Once safely out of the driveway, I unbuttoned my pants, grabbed the vibe from the passenger seat where I’d tossed it as I’d gotten into the car, and clicked it on. It felt good over my jeans. Driving masturbation is a delicate balance between your inner eyes settling on a fantasy, feeling the arousal, and keeping your everyday eyes on the road. I breathed with each little wave of pleasure. When not masturbating, I like to drive as fast as safely possible and change lanes often. But because my focus was elsewhere, I stayed in the far right lane – the taking-your-time lane – with the cruise control set at 60. As the cars passed, I wondered if the drivers could see or sense what I was doing. I can’t remember what I was fantasizing about. Maybe my latest encounter with this very hot, very cool person I’ve been seeing. They recently brought over some impact toys and we spent a day together, fucking and hitting each other. I breathed more and a little harder and the freeway careened by. Then, without warning, the vibe went still. 

“Uh!” 

I peeked down quickly and pushed the buttons hoping I’d accidentally turned it off. But no, it was dead. 

“Fuck.”

I’d thought about charging it before leaving but hadn’t.  

I was heading out for a night of dancing and had hoped to be seeing the evening through a fresh freeway orgasm. Using my hand would’ve been more wrist twisting than I wanted to engage in – navigating seatbelt and tight unzipped pants – so instead of trying to come in a flurry of frustration, I breathed the stirred energy up into my body. 

When I was a kid I used to think that the fizzy tingles of orgasm were God letting me know it was time to stop. I understood God to be the grand policeman of us all and I made deals with him about how often and when I would touch myself. It was my gay uncle educating me in my teens that shifted the bargaining and helped me realize I was doing something normal. He would frequently say at family dinners, “Masturbate to your heart’s content, honey. Everyone does it, and anyone who says they don’t is lying.” 

I’ve revised my kid thinking. I’ve dropped the God concept and its lack of agency. And I’ve replaced the inner policing with connection to All-That-Is and honing the belief that it is through pleasure and connection we are able to feel the separation from the Earth and each other is but a vulgar lie run amok. 

I thought this topic would bring forth scenes from my life to share that were so smoking hot that you, dear reader, would have to masturbate yourself into oblivion, “ah, ah, ahhhhhhhh!” to assuage your jealousy. The opposite also occurred to me as I typed. That I’d be unable to do anything but ramble on about the physiology of the natural response we call orgasm: the right stimulation for the right amount of time and everyone gets one… a natural body response like a sneeze… blah, blah, blah. And like that, I’d reveal myself as just another pleasure coach talking about crossing the gossamer bridge of orgasm.  

But it turns out, as I’ve been sitting with the topic over the summer, mostly what’s present is fury and other huge emotions. A magma chamber deep within and a precarious feeling that I’m walking the edge of a slighted volcano with the shaky sense that it was simply luck that I’ve been orgasmic since the age of 3 or 4. Luck that I never stopped touching myself as I cobbled together strategies to survive the toxic shame of our culture. 

In so many ways it feels like we’re in the same spot we’ve always been. Trudging through the nescience of patriarchy and putrefying colonialism to connect to our pleasure and the beauty outside of grind culture. And I wonder, am I not just repeating a version of what so many before me strived and fought for? I wish we weren’t continuously discovering ourselves on the front lines of domestication’s civilized backwardsness. Afterall, who am I to do any of this work but an aging queer who can barely keep up with each new progressive rainbow shift of my community? 

As I’ve been learning what it takes to tend my own hearthfire volcano of pleasure-becoming-consciousness-becoming-creation, I desire to see the fight replaced with the realization that to continuously fight is a trauma response. And if all we ever do is fight then we are the ones creating the trauma and passing it down. Some wiser version of myself, a helping spirit or ancestor maybe, invites me to have the courage to slow down and feel rather than fight.

