As I remember all the erotic moments I’ve had in my life, the ones that stand out as “the best” or “the one moment I cannot forget” are very few. I could count, but I don’t quantify; and I’m terrible with numbers. Besides, I’d rather not count. The one lover that has come along and, with a sweeping kiss, undone all of my notions of what “the best sex” is has done so without realizing it. Chemistry and all.

When I was a girl of thirteen, one of my aunts told me that sex was good and healthy to have when I’m ready. That last statement was added for precaution by my auntie, the hippie, the flower child— she had three boyfriends at the time she gave this advice. She then sealed her comment with “and it’s the best when you are in love.” So I thought that this magic combination would be waiting for me when I fell in love one fine day,  I expected it would happen like all young girls that age tend to do.

But falling in love wasn’t easily found, and, when I did have sex, the first time, I was fourteen. That was a year after my auntie gave me her words of wisdom. I wasn’t in love with the first boy I had sex with, of course. I wanted to have sex, and I was ready, or so I thought. The years that followed were explorations in sex and many a guy I wasn’t feeling anything for. I was searching for love and not finding it. I watched awful porn with my so-called boyfriend and thought I was suppose to act like those 80’s porn stars. I had no idea what the best sex was. I did whatever was required to get the approval of the boy I wanted to be loved by. I wanted to be loved, so I moaned and made lots of noise and even let him come all over my face. I swallowed, I sucked, and I fucked him wildly, but clearly this wasn’t the magical “best sex ever” experience I had in mind.

I wasn’t having orgasms during sex in my teenage sex life either. My boyfriend was older than me by a number of years, and he wasn’t very emotional or tender. I was lost in the act of sex. I had thought that sex would be as good as my auntie said. Especially so if I was in love, which I wasn’t. I wasn’t in love, and I was having lots of sex without feeling, straight ahead fucking without romance or sweet nothings. When he and I had sex in the back of his Chevy Impala, David Lee Roth was on the tape deck singing Jamie’s Cryin’ which taunted my young heart. While the lyrics said that Jamie’s been in love before, and that it should mean a little more than one night stands, I got the idea that it should mean more. It could mean more. But, I was fifteen year old girl, and my boyfriend wasn’t in love with me.

I knew I could orgasm by myself, but the mystery of sex was clouded with the idea that other women could orgasm so easily (as I’d seen in porn). But, I wasn’t having such an easy time doing it in real life. One scene I remembered watching was a couple fucking hard. The woman was being taken from behind in an all fours doggy style position— a moaning and gasping blonde porn star, her glistening buttocks shimmying like jello with every thrust as she was being fucked into a frenzied orgasm. Inspired, I tried that position with my boyfriend. He came right away. I didn’t.

The best sex evaded me.

As I entered my twenties, sex became much better. I knew my body, and I was familiar with toys and what worked for me to get off: vibrators, dildos, and anal play, mainly. I read Women on Top and My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday. I read Anais Nin’s erotica and Anne Rice’s erotic writings as A.N. Roquelaure, The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. I was stripping down nude daily at a seedy club in the San Fernando Valley, affectionately called “The Ball,” and my best friend was a former porn star from the 80’s. She was dancing at the club and found love with a sweetheart of a man. They married, and I was her maid of honor. I wondered what exactly it was that she understood about sex and love that I didn’t. What was good sex with real love? During that time of my life, I had many girlfriends, mostly from the club. Finding a boyfriend or a serious lover was difficult when mostly what men wanted from me was to be had for the price of a table dance or a round of dollar bills around the stage. Men wanted to watch me dance naked. The loneliest time of my non-existent love life was when I was a stripper, in fact. It was a terribly lonely feeling to be sexually sought after day after day but have no one who cherished me once I left the club. The idea of someone taking me to dinner without paying me for my time was a silly notion. Who would just take me out to dinner, just because?

Not that I minded being alone. I preferred my solitude and enjoyed my beautiful apartment, my new car, and my growing bookshelf full of books. Most of the time, after a long day naked in high heels, I popped open a bottle of my favorite champagne, put some jazz on the stereo, and happily made myself a lovely dinner. I dined in candlelight on my patio alone with a good book. I had erotica to read. If the mood struck, I had my fantasies to help me along while using my vibrator. The thing was I still had no idea what the best sex was or how to imagine it happening to me.

I did figure out how to orgasm with a partner, finally. I had a sweet boyfriend who cared a little about me. Me, the young nineteen year old girl-woman. My clitoris was my best friend in that discovery. As long as I touched myself while he slowly went in and out, I came and came. It was good sex, but I wasn’t in love. We never said anything about love at all. Ever.

Playing with other women was exciting— observing how they pleasured themselves and how they liked it. One memorable moment was with a girlfriend that I lived with. We had one of those ‘papasan’ bowl-shaped couches from Pier One Imports that proved itself to be a sex chair of the deluxe kind for two nubile young women. We slathered some oil on each other’s pussies and scissored our legs together while holding each other’s hands. Grinding our pussies together allowed us to come in ways I had no idea existed. The slippery feeling of her pussy on mine was arousing beyond compare. We loved that chair for all its fabulous reasons. That was the best lesbian sex I had ever had. But did Jen care for me? I know she felt something like desire. I did feel a sense of something with her, too, but it was simply lust and sexual curiosity. She had two other boyfriends as well as me. She loved the way I went down on her and used toys to get her to come in a shaking orgasmic release. And it was Jen— the one who climbed on top of me and, with a naughty smile, she knew just what to do. She went down and licked my clitoris while slowly moving a vibrator in and out of me until I came. She also used toys in my other parts, both anally and vaginally penetrating me, while licking my clit and getting me so juicy wet. So far, it was Jennifer that gave me the best sex. And I was barely twenty years old then.

But the idea of romantic love and sex combining itself together into “the best sex” was still mysterious. My gal pal, Kristy, from the dancing days of The Oddball Cabaret, a.k.a. The Ball, was a piano teacher by weekend and stripper during the week. Kristy was a warm and wonderful redhead. She wore thigh high leather boots onstage and danced to Thomas Dolby’s She Blinded Me With Science. We spent most nights hanging out while mixing up Kahlua and cream in iced glasses, watching films, or soaking in her big round bath tub while listening to endless loops of Enya. She had a crush on Rutger Hauer in Ladyhawke, and, for the most part, she was closer to straight than anything. She was a sweet woman and yet .. . Sex with her alone was not really quite ‘it.’ Kristy was a flirt with all the men we knew, and finding boy toys to satisfy us was our specialty. We had one weekend long romp with a lovely guy we met and tired the dear man out between the two of us. But did I remember that as the best sex?

There were many other boyfriends until I had a year-long fling with a musician who didn’t mind that I was a stripper. We did have delicious sex, and I did orgasm every time. I began to discover that I was multi-orgasmic. I felt a slight tenderness for him, and I am sure he felt something similar. But there were no “I love you” moments from either of us, and we never discussed our relationship beyond a sexual one. He wasn’t my boyfriend. He was just a guy I had really good sex with. As far as the idea of love went, he compared me to liking a chocolate chip cookie rather than to a summer’s day. But he never admitted a darn emotion. Not once.

As the years went on, the best sex was hard to find.  Even while I was engaged to a chef, our best times were in the kitchen, cooking for our dinner parties, or traveling together to luxurious locales. In bed, it was vanilla and lukewarm. One hot steamy night in Kona, he was overwhelmed by my hungry need for good and lusty sex. It was too much for him— he rejected my intensity. I had a lot of sun that day. Sunning in the nude always makes me aroused. I had masturbated outside on the grass while at the house we were staying at. The scent of plumeria flowers, the ocean, the sun, and the relaxed Hawaiian air had me wriggling around in the island heat until I touched myself, feverish for some kind of passion. So I made it known that I wanted ‘it,’ but he just liked ‘it’ when I was sweet and demure, half asleep, with my legs spread open. It was a few thrusts, and that was that. I thought that perhaps the idea of ‘the best sex’ or even good sex was something I might just have to give up. The fantasy of having sex with a passionate lover that involved hair pulling and wild sweaty abandon may never happen to me, I thought. I was in my mid-twenties. I had yet to have that magical combination of amazing sex and loving emotions. Maybe the idea was just a dream?

But I wanted passion. I realized that it was something I could not live without. I hadn’t experienced true passion before, but there was a yearning deep within me that ached for it. I wanted passion, and I couldn’t get married unless I had that with my fiancé. But, we were more like good friends and less like lovers, and I wanted more.

He compared me to a diamond in the rough. If I could just polish you, he said, you’d shine. I coiled from the mere comparison, which suggested that I wasn’t good enough the way I was, just as me. So, that led me to a question. Wasn’t I enough for someone just as I am? Why couldn’t I have amazingly good sex with heaping amounts of love? Why was I labeled the ‘diamond in the rough’ and just a chocolate chip cookie?

All these years, I have waited for that mind-blowing orgasmic bliss with a man I am so very into— with passion, desire, and intense kissing. Wanting someone so much like this, I can’t embrace, kiss, and orgasm upon him enough. The desire to bite him out of sheer lusty want is my wild expression of intense affection. I feel so much desire, it’s animal. It’s almost cannibal. I want to eat him because I feel so much. And is it the best sex of my life? Yes.

Yes, years later, now in my forties, I am experiencing what I think is the best sex of my life. And yes, love has something to do with it. Passionate sex has found me. I’m getting close, and I’m coming… closer. I’m closer to that passionate experience I have been longing for. Yes. Finally, the universe has answered my heart, mind, body and soul. James Joyce couldn’t have written it better: And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes. 

