Lover Come Home

Letter 20

Day 21

Saturday, at the lake

Dearest

Have gone to Lily's empty cottage. Drove up early this morning.

Am sitting on the porch, looking at the people swimming in the lake. They come in so many shapes and sizes. The variety in human bodies fascinates me. Lions and wrens and beavers and ants all look the same. Only our best friends (Lucky sends his Woof) and us seem to come in so many different forms. Or perhaps this is a failure of my perception, and lions and wrens are infinitely varied, but only to each other.

The swimmers on the lake are certainly different. And all are beautiful. Big noses, warts, fat stomachs, everything. Life, in all its forms, seems good to me, and beautiful. I know, you think I am Miss Pollyanna in a Big Bad World. But I have eyes that can see.

This morning when I was taking a short cut through the woods, I found a couple making love. They didn't see me, so shamelessly I stopped to watch. It was not erotic or exciting in any way. Mostly it looked sort of silly. Hard to imagine why they were so involved in that funny tangle of arms and legs. Their clothes were getting all twiggy, and they both looked a little the worse for wear. I watched like one would an anthropological movie of some exotic people doing something tribal and remote. And finally I tiptoed away, to leave the pair to their odd, unappealing endeavor.

Shaherazade has promised sexy letters and here she is instead writing about other people's bodies, not ours. I have become a voyeur in your absence. Glancing at the world, living vicariously. I see it as a visitor might from a different planet. When I am with you the world swirls by, the light shines on us, though it also illuminates the stuff around us. We live in a realm of light. The world is us in it. We give it our presence, and it speaks to us. Without you, I am in the shadows. The world goes on, but not for me, for itself. I wonder which is the truer view, with you in the light, or by myself as a solitary observer at dusk and dawn.

I am not saying this right. But I am not the same way as I am when you are with me. Life is different at its core. But the bodies are always beautiful. Even when they are twiggy in the woods, doing something strange that involves thumping and moving up and down and wiggling.

I am menstruating. My mind is sort of on thud. My body is heavier than normal and feels like a divan. I am sitting on the porch, a divan on a chair with a thud inside. Hum.

Most women don't like the monthly business, judging from all the awful names for it. We called it the curse when I was a teenager. But I always liked it. I didn't mind that I'd wake up in bloody sheets (my Mom did the laundry), or that I had to wear a thick heavy pad between my legs for a week (tampax were for married women only), or even that I would occasionally leave an embarrassing spot on a chair.

Bleeding never makes me feel like I am dying, or injured, though I have heard women say that it did them. And I am never sick or discomforted or out of sorts. The truth is I never feel more female. It feels like what it really is, cleansing, purifying, starting the cycle again. Mother Earth, once a month.

The real Mother Earth must be making love all the time. She must, she's so fertile. I'm always amazed at the maple tree out front. In spring it rains down thousands of seeds. One medium size tree. Mom is trying to make sure, shorten the odds. I wonder if she has orgasms. Maybe that's what hurricanes and volcanoes really are.

I don't often come when I am bleeding, but making love then satisfies some elemental part of me that has no name. It is on some primal level of female. It is what the Earth does. Continuously, forever, always. Or life will end. Simple as that. And you as male, seem to understand that. You do your part.

Have you noticed that when I am bleeding we make love in a very different way? We never laugh or tease, as we often do. We are always serious, deliberate. We take our time. Each plunge is deep but slow. You hold yourself up, away from me, so that we can look into each others eyes. We do not kiss or caress. The music is from a drum, not an orchestra or a jazz band.

And afterwards we look like we've committed an ax murder. Who has been killed is uncertain. We are both marked by my blood. I think of it as initiation marks. We have been through a rite. Lovemaking as sacred activity. The blood has joined us, like little boys and Mafia men slice their fingers. It makes a bond, with your semen, that mixes to make us one. Is that why "making it" is a euphemism for sex?

What a strange letter this. Full of swimmers' bodies, lovers' tangles, a world without you and bleeding as a bond. If it doesn't make any sense, please understand.

C