May 19, 2020:
In my little single bed with the sweet blonde neighbor I loved. She has her shirt and bra off and we're passing a wine bottle back and forth which she stole from her mother.
Truth or Dare with the pretty brunette neighbor girl I liked, on her couch with her mother away at work. The dares are all showing and touching, until eventually the dares are no longer necessary.
On the pull-out couch in her parents' guest room with the beautiful, brilliant older girl who was my mentor. Panting she says, "I've been well and truly fucked."
These memories are intense in part because they're so few. My experience of intense sexuality ended in my early thirties, with breakdown, addiction, and untreated major depression.
It wasn't so much diminished libido post-catastrophe, although there's that. It was in large measure because I irrationally blamed the catastrophe itself on intense sexuality. I felt betrayed by sex, that if I'd refrained from sleeping with the woman I quite incorrectly understood to have been my lifelong best friend she'd have remained my lifelong best friend, without whom I felt utterly and irreparably bereft.
The falsity in that belief was that she'd ever been a friend at all. In reality she didn't believe it was possible for men and women to be friends. She was fully and uncompromisingly committed to the pre-Feminist Battle of the Sexes, where women and men are so different and so incompatible and so at war with one another that you'd might as well consider them different species. She told me all that, repeatedly. But I failed to take it seriously, largely because my experience with her had been so different, but also because it was too irrational to take seriously.
Now after so much distance I no longer remember her sexually. I have no vivid memories of her, as I have of the women who were my lovers before her, although we were together off and on for most of a decade. I remember her exerting control by running away, so that I was constantly on edge fearing I'd use the wrong word or wrinkle my nose the wrong way, leading her to angrily and manipulatively absent herself, ruining one of the precious days together which were so hard to arrange. And I remember her lying, and acting with disloyalty, and laughing her lovely childlike laugh of mischief and charm which I once loved and now find dramatically false. Perhaps I'm unable to remember her sexually because I later came to dislike her with such intensity.