Heartless

After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickens at slamming, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, an elusive gaping worry. You don't try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it's nothing after all, everything filling up finally and absolutely with death. After the briskness of loving, loving stops. And you roll over with death stretched out alongside you like a feather boa, or a snake, light as air, and you...you don't even ask for anything or try to say something to him because it's obviously your own damn fault. You haven't been able to - to what? To open your heart. You open your legs but can't, or don't dare anymore, to open your heart.

Susan Minot wrote this story, titled quite simply Lust, and in it she portrays the sexual promiscuity of one girl. Nearly every paragraph of the 50 plus paragraphs included in the story hints or alludes or might even graphically illustrate some form of sensuality. Some of the paragraphs, of course, don't, but for the most part they do. It is because of the overwhelming sickness involved in each paragraph that the protagonist feels nothing but death after her sexual encounters. Sex is a life producing encounter, not death. No, I do not even mean life producing in the sense of procreation (though, that too), but in the sense that it makes every sense pump in adrenaline acceleration. There should be no sadness or sense of death. There should be happiness and a sense of life.

Still that is not what I wanted to address with this paragraph. No, I wished to address the final two sentences of the paragraph. Some time ago I encountered a poem by Pablo Neruda titled Tus Pies (which is, Your Feet). In this poem I began to notice a certain pattern which detonated a poem in my own mind. I am not going to share the actual poem as I feel it is not fully (nor well) done yet. But I do want to share the "gist" of it with you. I've titled the poem Two of All and in it I deal with a woman who entertains men with everything she has, or rather, with everything she has two of. For example, with her two eyes she will gaze upon him, she will allow her two ears to be nibbled upon, her two cheeks will be kissed, and with her two lips she will kiss in return. The poem does not end there for the body does not end there either. With her two shoulders she will comfort his head and with her two arms she will embrace him. Both of her breasts will be fondled and her two nipples tasted. Her two hips will be held and her two lower "lips" will be penetrated. Her two legs will be caressed and her two feet touched.

That pretty much covers everything. At least, everything she has two of, but everything is covered because she reveals or shows it all. Everything is taken only because she surrenders it all. Yet there is one thing she does not show. There is one thing she will not surrender. She will not show it or surrender it because she only has one of it, and that is her heart. She'll give them her physicality, that is, her body. But she will not give them her heart, she will not love them. The reasons for this refusal vary and can be conjectured by the audience or reader. Pain is certainly a factor, but so is ignorance perhaps. So just like the girl in the story, so the girl in the poem, gives everything up. Everything except that which is most important, her heart.