dress pants. It was all I could do to keep myself from reaching out and touching one.  Instead, I imagined myself caressing that thigh, followed by all sorts of unmentionable things.  

Then, mid-fantasy, my muse had the audacity to disembark.  I was left alone with myself, hands in my gloves resting softly in my lap as the bus lurched on.

I find myself living the First and Second Noble Truths in technicolor.  Life is suffering.  Suffering comes from our clinging, our craving, our desires.  It’s ok to have desires, but it’s when we get hooked into them, when we identify fully with them that we are in trouble. And I am most definitely hooked into a whole lot of lust these days.  

Pema Chodron talks about how we scratch and scratch and scratch at our itches until we are raw and bleeding.  Then we realize that we need to stop scratching if we ever want to heal.  Tonight I realize that instead of being open to what this period of celibacy has to teach me, I am scratching and scratching, trying to get away from it.  Getting lost in fantasies about strangers so I can avoid becoming more intimate with myself.  

Eight days until I board a plane to visit Man on the Horizon for the first time, Man on the Horizon whom I have fallen so deeply for, fallen fast and hard and gravity has spared my feet from touching the ground yet.  Our connection has felt so immediate, so different than anything I have experienced as a single woman.  I pray that my future, that our future, lies out on the horizon with this man and his child.  I have been ready to leave Washington, DC for a long time and interestingly, I have wanted to go exactly where he happens to live.  I find myself leaning into futures near and far.  I have run away before, and it only brought me closer to the truths I sought to escape.  

God it hurts to want something so much - longing, and aching for earthly and heavenly delights off in the distance.  Faraway pleasures of the heart.  Skin-to-skin contact - elusive yet soon to be within my reach.  Will my long, lonely period of celibacy end next week?  What will Man on the Horizon and I find when we finally meet in person after this long-distance courtship?  Will we find that our connection is real and authentic, or an elaborately co-created, co-concocted fantasy, born of deprivation and desperation?  (Or perhaps something in between?  Is that possible?)  Will we find something to be truly thankful for over the Thanksgiving holiday?

I have so many questions, and no matter what answers materialize I am sure of one thing: I will never regret following my heart to where he is.  

I’d rather try and fail than not try at all.

I close my eyes and breathe past the exhaustion and lust and into the silence of this house, my child asleep, the space heater whirring gently in the background, sparing me from the winter cold.  I breathe past this compelling and bewitching story of loneliness and lack and hormones out of control, past all the stories I create and believe, I breathe, my hand on my heart, beating fast and hard and strong beneath my ribs, my chest rising and falling like the tides.