Sex Without Touching: Notes
Erotic Blueprints. Marie Antoinette. Imelda Marcos. High school.
The secret she shares with them resides in her ability to stir a desire, to see without being seen, to hear without being heard… Through a series of stylized gestures and a standard repertoire of lovesongs in the vernacular, [Imelda] created an atmosphere of generalized melancholia.
Seeing her eating watermelon seeds at the cafeteria of the former congress building, Ferdinand was seized with desire. -Vincente L. Rafael
A current of wet salt, cumin, burnt hair, and sleep, fills Olive street for four blocks one morning after a warm and windless night. This morning, and only this morning, downtown Eugene is one big armpit I wish I had woken up in. Tent flaps facing the street are half-zipped. Window screens to floor-level student apartments are slid open. The sleepers who’ve thrown off their blankets stir but won’t be up for another hour. I’m walking to work. My stomach hurts. I want to go home where my sleeper is still sweating vinegar. At work, I think about what he won’t do to make my hips tilt towards his hands. I remember how he pulled me into his lap from behind in the kitchen. A kiss he initiated. I feel evil. Ungrateful. A pest, fast to reproduce and quickly dying, sent to ruin a good crop. That’s what I have—a really good crop.
Codependency, the fear of it, is a false face. I’m talking about wanting. I’m talking about how I wasn’t prepared to want.
My day off. Taking notes at the coffee table.
Blueprint Breakthrough Zoom Workshop (as seen on Netflix Goop Love & Sex Lab): 3 Tools to End Sexual Incompatibility, Creating Lifelong Connection and Sexual Satisfaction.
A word about willingness – Fear of revealing (where willingness hides).
Pleasure first. Dessert before dinner.
Self-Assessment: The Palpation Game. Discover the distance you want to be touched from. There are distances to touch from. Discover the distance (temperature, depth, texture) and train your partner. “Up-level” as a lover. I hover my hand at the edge of my forearm’s energetic perception. I cried. I could cum this way. I’m an energetic. Erotic blueprints. To learn yours, take the quiz. I’m a shapeshifter. I’m a shapeshifter with energetic right underneath. I could cum from missing you. Building stories around glances. Sex when it’s an idea. Sex without touching.
Safety and Communication – does the talking kill the thing? If I tell you what I want can you trust there’s more to be said?
Excessive talking about pleasure. Excessive thinking about pleasure. Pleasure first. Movie before dinner. Bring back longing, I miss longing. Marie Antoinette (2006). Every step in her Manolo Blahniks are proceeded by the seven years unconsummated bed. Touching noses with exalted women spurned in secret. Towers of Chantilly cream. Tea cakes taken in the bath. Pug kisses. The opera. Being fourteen. She wouldn’t have her taste without the hand that evaded her. The indifferent hand carves the first contours of a bespoke girl’s figure who in rejection finds herself made a cultured creature.
I am angry there are no pictures of her. I am angry they took her head. A lawyer’s son invented the camera there in France only sixteen years later. If only the mobs knew what excessive vanity cameras would create. That people could watch the reaches of their desire mount without being seen.
Marie Antoinette maintained a 23-inch waist stuffing her face with genoise sponges.
Imelda Marcos maintained her head stuffing baby diapers full of diamonds.
September 2016 – June 2017
High school. There was something potent and self-sustained about being desired in secret. Lovesongs sung back and forth in a mute Facebook Messenger vernacular. Stylized gestures. Generalized melancholia.
What will I part with, what will I maintain, to feed my longing.