Sex on Fire

I love the Kings of Leon song, "Sex on Fire". It's loud and beautiful and has pounding, driving lines that musically represent how my body and mind function when I am passionately in love. The lead guitar, drums, vocals all pulsate passion. Passion. How I miss passion. When I give my mind, spirit, and body to someone, it engulfs me. It is the most intense feeling I have ever had. All-consuming. Yep, that sex is on fire. I can't imagine any drug could ever possibly feel as good as that.

Today I was reminded of how it felt when I first fell in love with Bill. It seemed to be a meshing of my being with his. There was a kind of electricity that made every moment together feel like life was perfect, that being in each other's presence was the only thing that mattered, the only thing I needed to sustain me. It must be from this feeling that my mother used to say, "You can't live on love alone." Moments like those that make me think she was wrong. Every second without him lasted too long. It just felt wrong. Everything he said, everything he did, every time he touched me felt ......perfect. Those are the times when the best use of a day is to stay in bed and make love over and over and over again, to bring in food on trays and eat in the sheets. Time can go by, friends can be forgotten, lame excuses can be made for not being places, the time and passion were all I needed. Those were the days. I couldn't imagine my life without him. We could sit and talk for hours. That aspect lasted throughout our marriage. He had an ability to peer inside my soul, to comprehend and empathize with all I said or felt. He could make me relax, he could make me laugh, he could take me to emotional regions I had never before known. We had so many commonalities in our upbringings. In time we realized that our families were even from the same area. We both had an alcoholic parent, had been from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, and had grown up in similar communities. And it was based on all that----and on the idea that Bill was going got be an attorney and provide well for us----I thought marrying him was my destiny.

Apart from those similarities, our differences also looked like they balanced our relationship in such a way that his strengths were in areas where I was weak, and I was strong in areas where he was not. He brought an excitement to my life that I cannot deny were exhilarating, seductive, and a refreshing change from not only my previous marriage but my entire background. He surfed, he camped, he fished, he flew airplanes, he had a motorcycle, sophisticated cameras, skied, he had run a successful business and had bought and sold properties, off of whose sales he was now living and putting himself through law school. He exhibited an enthusiasm and an undaunted attitude toward new things. When he wanted to learn something new, he bought a book about it and taught himself how to do it. And here was another important but odd thing: he would buy things and not hesitate to return them. Why was this important? It represented his way of taking the reins and being in charge of his life. Nobody I had lived with, I mean Nobody, had ever had this attitude. When people bought something and they didn't like it, they sucked it up and kept the item. They felt that returning something required a note from the principal. It was a daunting endeavor to return something to a store for any reason at all, even if the thing didn't work right.

I was smitten.

How could that have been wrong, so very very wrong?