It was forbidden, that street. When I was a girl, I was not allowed to go down that road. My mother had made it clear  that I could only go as far as the end of our street when I went out on my bicycle, never to wander. The forbidden street was at the bottom of the hill, just to the left, at the end. The entrance was shaded with trees, sloping down into the park. At the end, the road turned into hiking trails, eucalyptus trees, mystery.

I wanted him to drive me through the neighborhood where I grew up, where I skinned my knees from bicycle falls, where I played and drew in colored chalk on the sidewalk. We drove around and up and through the hills, my memory as a girl following along the asphalt. “Where can we go?” he asks. I give him a look, wanting. We kiss quickly. He leans close to me as he curves the moving car through the narrow roads, guiding the steering wheel through my childhood memories. I nestle my head into the scoop of his shoulder, planting little kisses lightly along his neck, nuzzling my nose to smell his skin. I trail my fingers along the edge of his ear, the curving shell roundness of it. Just then, at the bottom of the hill, was the forbidden street I wasn’t supposed to go down.

“Let’s go down that street. Turn here.”

The street is quiet. There are houses on one side. The other side is hidden by the densely wooded brush and trees. The tires crackle slowly along the road. We look for a spot to park. I have butterflies in my stomach and a melancholy ache in my bones. He turns the car around at the end, finding a place. We kiss for a moment. It’s dark, headlights off, streetlights buzzing in their orange glow. We can hear someone’s television in the distance. Like teenagers on a date, we cannot wait to kiss. I clasp his face lightly with my hands. The natural scent of him, his warm mouth melting against mine, I’m intoxicated by his kiss. He leans across the center and unbuckles his seatbelt. The click of his seatbelt undone, the sound, opens a place in my body. My blouse, my wide leather belt, my jeans, the seatbelt—confining me. I want to remove everything, remove the things in my life that keep me from him. I want undoing. I unbuckle my heeled sandals. I undo the seatbelt. His hands tuck up underneath my hair. He pulls my face deeper into our kiss.

His mouth and mine, his mouth, mine.

I look out the window into the nigh, and see myself as a girl, running down toward the end where the dirt path begins. I see myself looking back at the older me in the car. She knows— that little girl— where I am going. Whatever she knows, it’s discovered here, this secret place at the end of this street. She sees me, thirty years later, in a minivan full of my children’s things– a baby seat, a baseball bag, the sand toys for the beach all cluttered in the trunk, kissing a man I am having an affair with, a man I am falling in love with, in the dark, stealing a moment away. Secret. It seems that my life has come to this secret and hidden end of a street, to rediscover something forgotten within me.

We climb into the back of the van, my jeans pulled off, removing my belt, my pussy wet, his hard sex in my hand. “You are so hard,” I marvel, as the length and swell of his cock is warm and heavy with thick arousal. I caress his sex with one hand. I cup his balls with the other. He is sitting on the seat, half dressed, still wearing his shirt. I lean up and into him, kissing him deeply. Holding his body to mine, my blouse is sticking from sweat and desire, the fabric coming between the smoothness of our bodies. I want to feel him naked and breathing upon me. I pull the fabric away to feel his belly and chest against mine. He pulls his shirt away, too. We want our skin touching. I want to dissolve into him where the world is golden-yellow and soft like sunlight in summertime memories. I want to melt away into the light as he plunges his body into mine. No barriers, nothing between us, not even the years we lived so close to one another, never knowing that all this time, we were already close in parallel existence. I want his hunger, his sadness, his memories, all of his colors inside of me, blending both of our shadows, touching, like watercolors all bleeding together until the paper is saturated with imperfect beauty.

My lover’s face in the shadows is luminous and delicate. There is something within him that is intangible, revealing itself to me. His face is like moonlight through a raincloud. I put my hand to his cheek, making sure he is there. Here in the dark, the blueness of the evening, illuminated by the amber street lamps lighting the shadows within ourselves, the forgotten places within us can no longer stay hidden. I open my eyes to see him in the dark. He cannot see me entirely. We can only see each other in the half-light. We are shadows of each other. We are radiant with desire, opening and tasting what is true, kissing him, kissing him. By this desire, he is awakening my soul. His fingers and hands light along my body, undoing me, releasing me, bringing me back to life.

I feel released from everything when we kiss. Nothing is binding me to the gravity of my existence. I am a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis. I am returning to myself within his embrace, by his kiss. We move around in the back, trying to find the right position. We kiss, and I laugh like a teenage girl. My legs are up, bare and dangling over his shoulder. He can’t see my face at all now. What he can see he finds with his hands. He discovers me in the slip of my wanting. My skin against his, my pussy is flowering with ripeness, and, as he touches me there, as he slides his fingers inside, he has me, he possesses me— all of me— the girl running down the street and the woman in the back seat of the car.

We kiss. I press my body into his. My hands are slipping all around his shoulders, feeling the fabric of his shirt, flattening my palms, smoothing and stroking his chest, squeezing his arms, and pulling him against me. I want him inside of me. My hands caress up along the back of his neck. My fingernails claw into his black hair. I have this erotic need to kiss him in the back of the car, half naked like this. It brings moments from girlhood into womanhood colliding within me like a surreal dream. I pretend it is him that I first gave myself to in the back of a car. I pretend, all this time, it was he, this man I see in the half-light, the blue shadows curving along his handsome face, his smile, his sighs. I suckle his lower lip, and he says something, pulling away, mystified, searching for my face. He says something beautiful. He is beatific in that moment. I suck his lip in a kiss again, and the same reaction comes. He is searching for my face. The kissing is making us dizzy with the feeling we have. We are in this dream together, looking out the windows at the broken indigo and granite colors, just shapes now, the houses, the street. We are dreaming each other. What we cannot see with our eyes, we can see with our hands, with our kisses. We can see everything about each other and all the years that paralleled themselves, bringing us to this moment, all the secrets once so elusive, now illuminated.

Thirty years before, I ran down that street, not supposed to go there, not allowed. Danger. My mother worried about someone kidnapping me, taking me away. Now, I want to be taken, I want someone to kidnap me. “Take me,” I whisper.

We are in the back of the van. My body is longing for him to be deep inside of me. I am sucking him as he straddles the farthest back seat, slinking into a position so I can take his cock into my mouth. My face nuzzles into his belly, making my way down. I inhale his musky scent, petting the soft nest of hair there with my palm, pressing down upon where his pubic bone meets the base of his sex. Tenderly I open my mouth to take him in, my mouth wet, longing to suck him, licking the head, savoring the length of his erect cock. He is hard. So hard, I have never felt him harder than that. I want him to kidnap me, just take me and take me. I don’t want to go back. I want to run away. I want him so much I can’t imagine how it’s happened. It consumes me, this want, and there’s no stopping it.

Outside the car windows, it’s deep night. We can only hear our breath and our sighing, our desire for one another climbing over the velour car seats, reaching the branches of the trees outside, shaking. I am shaking with orgasms. He gives them to me, over and over until everything blurs together and I don’t know who I am anymore.

The gray concrete of the street softly encompasses us. There is no time, only our breath, our hands, our kisses. My body sinks upon him, I climb upon him, slide him within me. When I am like this, on top of him, I am his. I belong to him, and that is what I need. It doesn’t really matter what we do, or how we do it.

He moves us down onto the carpeted floor of the back of the van. My leg is cramped against the side of the car interior. I cannot see his face now, but he can see mine by the dim light of the window. I feel him watching me as I ride him, moaning a little, feeling the marvelous way his cock slides in and half out of my cunt, my wet and juicy place where he is entering me. He grasps the sides of my hips, holding me upon him. He holds, squeezes me, and shakes my fleshy hips with yearning. I feel like a woman. When he holds my hips like that, I feel him possess me. The softest place of me, not just the inside of my body, but the most secret place, he finds, he uncovers. I am naked inside. I am his. I am myself again.

“Love is an attempt at penetrating another being, but it can only succeed if the surrender is mutual.” ~Octavio Paz

Surrendering to another person is an exquisite feeling. It is also terrifying. It’s been a part of my psyche and played its role in my soul’s growth. Being a submissive type of woman— only when I’m in control of that, mind you— I take pleasure in relinquishing all. In most cases, romantically speaking, I’ve been the one that’s sought after, desired, and taken. In the moment of the taking, I delight in the feeling of giving myself over to the passionate experience of love, lust or whatever you have in mind. Only once did I ever pursue and aggressively ‘take’ a man (to bed), and it was not exactly the kind of experience that suited my needs. You see, I love to surrender. (I do have a funny story about that moment, but that I will save for another time.) There is a deliciousness that builds from sexual tension. The surrender, then, is blissful, yielding, opening.

“This hunger of the eyes, skin, of the whole body and spirit, which made others criminals, robbers, rapers, barbarians, which caused wars, invasions, plundering and murder, in Djuna, at the age of puberty, alchemized into love. Whatever was missing she became: she became mother, father, cousin, brother, friend, confidant, guide, companion to all. This power of absorption, this sponge of receptivity which might have fed itself forever to fill the early want, she used to receive all communication of the need of others. The need and hunger became nourishment. Her breasts, which no poverty had been able to wither, were heavy with the milk of lucidity, the milk of devotion.

This hunger. . . became love.

