Here in America, tomorrow is a big national holiday — Thanksgiving.

It used to be my favorite holiday — I am actually a really good cook and used to be a  really good baker, too, but haven’t done that in a long time.

But for several years in a row now, I’m choosing not to celebrate. It’s making me a little gloomy today. But, you know, you make choices for specific reasons, and in the long run, I know this life I’m living now is going to be better for me. And I know it isn’t always going to be like this — so isolated.

I think I have finally signed off on Letter #5, “Hymn to the Dark,” for Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse. I’m going to read it over again after I post this, and then see how I feel. Maybe I’ll tweak it some more; maybe move on to something else. Thug Luckless, maybe? Not sure. I might be a little too gloomy for Thug today.

However. Before I decide about all that, I thought I’d regale you with all my many dishes. You know, just give you an idea of a mere fraction of my dish-addiction insanity– of what is left of it. But also, you’ll get an idea of just how much I used to love to entertain.

I left a ton of dishes behind with Wayne when I left him. And then when I sold the old house here, I got rid of a lot more dishes because everything went into storage for over a year.  But what remains will still be of interest! I have chosen not to include a photo of Gus Van Sant Sr.’s wedding china — complete service for 8 of Lenox Imperial — that he gave to me, which is on the floor of my bedroom closet since I have no room for it anywhere else… It would only confirm for you that I am completely out of my mind when it comes to dishes.

Okay, gang. Break’s over. I’m gonna get back to work here!

This has been updated as of 11/27/19

The following contains sexually explicit material, so please be advised. Thanks!

*********************************************************

Hymn to the Dark

Shapes in the bed at night now. Soundless but entwined and enigmatically engaged. Thrusting, shifting, turning. Bordering on life. This is you, on top of me, in my dreams.

Sometimes it’s complicated – the positions my mind needs from your phantom form. Sometimes it’s brutal and yet my orgasm still erupts, the shock of it contracting me sharply around my solar plexus.

Most times, though, the need is almost unbearably simple: to learn the scent of you, your skin, your neck; or to hear the sound you make when desire can climb no higher in you and becomes climactic. The shift into ecstasy.

What does that sound like in you; how does it feel outside of you, but up close? The electric pulse of lust, flowing freely from you into me. With no emotional baggage. No barriers of doubt, disappointment, or change.

You’re a stranger to me, so you are weightless on my soul. But the measure of my love for you within my very being? It’s as profound as gravity – a presence to which I can attest; still, a force I cannot explain.

*     *     *

When I was five, I awoke with a start, alone in my bed.

It was summer, early in the morning. The sun was up but the house was silent. The feeling between my legs that had awakened me was urgent, persistent, undeniable. But I had no ready understanding of what it was, of where the feeling needed to go. The only thing I knew how to do down there was pee. So I tried that, to see if that would lead my insistent body to its desired destination. But all I did was wet my PJs and – very nearly – the bed. It felt nothing at all like the feeling I was somehow expecting.

I hurriedly slipped out of bed and changed into pajamas that were dry. And then hid the evidence of my incomprehension, crumpled into a pee-soaked ball, at the back of the dresser drawer.

*     *     *

Imagine, as I’m imagining now, that little girl of five, grasping the profoundness of you. Right at that moment. Perhaps that’s what the essence of her being was trying so hard to propel her toward – the rapture of it; the idea of you.

*     *     *

It took forever – two more years – for me to finally allow the orgasm to have its proper moment; to be known.

I was seven and convinced by then that the feeling of urgency my body was always climbing toward in my bed at night – my fingers between my legs now – was merely the signal to pee. I would not be fooled again. It would just make a mess.

Luckily, the gods that created Life and planets and daffodils and the moon and fox terriers and babbling brooks and lightning and little turtles and giant squids and oak trees and maple sap and snails and peppermint and a kitten’s purr and milk in nursing female mammals and worms and trout and iguanas and wild violets and strawberries and all manner of crustaceans and the arachnids, also made the aroused clitoris a thing extremely difficult to ignore.

One night, I was simply too weak-willed to resist its incessant pull any longer. If I wet the bed, then I wet the bed, but I simply could not stop the flow, the amazing feeling. I kept rubbing that little nub between my hairless legs until I passed breathlessly over –

“Into that thing your body does, you know? That thing that happens.”

