**FOREWORD**
I took the day for myself today. I've been working hard all year. Brutally so. Head down. Fuel spent. Energy low. I needed to unplug and give myself some space.
I walked a short way north to where a disused elevated railway line has been romantically renovated, reimagined and landscaped, for neighborhood people to stroll, a pedestrian promenade, sans the sea.
On my way I passed Journelle, an upmarket foo-foo boutique lux-lingerie store. A place where once upon a time I would happen, on occasion, to stop in and pick out something exquisite, something I knew would turn me on and spoil you rotten.
In the window they had a sheer bodysuit made from the most marvelous ink-black mesh. More chic than fetish, immediately provocative yet oh-so subtle, intimately sensual, and undeniably sexy.
It was impossible not to smile. To think of you and how you'd smoke and smolder stretching yourself underneath me, slinky-as-fuck, in such a tight-fitting fabric.
Just writing to you now gets me hard. And I wonder, is it really so very wrong of me to say so? Maybe, yes. Or no? After all, you're a married woman and focusing on facing forward. You likely don't really need (or much want) some bastard from the past wrecking your weekend with reminiscent writing about how good we felt whenever we found a way to hold space for each other.
Truth is, like you, I'm trying to move on too. Trying to get my life together. I've made some progress, coming up on 1,300 days sober and actively working the twelve steps of ACOA with a sponsor.
Still, I never saw this coming. Me in recovery. And dear lord, addiction is rough. Healing is slow. I'm doing the work mind, sitting with the grief and the shame, creating a fearless and moral inventory, and methodically cleaning out the past.
But damn it, I know my writing to you in this way would qualify as a relapse. To squander time writing indulgent fiction and living in a fantasy at the expense of working on my recovery.
My hope is I'll forgive myself. It's my birthday after all, and selfishly this is my present. A simple and solemn, though somewhat selfish sojourn. An escape from the slow grinding burden of the mundane truth that has become the train wreck of my home life, in exchange for a sweet vibrant moment of excitement and hedonistic pleasure.
Ah, to revisit the rush of unbridled, unrivalled emotions that come with giving in to the needs of my flesh and bone and letting my mind run riot with the heroin-high feel of you and me fucking.
And forgive me, for in all truth, the moments I treasure most are in the setting of the scene, where serpentine coils of amber scented smoke rise from the red ember glow of an Indian spiced incense stick. And where we would lay together and slowly kiss, with no rush in the movement of our mouths, just the aching realization that nothing else feels as good as this...
SHE WALKS ALONE
Her mind wandering and never standing still. The sodden footpath and the fallow fields feel only vaguely familiar. She'll swear she's never walked this way before, and yet there's something reassuring in these surroundings, a certain déjà vu.
The muted colors might offer a clue. How the light lays against the canvas of the land. An undulating emerald green, rolling beneath the turquoise aquamarine hue of a subtle Sussex sky. The unblemished brushstrokes of our fabled England, a wash, both delicate and distinct, and unlike any other.
The decaying scent of a summer spent, seasons changing, the soft soil and rough stubble of a well worked arable land, spent with the harvest, giving way to the petrichor of autumn. Beyond the equinox, the solstice approaching. Our hemisphere tilting between the longest and the shortest of days.
She thinks about her own seasons. The turning of another page. Three score approaching, to mark the end of her third chapter. And where did all the sand go? Slipping through the glass bowl. Time slowing down as we shift our appreciation, with measured apprehension, knowing there's less now. Cursing all our hurrying to grow up.
She pauses for a moment, listening to the peace that comes from stepping away. Remembering it's always here, the quiet, hidden among the open fields and the huddle of the trees. It's us that make the noise. With our machinery and incessant chatter.
She feels the stillness and knows she's alone. There's comfort in this space and she feels the fiber of her soul finding ground, connecting her with the land on which we all live and depend.
We take it all for granted she muses philosophically. The news nowadays, a bleak cacophony of crisis. Forest fires, heavy rains, and hurricanes. We've broken her. Well, the men have. The one's who crave power and make our lives a misery. We might dare to speak truth to them, but they do not stop. And so it goes.
She despairs, looking away, looking for distraction, her eyes searching the wooded tree line for the possibility of a path. She settles on a narrow break in the boundary and walks briskly on toward the opening.
She searches her thoughts looking for something tender to soothe her hurts, and she finds a fond memory, like a familiar photograph, one she keeps tucked away and refuses to throw out. She wonders if he holds on to a picture of her. Does he ever think of her, she's not so sure?
She blushes for a moment, remembering the youthful craving she'd see in the burnt umber of his hazel eyes. The feel of his hands when they grip, deliberate and certain. His palms, smoothing over her skin, pressing, and pushing against the underneath of her thighs, prizing her.
Her eyes brighten with the thought of his mouth sinking over her sex and sucking, his lunging tongue, rude with passion and lust, impatient for the source of her succulence, his fingertips digging bluntly, rubbing up against the edges of her cunt and determined to claim her.
Such a naughty thought, recalling now how she might arch her agile spine, her hips rising, hoisted by his hands, raising her sex, her soft shaven cunt aching and blushing, her insides melting, his lips swelling with greed and need as they lustily suck from the bowl of her body.