While wearing the costume of utter femininity, the veils and the combs, the gloves and the perfumes, the muffs and the heels of femininity, she nevertheless disguised in herself an active lover of the world, the one was was actively roused by the object of his love, the one who was made strong as man is made strong in the center of his being by the softness of his love.

Loving in men and women, not their strength but their softness, not their fullness but their hunger, not their plenitude but their needs.”  ~ Ladders to Fire, Anais Nin

Surrender is ecstasy when you allow it. The loss of control, letting go of everything, and giving over to something or someone is a kind of freedom. When I gave birth the second time, I had to learn how to let go. Birthing is the biggest letting go one can do. My first childbirth experience was not like that at all. I refused to let go, and I suffered. So, the second time I gave birth I practiced the art of letting go. It was a psychedelic experience. My body knew what to do. The body itself has an innate and supremely ancient wisdom. Letting go is all about trust. Tension causes pain. I learned this the hard way the first time. The second and third time I gave birth, pure joy. By completely letting go and surrendering to the experience of childbirth, I saw everything sparkle. Colors were vivid, and I had a big “a-ha” moment. As I was about to give birth, I looked at my birthing doula and laughed quizzically, “I don’t know.” She smiled, seemed amused, and said, “What don’t you know?”

I laughed, “I don’t know.”

This was the funniest thing in the world, at the very moment of birth, I had no idea about anything. It was a riddle, and it was an answer. It was everything and nothing. It was complete surrender. Joy, of course, came after.

Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips. 
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Kissing is surrendering to another. In the first moment of giving in to a passionate feeling, the kiss opens us. We are tender, full of emotion. There is an eroticism in being vulnerable. Surrendering to passion is giving in to the moment of desire, letting it sweep you away. Being taken by emotion, the yielding is what happens, opening ourselves— mind, body, and soul. Being psychologically penetrated is a kind of surrender. Opening one’s mind to another’s—sharing experiences, telling tales and stories about one’s life— is a form of surrender. Letting another into our metaphorical hearts, there is actual physical pain in the center of one’s chest. It’s not pleasant; it feels like standing on the edge of a balcony looking downward— falling in love— and just may be equal to the sensation of jumping out of a plane. For some. For me, at least.

The feeling of opening one’s self, whether it be all at once or over a period of years, is surrendering to love. And what if the parachute is broken? Then what?

“Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.” ~Albert Einstein 

Ah, the mysteries of sex. Like a labyrinth, the mystery of erotic love is an adventure that takes me deep within my soul. There’s no reasoning, no logic. Life takes on a mythical and magical quality. I discover and decipher. I feel fine-tuned for creative energy. I see things clearly; I feel intensely. Alive, full of fire, music and the elemental and invisible wonders of life. During a passionate moment, I have seen the most beautiful things within my lover’s eyes. The invisible becomes visible within the heart. Sweat from his body smells good. I can’t kiss his mouth enough, and I want him like nothing else in the world. I want him, desire him. I feel it deep in my bones. There are no words. Everything that comes out of my mouth sounds cliché. The only thing I can do is express this feeling with active affection and passion. Grasping his hair during sex, squeezing his body against mine, biting his shoulder, kissing his mouth— hunger, fire. I write poetry, I paint, I write. I am in the moment, and I feel alive. Inspiration comes from the darkness. From the invisible threads woven through my chemistry, the power of sex is the seed of creativity. Sex becomes a spiritual opening, a doorway to the mystery. A passage through the labyrinth with a thread of red fleece. The pleasure of yes is surrendering to love, surrendering to passion and desire.

“I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he
 asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first
 I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so 
he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was
 going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
 ~James Joyce

James Joyce wrote this letter to his beloved Nora:

My dear Nora,

It has just struck me. I came in at half past eleven. Since then I have been sitting in an easy chair like a fool. I could do nothing. I hear nothing but your voice. I am like a fool hearing you call me ‘Dear.’ I offended two men today by leaving them coolly. I wanted to hear your voice, not theirs.


When I am with you I leave aside my contemptuous, suspicious nature. I wish I felt your head on my shoulder. I think I will go to bed.


I have been a half-hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won’t sign anything at all, because I don’t know what to sign myself.

(James Joyce)

Passionate love overwhelms the senses. The lover is on fire. When in love, I can’t think. I can’t do anything but crave my lover’s touch, hear their voice, and, even in the daily routines of life, I am consumed by the flame of desire.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. 
In the beginning a flame, very pretty, 
Often hot and fierce, 
But still only light and flickering. 
As love grows older, 
Our hearts mature 
and our love becomes as coals, 
Deep-burning and unquenchable. 
~ Bruce Lee 

Fire is a common thread among lovers past and present. When experiencing the feeling of falling in love, I have also felt the fire of passion wildly burning inside of me. Erotic love and all the colors of passion are full of fire and symbols of transformative yearning.

A letter by Napoleon Bonaparte to his lover Josephine:

I wake filled with thoughts of you. Your portrait and the intoxicating evening which we spent yesterday have left my senses in turmoil. Sweet, incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have on my heart!

Are you angry? Do I see you looking sad? Are you worried?… My soul aches with sorrow, and there can be no rest for your lover; but is there still more in store for me when, yielding to the profound feelings which overwhelm me, I draw from your lips, from your heart, a love which consumes me with fire? Ah! it was last night that I fully realized how false an image of you your portrait gives!

 You are leaving at noon; I shall see you in three hours.

 Until then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses; but give me none in return, for they set my blood on fire.
 (Napoleon Bonaparte)

Napoleon mentions that “a love which consumes (him) with fire” and that Josephine’s kisses “set (his) blood on fire” so he asks her not to give any kisses in return. He is already burning.

Another love letter by Victor Hugo to his amor:

My dearest,

When two souls, which have sought each other for, however long in the throng, have finally found each other …a union, fiery and pure as they themselves are… begins on earth and continues forever in heaven.

This union is love, true love, … a religion, which deifies the loved one, whose life comes from devotion and passion, and for which the greatest sacrifices are the sweetest delights.

This is the love which you inspire in me… Your soul is made to love with the purity and passion of angels; but perhaps it can only love another angel, in which case I must tremble with apprehension.

Yours forever,

Victor Hugo 

The transcendent aspect of passionate love is an erotic exhilaration for the soul. The eyes, the voice, the smell, the taste, and every bit of the beloved sends the lover into a rapturous moment. Delicious passionate sex, open-hearted and orgasmic, bring two people closer to the gods and goddesses of myth and legend, to angels, to transform them into fire and blaze into ether, where they return into the stars and the universe.

“At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.” ~Plato

Slipping his fingers into my wet and wanting sex,  he pulls aside my apron from behind as my ass lifts a little higher. I’m leaning over the kitchen sink. He has three fingers buried deep into my pussy; my lips are swollen with a delicious melting sensation. More. The bottle of gourmet olive oil. He spies it on the counter and reaches for it. Pressing his arousal hotly against my bare behind, he pours some of the oil into one hand and slathers my bottom up with it. The delicate perfume of olives fills the kitchen in the heat of the day. With the slippery olive oil he deftly presses his thumb— his one thumb that is wide and slightly flattened– slowly against the tender entrance of my ass. Pushing gently inside, it sinks in slow. His fingers work themselves deeper into my pussy. Deeper. He’s got a way of doing this where I can only surrender to the pleasure. I want his hardening cock inside of me too, but his hands are causing me to vibrate with excitement. I can’t think of anything else. He takes his other hand and, with the long tips of his index and second finger, circles my clit in light, little motions. He flutters his fingers back and forth, lightly, the way he taps an eggshell against a bowl. He pinches my clit and plays with it like sprinkling spices into a pot. The ache of his three fingers in my pussy and the girth of his thumb inside my ass is exquisite. I want him so much that my whole body responds to him like a pot of boiling water, simmering and rolling into heat. He has full control of my body with his hand. He kneels down on the kitchen floor, burying his face in between my legs. His hot mouth is tonguing my pussy, trailing his kiss up, spreading my cheeks open, licking, tasting. I moan with desire, clutching the Formica countertop. Being in the kitchen with him couldn’t get any hotter. His fingers stir me into a froth of lust.

When we are at dinner in a restaurant, sitting side by side, he trails his hand to my thigh, delving downward in between my legs. His fingers tempt me under the dinner table, coaxing the edge of my panties aside, teasing, just until my body bubbles with desire, so close to climax. He smiles mischievously, observing my response. He drinks his wine coolly, watches me with a sideways glance, as I try to not to show anything in my expression. He’s sly and just a bit naughty. Other diners at surrounding tables might notice. Sometimes I just don’t care, it’s so good, what he does to me with his hands.

His hands. Looking upon the shape of them sends shivers of longing through me, sensations I cannot describe. There aren’t any words that can explain the way they undo me, bit by bit, like sugar dissolving.

