Distilled
February 29, 2008 — Z(With thanks to Elizavetta, for this post, which made me pull together what I was thinking)
My best friend’s house, in the dark for some reason. We’re both standing in our coats in the living room, with the unmade bed between us, and we’re both yelling at the tops of our voices. He’s telling me I’m a fuck-up, he was an idiot to ever think I knew what I was doing, I wreck everything and everyone around me. I’m amazed. I always thought that someone else knew what I was doing and thought it was OK, because I certainly had no fucking clue.
I see him in the street, months and months later. He stops me and asks me how I am. I don’t say anything, and I don’t want to smile at him, but I do. “I miss you,” he says, “I’m sorry. I was a cunt, I know I was. But I really miss you”. He walks me back to college, because I need a bath before I go out. I leave him in my room while I have a bath, and he’s sitting in the chair reading one of my poetry books when I get back, and he’s made tea. I sit on the bed, and he comes and sits beside me and puts his cheek against mine. He pulls at the top of my towel. “Take it off”, he whispers. I do, because I’ve missed him tugging at my clothes and telling me to take them off, but I make him work for every step, until he says: “Open your legs”, and then I’m lost.
My sexuality then is a distillation of what it is now, and that’s probably the wrong word, suggesting as it does an end process, but it’s the one in my head. It’s as though what was there then has been added to (enriched, not diluted) over the years, but what it was then, that passive, reactive, greedy core, was it in maybe not its purest, but its rawest form.
A lifetime later, I tell a lover he should have been more specific when we were younger, and then I tell him it wouldn’t have made any difference, because I was scared of my sexuality. The scaredness came after the time when it was distilled, and with fear did come dilution; I deliberately watered it down until it was safe and acceptable and unthreatening. The last thing I needed then was a man who threatened to boil it down to its bare bones again: I’d learnt that that would only get me grief and strife. I didn’t realise that I was afraid of it then until the words were out, and then the sterility of the relationships that had followed giving in to what I wanted made sense.
Something changed. Not in me, although I had learnt some sense and compassion in the intervening years, but whatever the essence of what I wanted was, it remained the same - except that by now (this now) I was less willing to compromise, and the men who were/are my lovers wanted what they would have backed away from twenty years earlier. Twenty years ago the girl who knew what she wanted and took it was an anomaly. Twenty years later, the woman who knows the same is a much more desirable proposition.
March 1, 2008 at 6:48 am
When you speak of distillation in this post, I think of essential oils; concentrated, exponentially potent, and often dangerous to use in their undiluted form. So we dilute them in order to use them “safely.”
But like essential oils, something of our essential sexuality always stays true despite our most earnest and often horrible botched attempts at dilution over the years.
I too, had a past lover who was terrified of what I wanted almost 20 years ago, even though by his own conscious admission, he wanted it too. Unfortunately, at the time, his terror was greater than his desire (or his courage). In the end, his terror won, I compromised, and we parted.
And in the same way you describe in this post, I know that I still want what I wanted back then despite my attempts over time to dilute the wanting. I know that the original essence is still there for me, and for my past lover, too, I suspect. The only difference is that, if we were to meet today, I would not let myself be fooled into compromise by his terror. And hopefully, his courage would have by now grown stronger than his fear.
So, perhaps even the reactionary dilution we do to our sexuality is its in way a type of enrichment; a necessary step in the process which helps (forces?) us to form the wisdom that allows us to eventually use the true essence of our sexuality, not in it’s most raw or purest form, but in a perfect mixture which contains both knowing the terror of what we want and the courage to take it anyway.
March 1, 2008 at 6:56 am
One more thing. Well, two, actually…
I hope you do, as you hinted at in your comment on my post, write more on all of this business of distillation, dilution, maturing, the waxing and waning of libido… basically, the life-long process of sexual alchemy. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on any or all of this.
And, congrats on your new abode! So much better to own than to rent, no?
March 1, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Yes, I had an image in my head of a (slightly oily) glass bottle with a little opaque glass stopper - and a tiny brass pan over a flame.
I’ll grant that I may be going about getting what I want in a slightly more coherent manner nowadays, and also that times have changed. But with one (possibly two) exceptions, the men I have been involved with over the past few years would have regarded me as a dangerous, slightly-unhinged, and over-sexed proposition twenty years ago, and by the same token, I would have seen them as too striaghtlaced then. I think there has been a subtle, but overt, change in the way women’s sexuality is regarded, and I welcome it.
There’s little change that I won’t write more about this whole train of thought
and yes, it is lovely to have my own virtual four walls.
March 2, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I, too, feel that “distillation” is perhaps the wrong word. I think of concentration, and perhaps in both definitions.
The analogue to oils is fantastic, as is the idea of alchemy.
All too many times, with the passing of time, the strength, the passion, the essence of who we are fades away, evaporated and escaped. So, in contrast, it is a powerful image of the opposite.
.6
March 2, 2008 at 7:42 pm
I wonder if I have the incorrect theory in my head of the oil making process. To me it’s a timely process, the slow picking of flowers, the tedious soaking in vats of oil, and then the distillation process.
I was thinking that becoming where we are and what we want, sexually, is something that appears to take time. Rather, for me it has - some 20 years later, I’m just now realizing what I want and who I want and how I want it. The restraints that once bound me from saying and demanding those things are now long gone. I have no qualms in saying I want it this way, we shall do it MY way - there are no concerns about the other party thinking “what a whore” or “nice girls don’t say those things in bed or about sex”.
March 2, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Six, yes, you’re right, concentration is the meaning. But maybe it was distilled, and the bottle was opened, and then it was diluted, and now it’s been restored to its original form again, with minor changes to the formula.
Musns, you’re right about the process, but the word just wouldn’t get out of my head. Maybe I meant the various parts of what we are that go into making up the essence of our sexuality. I never really much considered what other people thought of me or said about me when I was young, but I find it ironic now that I’m involved with men who would have run a mile from me then (and so would I from them, probably).