“… when someone blushes, doesn’t that mean ‘yes’?” ~ Antoine Saint-Exupery from The Little Prince

After a nine-year hiatus I’m dating again.

Lord.

I have seven brothers. So, hanging with brothers from other mothers is easy.

Until I feel erotic attraction. Then all hell breaks loose.

I’m either blissful, buoyed by sense memory of life with boyz, or I’m freaking.

As in, I start speaking Ubbi Dubbi like Mushmouth on Fat Albert, or I duck and run Napoleon Dynamite style. 

And occasionally I feel the urge to spar, like that one time in college when I sparred with H.

We were at a party, beer in our bellies, and all evolved, especially after H showed me his Calvin and Hobbes tattoo, in the neighborhood of his pelvic crest….

But in general I suppress this desire for fear that sparring might be mistaken for savagery.

Grrrrr –

Recently I went out with D.

Mutually shy, we circled each other for hours; the way animals do in the seconds before they hump. 

After a while he spoke about his on-going study of talking to women. He went on forever.

And while I was engaged, the average human mind wanders into sexual fantasy after seven minutes of continuous listening. And mine is no exception.

I found myself holding his gaze; then watching his mouth.

Endorphins rose.

I imagined our bodies closer and moved in ever so slightly.

Then he stopped talking, and I choked.

Breathlessly I filled the air with a synopsis of the dang French Feminist theories.

Seriously.

I started in on phallogocentrism and how ‘…our minds are colonized by patriarchies; therefore our masculine, action driven society represses feminine principled space an-‘…

Wtf?

The moment shattered. 

My six syllable words came too soon, too swiftly. And, mildly emasculated, he started to text.

I wished I’d let his soliloquy land before I became ‘I-know-all-about-this-topic’ woman. After all we were not talking, we were circling one another; sensing, smelling. 

Sheesh.

I’m not certain where my big mouth took him; I just know that our ‘date’ lost its frisson in a heartbeat.

C’est la vie. I’ll get a do-over, maybe even with D; as the tide pulls so it returns.

Next time may Eros keep me in my body, out of my nerves, and in the animal dance.