But none of my little seven-year-old girlfriends had a clue what I was referring to: What thing?

*     *     *

Let me tell you about a young woman from Queens with long dark hair. She played an electric bass guitar back then. She wore a motorcycle jacket and black jeans. Combat boots. She wasn’t tatted up yet, that came later. She played punk rock. She smoked. She had a persistent heroin habit. That part’s gone now, but at the time it was an ever-present wedge between us.

I loved that woman. Real love. The kind I have transferred over to you. The kind of love that reaches forward through dark centuries of chaotic knowing and secret longing and makes its presence undeniably known.

Sometimes she was clean, and she’d come around to see me.

Those moments were what I thanked God for. They were the actual moments in which I knew I had a deeper reason to exist.

You cannot ever know many people like that, or in that way. That way that emits that type of cry from your own soul. The kind of love that you simply must pursue because all the things you agreed to forget about when you were born are hiding in plain sight within those eyes, that face; in the world that those eyes create in your dreams.

That first night that she was clean and I was sober at the same time and we found ourselves together, sitting on my bed – we kissed, with bodies that were not deadened to life but that could feel – all of the intensity that there is to feel. That night, that moment, she undressed. I probably did, too, but my own nakedness was not of enough interest to me to override for even a moment just how lovely her naked body was.

It was the moment I’d been born for
exulted in
to remember her suddenly, from some
deep black
sleep;
a memory of worlds
going horribly wrong –
in order to be together again
here now
in the quiet safety of my bed
in my meager apartment in
the East Village,
seeing her beauty anew in
a new life a
new way
a different and
now very sacred light.

By then, I had made many other girls come with my mouth, my tongue and, usually, two of my fingers up their slippery holes. I loved making girls come. I loved eating pussy. I was not particular at all. If a girl wanted to play, I played. If a girl didn’t want to play and I did, I tried. I knew how to take no as the second answer, not the first. I was persistent when I wanted a girl.

But with her – it was a gift. She gave her naked body over like a gift. And my mouth on her was tentative; could it be real? A woman I loved so dearly would open herself so wide for me?

And when her orgasm came, it seemed to come abruptly. She shuddered and it was undeniable.

Hers were the only orgasms other than my own that could leave me breathless and filled with awe. Her body coming, her face happy and my mouth on her down there.

*     *     *

Down there. That was the place my fingers learned to seek, alone in my bed at night. My mind told me stories. Terrible, brutal stories about bad, bad girls and their beautiful daddies who are always right there to reluctantly mete out the punishment.

That was the world that blossomed for me, even as early as age six. To this day, I have no idea where it came from, why it was there, waiting for me and why I was so delightfully pulled into it; so much so that I couldn’t wait to go there almost every night.

The man who had raised me was gentle, fair, pragmatic, sober, and in those early years, kind.

The man in my six-year-old erotic imagination was scary; I trembled because of him but I went to him willingly and I adored him.

You scare me, too, you know. You do. I know you know.

*     *     *

Do you know this – that I adore you? That the mere idea of you is all it takes to cause me to sink under and surrender? To those waves of thoughts that have grown up so much since I was six; that world within me that still tells stories, but simpler ones.

Regardless of what two people can do in my imagination, the simple story about you always tells me this: I do not know what life is; I do not know what we came here for. I do not know why bodies exult in love and in lust and in erotic trust and abandon. I don’t know what a body is. I have no answers for anything – well, not for the questions that really matter, I don’t.

Still, my mind goes willingly into those fornicating pictures – into the noise, the sweat, the fear and the taboos, into the sanctuary, the force and sometimes even the pain – to conjoin your form with my own.

The idea of you on top of me or next to me or under me or all around me; my mind and my body go willingly into the fray of you to become, for a moment, the flowing answer that it can never truly know. Until the orgasm comes. And the questions begin again.

The longing begins again.

*     *     *

One day I will die
We’re all going to
And from there, I will gaze
back over here
and relive the phantom nights
that have become filled with
you now –
with your body, your will, your erotic
appetites and carnal
desires
all the things that make you so
magnificent
to me
And that will be a good thing
Whether or not
you ever really came.

© 2019 Marilyn Jaye Lewis
Girl in the Night: Erotic Love Letters to the Muse

Man, sometimes my brain is just amazing. I never, ever used to forget things like people’s birthdays. But nowadays, it’s more unusual when I do remember one.

