jocasta

WOMEN 70
I met her in the city to read a new play of mine, as an audition. She was very nearly bald, which impressed me greatly (loving a bald woman being a long-unfulfilled fantasy). She was wonderfully talented and uninhibited. We became friends, getting together every month or two to read a play, or just hang out. Often we'd spend the night together, cuddling. Being bohemians, we were comfortable sleeping together naked. She was deep into the martial arts, so was usually in good shape. I very much liked being her friend. She wrote poignant poetry, mostly about sex, love, and howling darknesses in her psyche. She knew of depression and chemical imbalance, and sometimes took powerful mood-stabilizing drugs. In public, she always wore heavy makeup; she'd been through enough therapy to realize that this was a hiding behavior, but she was still unable to break free of it. As time progressed, sexuality crept into our embraces. There was always a holding-back element; we may have kissed on occasion, but no other fluids were ever swapped. And we almost never spoke of it, either. It became my first experience with anything resembling “friends with benefits”. She was into pain - i gave her a number of orgasms through hard biting. Once she took my thumb into her mouth, and i suddenly knew that she was far more talented at fellatio than any woman i'd ever been with, except perhaps my first, Kathy. I became a little obsessed imagining sharing that with her...but i always had a faintly disquieted feeling after we'd been sexual. I just couldn't find my way to being 100% present in those moments. I'm not sure how much of that was just fear of the dark, damaged parts of her (and my aversion to makeup)...but i knew that i didn’t feel enough compatibility to sustain the kind of intense romance she seemed drawn to. We never really talked about it - only once, did i maybe see a glimmer of a part of her that felt disappointed or rejected by me. Our friendship hung in there for a year or two, until she moved out west. She had fallen into a love threesome, with a man and a woman. The occasional notes she sent me in the years that followed told of being happy. Her words were a bit forced and mantra-like...but does anyone actually do better?