Passionate Inspiration

She told me that morning, as we drank our coffee, that she believed I was in love with the remembrance of our passionate nights more than the passionate encounter themselves. I took offense to the comment then but in retrospect I believe there was a bit of truth in this statement. Virginia Woolf once said: about past emotions that ‎"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."

We are insanely sexual people. We still have wild nights and days that leave us breathless and grateful that we are so attracted to each other. We still create scenarios and anticipation and that is, I believe what keeps us so wildly fervent for each other. I do also realize that chemistry is important when it comes to sexual attraction and that chemistry has not faded, in fact it has grown, after almost 16 years.

It is the afterglow that I thrive in. It is the rumpled sheets and the clothes strewn all over the room that cause me to remember and expand upon in my minds eye. I look at these things and it brings back pictures in my mind of the night before. I love to lie in her arms and let my mind drift back to the night before, candles lit and music playing, the cat and mouse games that we play and it is only then that I have the complete emotions about the event. I am swept away the next day when we are cleaning up and living our lives, taken back to the night before when the world stopped and all that mattered was that moment and the breathtaking touches and strokes carried me to new heights of excitement.

The feelings about those moments grow and become more real in the days following, even more real than when I am experiencing them. It is true of most events in life I think. It is true that when I am experiencing something, whether it be sex or the death of someone close to me that the re-living and re-telling of the event makes it even more real and I do think sometimes that is why I retreat into myself and can’t even speak of it. I want to keep it to myself and not let those emotions become “too real”. I don’t want to take away the magic by sharing it or I don’t want to believe it really happened.

And so today, I have mundane tasks to finish and lemons to pick off of the lemon tree. The scent of lemon will overtake the scent of sex that lingers on my hands and that will be a little sad for a moment. I am the kind of person that likes to leave that scent on me so I can re-live the night before. I don’t want those memories to be left behind, even though, as Virginia Woolf so beautifully stated: “we only have complete emotions about the past”, even if the past was only 12 hours ago.