I watch him peel shrimp in the kitchen. He’s holding the knife steady, his index finger is pressed against the outer part of the blade. With precision, he deftly cuts along the spine of the shrimp, pink and quivering in his grip. I understand how that shrimp feels, much like the way I am when in his command. At the wooden cutting block, he conducts with his chef’s knife— he’s finely chopping fresh wide leaves of mint, frilly clumps of cilantro, his fingers nimbly mincing the green leaves into submission. He scoops the herbs into a bowl as I watch, enthralled by the way his hands take such loving care with what he is making. The watermelon and cucumber, all cubed and ready, shimmer with watery urgency. His long fingers casually shimmy among them, dipping into the bowl, tossing and dressing it with a squeeze of lime. The juice spurts into the bowl. He squeezes the lime until its pulp feathers and separates from the green rind. I notice the juice covering his fingernails, tips of his fingers, palm of his hand. It smells good and citrussy. He pulls me close and kisses me. I smell fragrant mint and juicy lime on his fingers as he touches my face. Then he’s back to preparing our meal. I delight in watching him drizzle olive oil into another bowl; stirring the dressing with the stainless whisk. He slices corn off the cob. While I stand there, barefoot in my sundress, watching him like a little girl, he smiles the faintest hint of a smile. He knows I am melting inside down to the marrow with want. My body is responding from the buttery center of my rising lust, a soufflé of creamy desire.

He sets the two dishes down on the dining table. Just a simple dish: shrimp in a dressing of olive oil, lime, honey, mint, cilantro, corn, watermelon and cucumber— the fragrance and sweetness, the pleasure. He caresses my thigh with one hand as I taste a mouthful of his creation, and suddenly, from the very core of my body, I am shuddering with some kind of mysterious reaction to the meal made aphrodisiac by his hands. I am melting with tenderness. I am noticing how he holds his fork. His index finger points into the silver handle of the fork, controlling its motion. My thoughts are percolating, the agitation in my body won’t stop. His other hand is warm and smooth against my thigh. I am shaking; my knees are gelatinous and unable to hold still. He slides his hand softly along my leg. My mouth is full of watermelon and shrimp, and I can’t stop giggling. I am so moved I want to cry from the joy. Another kind of orgasm, one coming from the depths of me, ripples from within, and all I can do is surrender to it. His eyes gleam at me like champagne glasses as he gives a fizzy smile. We eat from our dishes, and I taste slowly, savoring each mouthful. The heat of his hand and the way he made our dinner is whipping up some unknown place inside my body. A kiss with flavors of watermelon, olive oil, honey and mint on our tongues, the sea-sweetness of the pink fresh shrimp, the tang of pleasure.

Later, again, after the food, in the kitchen, his hands hug my hips close. We embrace. The warmth of his palms travels up my body, wraps in and cups around my breasts, kissing. He holds my face in his hands. The faint scent of herbs, like a magic spell from his fingertips, intoxicates me with its summery bouquet. He gazes into my eyes. I am trembling. I’m in love.

(photo from the 1962 film “Lolita”)

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.” ~Pablo Neruda

It was mid-July in New York City. The subway was crowded, and my aunt and I were squeezed together. No air and the stuffy, awful smell of the crowded subway car. I was wearing my favorite lilac-colored tank top and white shorts. My legs were tanned from the California sunshine, boogie boarding in the ocean, Santa Monica beaches, Hawaiian Tropics suntanning oil, and the scent of coconut. I wore a necklace of pop beads in cherry red. My lips were slick with Bonne Bell “Dr. Pepper” lip gloss, my hair long and brown and blonde from the sun. Men were sitting across from me, in suits, carrying briefcases. Summer, 1983. I had just turned thirteen.

My breasts were swelling like the buds of camellias that show their pale pink petals through the green bud. My arms, long, and legs, long, hair sun-streaked to the middle of my back, blonde feathers nearly platinum. My eyes alive and sparkling, newly opened and poured into my irises, pop bottle of Coca Cola color, fizzing along the city, watching all the men come in and out of the subway. My thighs were sticking to the hard plastic of the seat, sweat and humidity. My thighs, untouched by men’s hands. My thighs, the soft skin of a girl of thirteen. My eyes full of carbonated dreams, of Monet’s pond, of light in the trees, of Debussy’s Clair de Lune. My eyes that slurried along the sidewalks of Manhattan, looking for something, listening to the buildings, taxis, shop signs and restaurant signs, the many sounds and smells of New York City in the summertime.

“Stop it,” nudges my beautiful aunt. Her elbow dug into my side. She is an opera singer, a Tosca, dark brown hair, musky eyes, and olive skin. She looks like a Flamenco dancer, a Spanish beauty, Italian diva. She looks beautiful even though she wears little makeup and never flaunts her looks. She has the same last name as I do, my mother’s sister, the great beauty. She sings Puccini arias, lives in a 5th story walk up in the West 80′s. We take the subway from my art school.

“Stop what?” I ask. She glares at me through the side of her eyes, magnetic slits of feminine knowledge, only a sliver is revealed.

“You know what.”

I pause, uncertain. My belly drops inside like a pendulum falling from the cogs and rhythms of the inner workings, and, with the face of a clock, I ask again, “Stop what?” But, time continues, and I’m not stopping. I was staring at the man across from me in the subway, giving him a sly smile, a Mona Lisa smile. My lips were barely turned upwards with their glossy pout. My eyes, my Coca Cola bubbling eyes, eyes that through generations told fortunes and tales, weaving a magic on their very own, whispering little stories into the man across from me, tempting him to find out what legends the women in my family have created with their tanned gypsy arms, bangles of gold and silver, glimmering and jingling with the sounds of laughter, what the women in my family have done with men like him. I smiled, a long and slippery smile, as my mouth has never tasted a man like him. My mouth had not yet opened to the kiss of a man.

I had written poetry with a calligraphy pen in the apartment while my aunt practiced her Puccini Vissi d’arte and sang as Floria Tosca. We had Zabar’s croissants in white wax paper bags, hard salami, and slices of cheese. My beautiful aunt watched me write and told me there are men in this city who would steal me away. Not to stare at men like that. How I looked at that man on the subway, it was dangerous. She told me she knew I was growing up, and I needed to learn that my body was so beautiful that men would take me and so I had to learn how to walk as if I were in a hurry, look down on the sidewalk, walk fast. My beautiful aunt gave me Rilke’s writings to read and books full of Pablo Neruda’s poetry.

“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” ~Pablo Neruda

I learned how boys liked to feel my body, put their hungry and curious fingers under my skirt, pulling aside my cotton panties, searching for the softest part of my female body, my yearning and budding body, so alive with the hum of cicadas in the August evening. It was summertime along the Mississippi River. The kudzu wrapped around the trees and the musk of cotton oil hung heavy. I was a girl of thirteen.

We moved from sunny California to the Deep South along the winding river that rambled down to the Delta, the mouth of the Gulf. She was a river that I knew well, and I was much like her, wanton and restless, muddy. I had boys touch me and felt their hot breath on my neck, their young pink tongues exploring my ear. Kissing me, in the back of cars in the skating rink parking lot.

My girlfriend showed me how to go ridin’ and cruise with the boys in their daddy’s cars. Oldsmobiles with velour interiors, music on the radio. We ate nachos covered in plastic orange cheese, salty tortilla chips on our fingers. We licked the tips of them and got into the car with the two boys, older, almost eighteen. We made out in the back seat, the boy I liked named after his daddy. He was sweet and Southern, syrupy vowels and tongue running down my neck like the river’s trail. He wrote me love letters and dedicated slow songs at the roller rink. We skated together in the dim light, Luther Vandross love songs and to Heatwave’s Always and Forever.

“…like the breasts of the young girl, so young before the immensity of what is to come.” ~Marguerite Duras

Soon I moved to Memphis and that older boy drove through cotton fields to my home, wrote me love letters, played vinyls on my record player, dedicating songs while kissing me on the couch. Our mouths searched for the shape of each other’s, and his hands traveled along my shoulders and arms and down along my jeans until he discovered how to unbutton and unzip while caressing. Soon we were sneaking off into the car, telling my mother we were going to get some ice cream. Back seat kisses and the radio. Smell of oily night in the South. The heat was thick with steamed up car windows. His hands were underneath my bra, down my panties. Sticky with longing, his pants stayed on. His hardness I never knew, but his fingers were wet with my almost ripe desire.

“I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.” ~ Pablo Neruda

Santa Monica Beach, 1984. I wore a white bikini and nothing else but flip flops and pink toenail polish. I was lean and tan, walking the boardwalk, going to visit an Israeli boy of nineteen that worked in the market. He came out as I stood before the window.

The sun was high and the sand was still in between my toes. I was swimming in the ocean, hair tangled like seaweed, scent of wakame and salt. He wrapped his arms boldly around my waist, pulling me close, kissing me on the mouth. My aunt, my beautiful aunt, walked behind me. She was watching me kiss the Israeli boy. She herself, with so many lovers, so many men that would do anything for my beautiful auntie, she herself knew what she could not stop. She could not stop me from kissing boys on the boardwalk, wearing only a small amount of fabric strung together. I was smiling, happy. He was holding my hand, and, forgetting my aunt was with me, I ran with him, down to the sand. We walked to the water, kissed hungrily, tasted each other’s mouths like tasting open papayas in the sun, with the juice of pleasure on our lips, we laughed and kissed. It was a moment of girlhood into womanhood. You could smell my blossoming with your eyes.

“Very early in my life it was too late.”  ~ Marguerite Duras

So I let him climb through my window. Scent of gardenia coming from the garden. Crickets and night, warm summer air. June, 1984. I was fourteen. His body is heavy upon mine. He presses into me, and I gasp, clutching his hips. My sex is as soft as fruit, you can’t force it to ripen, he’s almost inside of me, it’s too much. He whispers, “Is it hurting you?” but it’s not pain I’m feeling, just aching, the opening of my body. And I learned to open and offer my body, for lips to taste without hesitation, without pause, just an erect and warm penis sliding inside of me for the first time. I was free. I felt my body realize its true essence that night into dawn and after a hot bath in the early morning light. My body felt different, lighter. It was a woman’s body.