Being embodied in physical form is slow, clunky, embarrassing sometimes. Even still, I think about what delights we might get up to if we climbed out of the flightflightfreezefawn responses our culture demands we wrap ourselves in for survival and do something else with the afternoon. I don’t mean ignoring what’s so or fantasizing to forget. These, I don’t have to remind us, are trauma responses too. I mean getting curious about our volcano and inner fire. What possibilities are created if we slip into the shimmery world where time is measured by the eons it takes to make a batch of magma, whose doorway opens when we touch what’s so? Be it on our knees grieving, or on top of them, shivering with pleasure. 

Hot embers take time. The desire fire, the nourishing fire, takes time, and a willingness to face what is. 

Rage. 

Despair. 

Loneliness. 

Lust.

Tenderness.

Orgasms aren’t one way. And the pinnacle of them is not, as I was taught from no one in particular, to hopefully come in 5 minutes, with the dream of one day, ejaculating like someone with a penis does. 

Some orgasms are pansies with aggressively vivid color combinations, and some are elegant double peonies. Some are a popcorn snack, a quick release – ah, that’s better. Some are the charm of a come on the highway. And there are so many ands. Yes ands. No ands. And ands. Sweaty and timeless ands. Breathless ands. Pleading ands that uncover weeping for belonging ands. There are dream-manifesting orgasms that take all the pleasurable stirring and create a beauty to behold. Some orgasms are cool and without beefy emotion and some are bright with the bliss of remembering, oh yeah, human. This human. Me human. Their version of human on top of my version. Orgasms that remind us this is special. That we might be made of stars, but without blood and tissue we don’t get to do stardust like this. 

Broken-hearted orgasm is different still. It pines and cries out. It begs. 

“No, not like this. Not without you.” 

The good sensations open an aching chasm and reminder of treasure lost. It longs for as your image interrupts my fantasies and the new life I’m trying to grow into. And I’m walking not  only with Fire and volcanos now, but also Death.

I want you to want me like you did before I asked for things of substance and bedrock. I want you dripping wet for me again, and calling out my name as you come. I miss being inside you, and your weight on top of me compressing my ribs. You in my bed was a highlight of my life. The ease and thrill of every time with you. I can’t seem to come these days if I don’t acknowledge both the loss and the wonder. I want to be reflected back to myself again the way you did it. Now, all these months and deteriorations later, I’m pretty sure you felt I was requesting that you to be less of you, even though that’s never what I said. Your casting me off as if our so many years together were nothing isn’t mine and aren’t me, but feels personal. And I didn’t do anything wrong even though it feels like I did. 

As I try to call forth the more surefooted me I was before you, deprivation sneaks in. I marvel at how I can simultaneously despise you, resisting – though barely and poorly – contempt because the Gottmans caution against it, and still be so in love with what got created when we were together. What was between us was indeed made of stars, distinct and twinkly. I didn’t make it up, I remind myself. 

As best I can, I allow the tears to flow as I come. And I work to separate out, amid so many things that went with Death when we broke up, what stays? What of me doesn’t die while so much did? I say an apology out loud for the times I, like you, have made others feel my feelings for me because I would not or could not bear them. For the times I too heaped upon others what I didn’t have skills or courage to process. 

I cling to the bittersweet knowledge that everything eventually changes. That a walk with Death isn’t the end of the line but a stop on the cosmic train. I cling to a fool’s hope that with each ash-covered crawl, the new person I’ll eventually be, will one day look back and not be only pining and easily deceived when you gaze at me. That I will recognize within me not just the too hot, too destructive, transforming forest fire, but the just right nourishing hearth fire, as well as the seductive and luscious desire fire. And that I will know that I broke hard enough and wailed deep enough to have sung Death’s song well. That I did indeed grieve what needed to die without myself dying. That all this Life lifing is complex and unwieldy and it’s not my job to resist it but to dance and fuck, to create and live. And that orgasm shepherded me through, because it is the generative dark and sparkly goo of the cosmos that does not die because it was never born. It very simply just always was and will be. 

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

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