I wore my hair in the same style, but it looked changed. There was something in my eyes that changed, too. The light in them was green-gold and held shadows and stories. The way I looked at men with a sideways smile was something too late to change. It could not be undone. What my aunt saw in my eyes, in the sway of my young hips, was something she knew would come. It would end my childhood and begin my story, and whatever she was afraid of in that change was tidal and dark, something sinewy-like and briny, something mysterious and powerful, something altogether inevitable. Our gypsy smiles and flashing eyes came across the ocean from lands where our ancestors rode horses, drank smoky black tea leaves soaked in boiling water, told lies and stole things that were precious and sold things for more than they were worth. We came from tents and sang out with our hearts. Our hearts that were bigger than the sky and full of tears, hearts of women that drank to laugh at the men that loved them. Hearts of women like me, what we don’t say is the loudest song of our souls.

With a heart of a gypsy, I smile at the men as I walk upon the stage, naked. Slow, slow, hip, hip. Heel, sway, heel, sway. Wearing my smile, giving the men surrounding the stage the glance I gave as a girl on the New York City subway.

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clearing, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in the abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” ~ Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Aphrodite awakens in us, born from the sea of our soul. She is symbolic of erotic dreams and desires. The ocean, saline, amniotic, the primordial sea, womb of life. We are made of stardust and seashells, and all of the yearning that stretches beyond our bodies. The erotic within us is that yearning, the coming together and ignition of our souls. We are longing to feel that magical passion for life when we seek the erotic, as Eros was spirited away by his love for Psyche.

From Wikipedia:

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.” ~ Haruki Murakami

I could say that I’ve been asleep. Dreaming, for how long I’m not sure, perhaps years. My soul has been caught in the tide of reverie and longing. There are layers of my being that I do not reveal that are sediment, deep within. Places within me that I didn’t know existed. Just as grains of sand are eroded rock and shell, thousands of years have created it— our souls have mysteries like that. When the light sparks and the glimmer of something beautiful is discovered, then that is the moment. It is a memory. So I have been going along this current of memory, like the ocean waves, lost in it, not caring where it takes me. I have had many lovers in my life and many erotic experiences. All fragments of my erotic landscape. It’s all there to use as a palette, along with the imagination. Writing about the erotic is really an adventure on the soul level.

“Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.” ~Isabel Allende

You might say I’ve been in the mood for love. I’ve been dormant, sleeping within. But there has been a marvelous phenomenon happening inside of me lately, an awakening of my soul. This awakening has been sparked, like Sleeping Beauty, by a kiss of life, and now I am vibrating with passion. Like any birth, there is blood involved, and pain, and things that I had not known about myself. All this time, I think I have been sleeping. Now it’s all fire and passion and living in every moment. I haven’t had much time to sleep. My mind is restless, and I am hyper-aware, even my flesh is alive with sensitivity. My soul is awake and my heart is full of passionate fire. Awakening.

“Erotica is using a feather; pornography is using the whole chicken.” ~Isabel Allende

I’ve been writing stories, erotic love stories, but in the process of writing, I am learning something new about myself. I make discoveries. It’s like sifting through soil, finding fragile treasures, tiny shells, whorls of prismatic layers and inner pearly chambers. Inside oneself is the treasure. My erotic self is tender within and soft. I am beginning to see the beauty of this process, searching through my memory, finding things that I never realized until the writing revealed it to me. When I say “erotic” what I am attempting to say is “passionate nature” and thus, we are naturally erotic and passionate beings. Passion is about life. And life is about sex and love, and all the complexities of being human. It is our instinct, to love. Longing is the yearning, to discover what lies within.

“Writing is like making love. Don’t worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.” ~Isabel Allende

When I first started writing erotica, I had no idea what path I was choosing. It is easy to say, “Oh, yes, I will write about sex,” as if doing so automatically makes it something delicious to write about. But what ends up happening in the process is an unearthing of one’s psyche and all the contents. It’s a veritable Pandora’s Box. Sex is life. So I’m writing about life. Yes, even creating fiction is writing about life. Creating characters that are part of one’s self, so you really cannot get away with hiding it all. Sooner or later, it all comes to surface. As a painter, I thought of my paints and brushes as my language. Writing poetry and erotica were secondary. I kept it secret like a diary. It revealed too much of myself. Painting, on the other hand, was pure expression, all color and light. I didn’t have to explain my reasons or confess my darknesses and shadows. I just had to apply the paint to the canvas and allow the feeling to come through.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ~Anaïs Nin

I love Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” and “Little Birds” out of all her writings. I admire her use of dream-like imagery and poetic layering. I like that her characters are imperfect and human. When I read various writers’ works in erotica anthologies, I enjoy some the modern stories, but in general, the lewd and formulaic writing is disappointing. I want to say I enjoy most of it, but, just like anything worth its weight in salt, most of the stuff our there sounds the same. I don’t want to churn out the stories full of “cock” and “pussy” and “cunt” and “thrust” without those words being used in a creative way, adding some juice to them; those names for our body parts that deserve more than being thrown about in between verbs and periods and paragraphs. Reinventing those “fuck words” with new life and energy, charging them with cosmic fuel.

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~Anaïs Nin

So, in the quest to write erotica, I have begun to discover, I am writing about life, love and human beings. Writing about being human, sexual and flawed, vulnerable, and other aspects. Fantasy, dreams. Romanticism, shadowy recesses and hidden corners of my erotic mind come into the realm of the written word.

I want it messy. I want it raw and real and vibrant. I want romance and longing. Passion. I know it may sound cliche or corny, but I want love. I want to be covered in the musky scent of sex. I want the stories I write to express something about human emotion and how life isn’t perfect. I want to create dreams and pleasure. I want to write about passion and the impermanent and sometimes heartbreaking beauty of life.

(painting by Gajin Fujita)

Henry Miller loved Anaïs Nin. She was married to Hugh Guiler. Her diaries, Vol.1, 1931–1934, were written when Anaïs lived a bohemian life with Henry Miller during her time in Paris. Her husband (Guiler) is not mentioned in her diary at that time. Henry and Anaïs remained lovers and kindled their passion for one another as artists, as writers, in love with each other; in love with life and the creative fire, passion.

Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin on March 4, 1932
“Three minutes after you have gone. No, I can’t restrain it. I tell you what you already know – I love you. It is this I destroyed over and over again. At Dijon I wrote you long passionate letters – if you had remained in Switzerland I would have sent them – but how could I send them to Louveciennes? Anais, I can’t say much now – I am in a fever. I could scarcely talk to you because I was continually on the point of getting up and throwing my arms around you.” 

Anaïs Nin to Henry Miller on March 26, 1932
“This is strange, Henry. Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you. [...] I love when you say all that happens is good, it is good. I say all that happens is wonderful. For me it is all symphonic, and I am so aroused by living – god, Henry, in you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness, the fullness … Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on. [...] I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy.”

Passionate souls and creative spirits, Anaïs and Henry wrote erotica together with other writers and artist friends, for a dollar per page commissioned by a secretive patron. The patron was a wealthy Oklahoma oil millionaire Roy Milisander Johnson. He commissioned these erotic manuscripts from writers like Anaïs and Henry. But. He wanted the poetry cut out. He just asked for the matter-of-fact details of sex.

Anaïs Nin on writing erotica for the eccentric patron:

“I gather poets around me and we all write beautiful erotica. As we have to suppress poetry, lyrical flight, and are condemned to focus only on sensuality, we have violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica becomes a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery…We have to cut out the poetry, and are haunted by the marvelous tales we cannot tell. We have sat around, imagined this old man, talked of how much we hate him, because he will not allow us to make a fusion of sexuality with feeling, sensuality and emotion, and lyrical flights which intensify eroticism.” 

Anaïs could not continue removing the poetry from the erotic. The wealthy patron became an albatross to her creative juices, and, finding the arrangement intolerable, she and the other writers could not go on writing sex without the poetry of life. She wrote a letter which the patron never received:

“Dear Collector;

We hate you. Sex loses all its its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships, which change its colour, flavour, rhythms, intensities…You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood…”

And in the art of writing erotica, life is what it’s all about. Life and living passionately, as if every single moment was as precious as our breath. A great big “Yes” when we are lost in pleasure. A “Yes” when we are in the arms of our lover.

“All night I could not sleep, because of the moonlight on my bed, I kept on hearing a voice calling: Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered “yes.” ~ Zi Ye (6th-3rd century B.C.E.) Chinese poet

(painting by Gajin Fujita)

Spanking. The rules of the dungeon were such as to initiate me as a submissive. No one graduated to become a dominatrix until they were a submissive first. I wore a white lace bodice that corseted me in and a garter belt with white thigh-high stockings. My submissive attire was to look girlish and innocent. Sweet. And I’m real good at being sweet. I’m a darling girl.

The dominatrix took me into a room fashioned like a classroom. In place were school desks and a chalkboard. She gently bent me over the teacher’s desk. Wearing her black latex outfit and shiny thigh high boots, she looked like a rocker from the late 80′s. I almost expected to see an electric guitar strapped to the front of her. In a way, she looked like Nancy Wilson from the rock band Heart. She was excited that I was so willing to become a submissive. Her thrill bubbling over her cool exterior, she was gentle when guiding my hips into position. Much like a yoga instructor helping me out with the proper pose of “down dog,” she angled my ample bottom into an upwards place. Contrary to my ideas of dominatrix behavior, she was, well… sweet to me.

This was when I realized the connection between my arousal and the sense of trust and safety. Mental connection and mutual respect needs to be the foundation for such explorations. The dominatrix was doing her best to make me comfortable, without pushing me beyond my threshold.

While I was bending over the teacher’s desk, the dominatrix gave my bottom a light swat with her leather paddle. It felt a little cold and kind of soft. The sting didn’t come until a few more swats to my behind. I felt a flush of excitement thrum through my body—my neck turned red and splotched, my face tingled. I was blushing. My body was responding with arousal. She didn’t say much but mentioned that she’d have to give me a number of spanks in order to train me properly as a submissive. The paddle was warming up, and the swats turned into full leather blows to my cushiony bottom. The ample amount of tush I had served me well. She caressed one of my cheeks with her hand, feeling the heat. She devilishly remarked how red my bottom was getting and giggled. It seemed as though she was enjoying it with all the mischievous glee of a naughty child stealing a cookie.

And just when I was getting into it… she was done. My eyes were glazing, my head lowered, facing the desk. A rush of sexual tingling flowed through my sex. I was swollen and wet; juicy through my white lace panties. I wanted her to do it more. The desks were all orderly, lined up in the classroom, facing the chalkboard like good children. I gave her a demure schoolgirl look like I wanted to be taken. I was aroused by the spanking, my breathing was heavy, and if she had pulled my hair and took me with a dildo I would have allowed her to.

“There’s two things in this world: wonderful, visceral, sexy sex. And death. Horrible, boring death.”

~ Kieran, Dinner for Schmucks

Rough sex. It’s like anything extreme or intense. If it’s done properly, with the right ingredients, it’s delicious. If it’s not done with skill, if it’s devoid of emotion, it can be awful. Cooking is much the same.

If you don’t handle your ingredients with care, you’ll ruin the whole meal. Don’t just thrash around the kitchen, stir things violently, cook haphazardly over a high flame, without knowing how to manage things in an artful way. Otherwise you might as well just microwave it and forget about what it tastes like. It’ll end up as inedible cardboard. And that is how I feel about rough sex without the right ingredients.

And I have had a desire for rough sex lately, which is an unusual thing for me. What I thought I liked or what I felt safe with was soft, gentle, and loving sexual encounters. Most of the time, I want it slow. Tenderness, caresses, and kisses. And then, past the point of orgasm and beyond, I long for my lover to take me as hard as he can. I want more. When I enter this zone, there is an emotional realm, a hidden place that runs along the periphery of my brain, and that realm asks for it rough. I want to be pushed into intensity. I want pleasure, and I want more of it. I want it harder, deeper, more. I need that animalistic sex— the pulling of my hair, the pounding into my body, the growling, screaming, moaning, wild fucking of sex.

Most of my life I’ve responded to sweetness. Sweet behavior and treatment opens me up, allows me to respond. If you are sweet, thoughtful, and gentle with me, I will most certainly enjoy (when the mood strikes) rough sex. You see, I don’t respond to rough right away. Crude behavior is a big turn off. Rough doesn’t mean you can be a boorish ogre and get your way with me.

Going back to the memory of being spanked by that dominatrix in that dungeon. Odd to say, but it was one of the most pleasant experiences I’ve had with a stranger. She was caring and feminine, strong yet soft.

It happened out of necessity. After I had moved back from New Orleans, I needed a job. I had just had my son— he was just a baby then. I was a single mother. My body was still carrying the extra pregnancy weight. Add to that, living in New Orleans. All the food. The wonderful, delicious, gourmet-buttery food. The extra weight wasn’t unattractive, just a little zaftig. Curvy.

I was thirty years old. I was in the prime of my life. And the strip club that I once worked at in Los Angeles wouldn’t hire me back. I was once one of their best girls.

Ten years before then, I had made them a fortune. They gave me any shifts I wanted, and I left with hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, each day. My body was supple, young, and tanned, with a small waist you could put both hands around, and large, bountiful (albeit silicone) breasts. My hips were sensual and feminine, and my legs as long as a gazelle. In heels, I was towering, over six feet tall. When I emerged from behind the curtain, the slow bump and grind of my hips melted men’s minds, moving like syrupy molasses onstage. With my sultry gaze, I mesmerized men by the crowd. Men lined up for me, waiting, for a private dance. Hordes, dozens, hundreds of men spent their pretty wallets up dry just to have me near. I was in my early twenties. Pretty face, healthy as a thoroughbred, intelligent mind. Not a wrinkle on my face or a reason to be discouraged. To add to my arsenal of seduction, I had a growing comprehension of what men really wanted. My British cousin once said disdainfully: “You’ve always been a man magnet.”

Surprisingly, this time, the club wouldn’t take me back. The manager I dubbed “Valium Bob” poked my belly with his bony index finger.

“What’s this?” he prodded.

“My belly, of course.” I snipped back.

I wanted to say that this was how women naturally look. Surrounded by the new girls, all of them skinny as supermodels in their rhinestone-studded bikinis, Valium Bob was surrounded by girls that resembled greyhound dogs. Compared to my womanly belly dancer curves, I stood out. I wondered, how did this happen? Wasn’t it just years ago I was scooping up bills off the main stage? Slithering out of my satin gowns, giving sideways looks, casting spells over any man like a siren to a sailor, drawing him closer toward the rocky collision of lust. I was the Princess of the Bare Elegance. Where were the girls I knew before? So I had to get over myself. It was all as false as the breasts in that club. And my breast implants had been removed years ago. The moment of pseudo-downfall and has-been realization was no matter. It wasn’t a small world my mind existed in. I saw it for what it was: superficial and nonsense. I had developed an illusion, a mechanism, to exist in that world. But, when my belly was poked by a scrawny, drugged up slimeball, I took offense. My feminist perspective found this behavior in men to push me beyond loathing. I kept my disgust at bay, held my head high, and gracefully stated that I wasn’t about to kill myself with amphetamines or crystal meth in order to work in their club. I walked out.

I had just given birth six months prior to that moment. I was back in Los Angeles, far from the Big Easy of butter and cream. I was not in New Orleans anymore. Dazzling through my mind, thoughts were spinning around, like a dancer spinning down a metal pole. I was wondering what happened to Lucky, Sasha, Heather, Precious, Cherry, Zee, Anita Dawn, and Renee— my sisterhood? The new girls were Fembots, representative of the stereotypical strippers. And those girls were thin, stick-thin, emaciated— some I suspected were anorexic or worse. And everyone in Los Angeles, it seemed, was fixated on body image, whether they knew it or not. It was a rude awakening from the sleepy romance of Louisiana bayou and Nouvelle-Orléans grace. In the Land of Hollywood, supermarkets contained shelves of magazines with celebrities on diets, and diet drinks, diet sodas, ‘lose weight now’ blurbs and fat-free options. Where was the joy of living? The laissez les bons temps rouler of New Orleans left behind, I was lost again in the asphalt maze of Los Angeles traffic and the underground of sex work in a megalopolis. It was a lonely place to be.

So I ended up working at that dungeon. I decided that it was an experimental thing until I lost the pregnancy weight. Then I’d go back to dancing. Or do something else. Besides, I liked being spanked. I guessed it would work out fine if I made some income from it. My behind was pleasantly plump. Spinal Tap’s song of adoration, Big Bottom, was fitting, unlike my old size eight jeans.

When I’ve had rough sex, it was done with love and emotion. The longing and ache to be set free from my contained nature, to have my lover pound me into glorious submission with his hard cock— to be shaken and stirred by the raw instinct— to be utterly taken. Surrender. It’s more about surrender and letting go of all control than violence. If it’s true violence, I’m not in the least interested— violence is not something that arouses me— I don’t want to be slapped in the face or called names. Violence is abhorrent. When I want rough sex, I want it to be about passion.

The most mind blowing rough sex scene I saw was in the erotic espionage film Lust, Caution by Ang Lee. I was pregnant with my third child when I went to see the film in the theater. I have always loved the Chinese actor Tony Leung. Any film he is in, I must watch. A parallel discovered. The parallel: my second pregnancy and my erotic fixation for Asian men which was awakened by a violent sword fight scene in House of Flying Daggers,— and again during my third pregnancy— the realization of my desire for rough sex while watching Lust, Caution. I was shocked to discover how it — rough sex and raw emotion— aroused me still. What was it about violent scenes that provoked? Was it intense love and passion that compelled me? The axis of that parallel erotic response was in correlation to my need for more. For passion and all its reasons, the vicissitudes of my experiential knowledge were weighing upon me. Physical weight, extra body weight, emotional weight—-

I want freedom. I crave lightness of being.

That sex scene in Lust, Caution— rough sex— he takes her with passion bordering on brutality. The emotions were intense, conflicting and layered. It was shocking and erotic. It was dark and dangerous, and tender and instinctual. She wants him; he takes her, roughly, on the bed. His belt buckle in hand, he’s violent with desire. I’m clutching the theater seat; my hands don’t know where to go. I can’t breathe. I’m holding my chest, my breath. I can’t watch. I’m watching. Shaking with undoing, I’m pregnant, and I want to be taken like that. My body is in conflict, wanting gentle treatment when carrying a child within my body. I am thrown into confusion. In the back of my mind, I want someone to take me like he takes her. It was done with finesse. Tony Leung, playing his part, in a sex scene that raised questions in my being as to why I want to be taken so, and the extreme emotions that go with the territory. Much like how lions subdue their mates with a bite to the neck during their mating habits and rituals, I want to surrender.

Perhaps the dangerous amount of intensity, when combined with strong emotion, lights my body up with a thrilling energy. I don’t want brutality. I want passion. Perhaps my body responds to extremes. Anal sex allows my body to feel an extra amount of intensity that vaginal sex doesn’t quite give me. When I am spanked, it’s a similar charge. It’s naughty, erotic. I love the intense orgasms I have during anal sex, which sends riveting tingling sensations and aftershocks of orgasmic pleasure through my entire body. I can reach such realms of heightened erotic stimulation during regular vaginal sex, but it takes longer. Anal sex, spanking, and rough, penetrative, emotional, animalistic sex with someone who adores me, someone I know would never truly hurt me, is the essential ingredient within the landscape of my erotic desire. Surrendering to someone who passionately loves me is the magical link to the core of my erotic being.

I was leaning over a leather saddle inside of a barn. The floor inside was covered in hay. The snow outside fell in feathery drifts. He held a riding crop in his left hand, pulling down my white lace panties with the other. The cold, brisk air was icy against my bare skin. I was trying not to think of the first swat to my backside, but I felt myself wriggling in anticipation. I liked the smell of the hay and feeling the cold air on my flesh, waiting for him to strike my bottom. He rubbed one cheek with his warm hand. He always made me wait for it. I closed my eyes, not knowing when the first of many swats would begin. It was a winter day. We were staying out in the rural rolling hills of historic Virginia. The barn was rarely used. It was just one of the three barns at the old farmhouse bed and breakfast. The saddle was placed on top of the hay bales.

He used riding crops, hairbrushes, and his bare hand. I loved his hand the most. When we first started doing this, the spanking, it was just a little foreplay. It happened unexpectedly. I was sitting in his living room, tipsy on single malt scotch. I had just come back from my afternoon shift at the strip club. He was a sort-of boyfriend, not the kind I was committed to. We were lovers but nothing romantic or anything standard to make it a formal relationship. I was in my mid-twenties, fresh out of a long engagement to a chef. After I broke my engagement, I met this boyfriend. Vanilla sex was all I knew before. Even if that vanilla sex sometimes included real vanilla and crème brulee, it was still vanilla.

Tasting the warmth expand on my tongue, the single malt scotch was a sensuous feeling. I only had a taste of it, and it made me tipsy right away. I had my stage makeup on, and he insisted I go wash it off. He knew me, bare and naked, just as I am, not wearing the made up face I used for strip tease. He said in his upper class East Coast manner, “Go wash off your face like a good girl.”

Like a good girl, I went to his bathroom to wash off the heavy eyeliner, the mascara, the powder, and lipstick. He came into the bathroom and stood in the doorway. The water was rushing from the faucet. My hands were under the running water, cupping some, lathering my hands with soap. I was looking for something to wipe my eye makeup off with in his cabinet and left it slightly ajar.

“Do you have any lotion?” I asked him. I felt him hovering near my bottom as I bent over the sink. Through the half opened mirror, I saw the expression on his face. He lifted my cotton dress. He placed his hand on my ass cheek and fingered his way into my panties, pulling them down around my knees.

“Maybe,” he said huskily, “If you’re a good girl.”

His hand caressed my bottom lustfully, until he gave it a swat. I gasped. I looked at him through the mirror above the sink, and he leaned into me, a hard-on through his jeans. Again, another swat. I grabbed the towel and giggled.

He said, “You’ve been such a bad girl, you know.” His breathing changed. His eyes fixated on my blushing bottom. He unzipped himself out of his jeans. I felt his hard cock pressing against my bottom, as he nudged it through the gap of my legs, grazing my moist pussy lips.  The faucet was still on. He took some water and wet his hand. Then he smacked my bottom again. With his other hand, he pulled my hair. “Listen, if you’re a good girl tonight, I just might let you sleep.”

I smiled at him, amused. “Really?” I sassed back. “And if I’m not?”

“Then I’ll have to give you a bare bottomed spanking with your hairbrush until your bottom is red. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll fuck you once I’m done.” He taunted. “But I think you’re really very naughty.”

More water, all over my breasts, under my dress, he wet me down with the water from the sink, and soaped up my bare bottom cheeks. “Do you really want me to fuck you, like a good girl?” he spread my bottom wide and slid his hard-on in between my cheeks. The soapy wetness was slippery, and the heat of his arousal was pressing into my bottom.

“If I spank you well, maybe you’ll want me to give it to you in your ass?” He touched my clitoris, reaching from the front, tempting me with his cock. “But first, tell me why you’re such a bad girl.”

We started this way. Sex was always satisfying with him. There wasn’t a need for more additions to our sex life like spanking. But, there was something in me that provoked that something in him. And so, like that, he began our adventures in spanking. I had no interest in bondage, domination, and sadomasochism. I didn’t feel like I was a “bad girl” nor did I have any family history of being spanked as a child. No spankings, no abuse in my childhood. I came into the realm of spanking purely by the play of a psychological wild card. He loved my bottom probably more than any other boyfriend before. Obsessed with my backside, after he spanked me, he loved to take me from behind. There were times that he felt awful for the welts and bruises that he left. It wasn’t about harming me, he just felt aroused by the sound, the heat, the redness that spanking caused. With my bottom in the air or with me lying over his lap, it aroused him.

I didn’t realize how much it aroused me, until after a good spanking, it made me wet.

So wet in fact, that I couldn’t believe how it affected me. At first, the few times we did role-play with spanking, I went along with the game. Then somehow, somewhere, both of our minds became enmeshed in the pleasure and pain, and we just could not have sex without it.

“Do you think we’ve taken this too far?” he asked over our cold orange juice in silver tumblers. The Southern-style breakfast at the Inn was a sumptuous feast: fried green tomatoes, cheese grits, eggs. We were the only visitors there in the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald had once stayed. My bottom was sore, swollen from being spanked by a riding crop and hairbrush in the barn. I could barely sit and had to lean to one side. I had been spanked in the same bedroom where F. Scott had slept. I wondered if he might have been into spanking.

“Well,” I pondered. “Possibly.”

“Do you think it’s weird? I mean, I don’t think I can have sex normally ever again after this.”

“We do it more now than we actually have sex.” I answered hesitantly. “I mean, we don’t just have sex anymore, it’s all about the—”

“Yes, I know.” He smirked. “Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m just not normal.”

I didn’t tell him what I was really feeling. I wanted it normal, without all the spanking. We did get carried away. Deep down, I wanted to be loved, cherish, adored. I didn’t want to have welts and bruises on my bottom all the time. I couldn’t dance at the club with my bottom marked up, especially the one time there was a defined red handprint left from a particularly strong smack. I was tired of being the bad girl. I was good. I was a really good girl that deserved really good treatment.

It left me wondering why I needed to be punished in the first place. Why was a good girl acting like a bad girl? And why did I need to be one or the other?  Was I playing out some submissive cliché? I was strong, worthy, and kind. I wanted a man who would love me wholeheartedly. I was getting tired of his psychosexual role-play. Tired of the role of bad girl. It became twisted, my responses more contrived. I began to dread the game of “good girl, bad girl.” I was ready to move on. But he wasn’t.

Before this boyfriend, before my fiancé, there was another boyfriend. He said I reminded him of Mary Ann of Gilligan’s Island. But then, as he looked deeper into my eyes, he said, “But, you are also Ginger.” I was both Mary Ann and Ginger. “Yes,” he snorted a guffaw when he realized, “You are both Mary Ann and Ginger. That’s it!”

And so it was. I was both the Good Girl and the Bad Girl, rolled in the hay, and the spankings were part of my evolution. I had forgotten about the spankings after we stopped seeing each other. I didn’t bring it up in new relationships. It was something I chose to live out, try on, and leave in the past. No other boyfriend asked about giving me a spanking. A few passionate slaps, but nothing more. Never the “good girl” or the “bad girl” again, just me, as I am. Whole and complete, worthy of love and goodness.

Me, in Virginia, on the bed where F. Scott Fitzgerald slept.

For the past nine years, I have been acutely aware of what arouses my desire: a passion, a yen for the Asian male. I say that playfully, yen, but it’s a serious matter. I cannot fully explain it. I write this to better understand my erotic fascination. Asian men are, for me, an enigma, the Eros of my own Psyche, the dream of my sensual desires. My attraction to the Asian male goes beyond the surface, deeper into my soul’s mysterious yearning.

My fantasy of the Asian man. He is sincere, tender, kind. A man who considers, rather than assumes. He is gentle yet masculine, soulful and strong. He is connected to his inner femininity, which emphasizes his own masculinity. He doesn’t try to exhibit machismo; he is supple of heart and mind. He is romantic but not effusive, gentlemanly but not contrived.

In my experience, other men I have dated, slept with, been with, engaged and married to, were not quite right for me. After a certain point, I lost interest. Somehow, the magic was not there, and the thrill was gone. What was left after the initial spark? I didn’t know myself well enough. I needed more time to explore the very depths of my being in order to know what I like and to know my soul’s desire. Previous to my acknowledgement of what sort of man attracts me like no other, I tried a rainbow of men. A few Latino lovers of Mexican and Spanish heritage. I was engaged to a red-headed, freckly, Irish-Belgian man covered in tattoos and piercings. I dated a few Scottish laddies, one Norwegian type, and a Hungarian from Montreal. A fling with a cerebral Bostonian songwriter. I had several boyfriends that were ‘grunge’ musicians of various mixed nationalities, simply Americans. I was pursued by many salivating Italian raconteurs and one Persian Casanova. I had a Persian-Polish-French (ex)husband. There was that African-American guy I dated and an Aussie or two. I had a whirlwind affair with an Irish poet from Wicklow.

Along the way, I discovered, my archetypal ideal man is Asian.

It started in fifth grade. I was a shy girl; tall, awkward, wearing tortoise shell-framed glasses. My lanky body and large hands made me feel like a monster next to the petite and giggly Japanese girls in my class.

I lived in historic Los Feliz, the hilly old Hollywood neighborhood of Griffith Park. My elementary school was a melting pot of many cultures. I felt comfortable, at home, around the colorful mixture of ethnicities.  I was intrigued by a Filipino boy that wore glasses like me. He was also shy and tall. And completely adorable. My first real crush.

When this Filipino boy was near, my blood pulsed through my veins, my mouth felt sticky and dry. I could not look at him. He also looked away. Then one day, he decided to look at me in class. He gave me a long, sideways glance. He pushed his glasses down his nose and gave a sly smile. Everyone in class knew he had a crush on me. My stomach gurgled with nervousness. I wanted to get as far away from him as possible. My vacillation between wanting him to talk to me and wanting to hide filled me with dread. What would I do, I thought, if he kissed me? I shoved the thought far back into my mind, never asking that of myself again. Until I read the (forbidden) novel I found on my grandparents’ bookshelf, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 

When I found the book on the shelf, I instinctively knew it was sensual. The sound of the book, the sweeping title name Lady Chatterley followed by Lover spelled out suggestions of longing and kisses. But the other thing was, as I read this novel, she was a Lady that was also compelled and confused by the climate of her desire.

As young as I was, I was aware that there was something interesting about the boy I had a crush on. If we had the opportunity to talk to one another, I am sure a puppy love affair would have developed. But with both of us being very shy, it never happened.

Many years later, I am in the movie theater. I am pregnant with my second child. My then-husband, the Persian-Polish-French man, loud-voiced, blue-eyed, blond-haired, was suddenly of no interest to me. In fact, he repelled me. I am in the movie theater with my French Maman-in-law, watching House of Flying Daggers. It’s November. I’m eight months pregnant, transfixed by Takeshi Kaneshiro on the screen. Suddenly, I’m boiling hot. I feel stifled. My clothes are uncomfortable. I’m wiggling and soon desperate to remove every article of clothing possible while in a public theater. My fluffy pink pashmina was itchy. My eyes grazed the handsome glowing face of Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro). Breathtaking, strong, determined. His love scene in the fields with the dangerous beauty, Mei, naked. Observing his pale skin, his long, black hair, it created a chain reaction of chemicals brewing in my body like a love potion. My mouth tasted of metal, swallowing, shaking. My body shifted from cold to hot. My sex pulsing. My belly full of baby, rolling around. I gripped the theater seat. My hands- sweaty. Jin has fallen in love with Mei, the main love interest. The duel in the snow, the last scene, profoundly aroused me until I was left flushed and confused by it all. The clash of swords caused my body to respond. I am surprised that I am turned on by violence. But the look of intense and furious concentration on his face reminded me of sex.

My brain pieced it all together; his face, his body, the love scene, the duel in the snow. All of it was powerfully erotic. My maman-in-law in the seat next to mine, Parisian and aware of l’amour, sniggered to herself as I removed my pashmina and socks. Barely reaching my shoes, I fumbled in the dark theater. I could not stop the chain reaction of the sword metal clanging in my head, reverberating through my bones, sending off little fires like daggers into my blood. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s naked skin flashed again and again in my mind’s eye. During the fight scene, his battle cries were sexual, his voice guttural and animal. I could not stand it, the reaction my body. In that moment, I imagined him coming inside of me, wanting it wildly. I wanted to be naked underneath him, his body pressed upon me, feeling the weight of him, the smoothness of his skin, the scent of his body. I imagine the taste of his lips. Then, in the film, he strikes forward toward his opponent, thrusting his sword in rage during the duel, and I swoon like a lady of the Renaissance, completely undone by the primal response.

As Jin thrusts his sword, I think of him naked and sweaty, dripping his perspiration all over my body as he groans and plunges inside of me. His hair is damp with sweat from our lovemaking, and he is determined to make me orgasm over and over again. He won’t stop, he keeps thrusting, deeper, harder, with ferocity and sexual hunger. The theater seat felt hard and confining. My swelling pregnant body overwhelmed by sudden, unexplainable lust.

The sword fight in the snow shook up my belief that I only responded to non-violent, loving, and gentle behaviors— it was puzzling that I physically reacted with such an intense sexual response. Gentleness and sweetness are two qualities that I require in a partner. The Sakyong, Jamgön Mipham Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama, has the same effect upon me due to his beautiful calm and handsome face. For quite some time I absorbed everything the Sakyong wrote, keeping his books by my bedside. And why is this little “falling in love” so troublesome? When having a “crush” on a Tibetan lama provided so much necessary inner growth and peace? But for the earthly desires I felt, falling for Sakyong Mipham was a positive thing. His poetry, painting, and calligraphy inspired me, because it illumined his passion. The sexual desires were natural as well. And quite probable, the possibility. Tibetan Buddhist lamas are not celibate at all. In fact, his father, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a lover of many women.

My sexual fantasies were more complex than I realized, and my primal instinct was to want the rough, savage male fighting viciously with his sword. My neural pathways were creating infinite loops and knots in some ancient pattern. The sword, his face, masculine, animal, my breath, my heartbeat, blood. Again and again, my female response to this scene, a sword fight, calls question to my own self-knowledge.

Understanding my sexual response and inclination to prefer the Asian man is a long path that trails through my genetic wiring. Scientists are now finding through research that women’s sexual orientations have something they call fluidity. 

Fluidity is something that occurs when I am entranced by a handsome Asian man, and, yes, it is no surprise that it triggers the physical fluidity as well (like damp panties). But fluidity in this terminology is “situation-dependent flexibility in women’s sexual responsiveness.” The original concept of “fluidity” has to do with women (like me, again) that are “bi-sexual” as their sexuality shifts (like water or fluid) according to the social influence and stages of their life. So I suppose it sort-of fits this situation, but not really. What I am finding is, as I entered my last marriage (to a non-Asian and very Caucasian male), I completely lost interest in him and his kind and only wanted Asian men. Period.

Still, after so many years, the final sword fight scene in House of Flying Daggers affects me like hardcore pornography. Intense, passionate, and bloody, Takeshi Kaneshiro moves my soul into a realm I cannot explain.

As the years went by, my desire for the Asian man reached epic proportions. Obsessive desire, longing, and wandering Asian markets, shopping centers, and neighborhoods, wearing nothing underneath my flouncy skirt. I wanted to be ravished, devoured, desired by them. I wanted many Asian lovers, all of them hopelessly in love with me. Takeshi Kaneshiro would not be immune. In my fantasy, he stalks me, calling me at all hours, asking if I like pineapple. He runs deliriously through the rain, longing for my touch again. Okay, I am making that up and referring to the film Chungking Express where he does just that. And eats many cans of pineapple.

I am with a Japanese man. I have become so accustomed to him, I forget that he is Japanese. It is because I love him as the person that I connect with. It has become more than the idealized sexual fantasy. Attraction has its magic, but sexual preference is still the glue that binds. It has been more than five years with him, and sex is better than ever. Quirky I guess, but when he talks softly in my ear in Japanese when we make love, I get shivers all over. My sexual response speeds up remarkably, until I am highly aroused and have multiple orgasms. Some things are better off as mysterious. It’s the wonders of life that we cannot know.

There are other celebrity Asian men I find wildly good looking or exceptionally sexy. Chef Ming Tsai, for instance. I have recently admitted to masturbating while looking at the cover of his latest cookbook: Simply Ming: One-Pot Meals. He turns me on by just looking at him. And, he cooks. He loves wine, and he does yoga. He believes in balance and harmony, and combines it all in one pot. Yes, he was raised in Dayton, Ohio. But still, he was raised in the kitchen and learned the art of cooking from his parents before studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. I melt like butter in a hot pan when I see his handsome face. Watching clips of Ming in the kitchen is veritable foodie porn.

 Ah, Ming. A dream man I desire. Whatever my mind does, and however it does it, I forget science and gaze upon his picture, longing to be by his side, at a wine tasting somewhere verdant and pastoral. The fantasy rolls through some idyll countryside of France, where we are giddy with wine and love. I imagine sex with him would be gourmet. His hands fragrant with spices and herbs. His kisses, sensual and epicurean. I suppose there is a common thread: wielding a sword or a chef’s knife, the Asian man of my dreams is multi-faceted, passionate, the existential hero of my animus within.

I am lost in the mystery of my desire, in favor of the Asian man.

voluptuous night

ripe with our sweat and pleasure

summer has begun

his skin like honey

dewdrops, tears, nectar, semen

delicious pleasure

Legs trembling,

he asks

why desire is like

the summer heat.

The moon tonight

is the color of wine,

making me drunk

with his question.

this night, lovemaking

street lights blossom with desire

July fireworks

what else can we do

but ignite like stars

into the heavens?