That said, though, this time I really outdid myself. On November 3rd — that was 17 days ago — I texted a friend and former business partner in NYC, asking her what her birthday was because I knew it was in November but couldn’t remember which day and I didn’t want to forget her birthday this year. She texted back “Nov. 20th.”  And 17 days later… absolutely clean slate in the brain. I didn’t remember her birthday until I woke up this morning.

You know, I just don’t understand how my brain works (or doesn’t) sometimes. I wonder just how self-involved I’m capable of getting. I guess we’re only going to find out now as time keeps barreling along.

I found this little tidbit of information interesting: I’ve had over 10,000 visitors to the blog this year. I don’t actually keep track of stuff like that anymore because I consider this just my private little blog, tucked away in a corner of the blogosphere now.  But I saw the numbers this morning when I was sorting through some of the widgets in the back-end of the blog. If someone were to have just randomly asked me how many people had come to my blog this year, I really would have said “maybe a few hundred.”

I guess you don’t want me to be your accountant or anything.

Well, I made good progress with “Hymn to the Dark” yesterday, until I got the news from Sandra about our other play finally getting a firm date for production (plus she posted a photo on Instagram of our director and one of the producers). Then I just couldn’t concentrate on anything at all after that.

I am really excited but it is also going to be a huge amount of work — not just that specific play (an original musical about Sandra’s life) which still needs massive revisions; but the year, in general, will be a huge amount of work because both plays are moving forward, in different phases, at the same time, again.

I’m happy about that, because each project can help drive the other. But it’s clear that I’m just going to have to really pace myself. I still want to finish Girl in the Night, as well as In the Shadow of Narcissa — which I’ve decided I want to present as chapbook-sized flash fiction. (And I don’t want to forget about Thug Luckless, either. Because he’s a cool character with plenty of post-apocalyptic porn potential!! Yay!!)

I woke up at 2 in the morning, with an old song of mine in my head — a song I wrote in 1981 that I used to really, really love and I tend to forget about it, since I never did any demo of it with the band. I have a demo of just me and the backup singer and my guitar, but nothing more. It used to go over really well live, so it was just always in the line-up and I never saw a need to demo it. But I just love that song.  (Titled “Saturn’s Got Moons Enough for Mars and Venus” — it’s an upbeat swing tempo, with a ton of words about astronomy and archaeology and dinosaurs, and it’s of course about a love gone bad, and it has a really catchy chorus. It really does.)

Eventually, when I’m finally able to afford to go into the studio in LA and record my album (with Peitor producing again — after only 35 years), I want to try to remember to include that song! I really do just love it. I drifted back to sleep, sort of singing it in my head, and I had a dream that the chorus was so long that when it was printed out on paper, it weighed 5 pounds.

This is of course not true, but what an interesting dream. I’m sure it means something very important.

I texted  my birth mom yesterday, to see if she wanted to come visit between Thanksgiving and Christmas — I usually don’t call her on the phone because she still makes me nervous, even after all these years. Something in the back of my brain still worries that she’ll pick up the phone and finally say, “What do you want? I gave you up for a reason now please just leave me alone.” (Sadly, I actually have an adoptive mother who’s more like that: “I adopted you for no reason whatsoever now please leave me alone.”) (Here’s an actual quote from my adoptive mom: “What part of leave me alone did you not understand?”) (I guess that whole part there about leaving you alone…)

Anyway. My birth mom texted back, “Yes, I’d love to.” It just made my day. So now I have an added reason to get into that huge storage closet and get out the many, many, MANY boxes of Christmas stuff! And it will officially be not only my first Christmas in the new house (because last year I was so despondent with loss and grief, and with trying to keep it all a secret, that I was off with various church people who were trying hard to keep me from killing myself. I’m very grateful that they were successful). But it will also be my very first Christmas with my birth mom.

Even though I’ve known her now since I was 25, we’ve never been together for Christmas. And when I was a little girl, I always missed her terribly at Christmas. I had to keep that a secret, too, of course. (When you have to keep secrets that are really sad, I think it just makes it that much harder to bear them and more isolating.)  So this is indeed a dream come true for me. My own house, my own tree, my own mom.

Okay. I’m gonna close and get to work here. I’d leave you with that song I wrote back in 1981, because I was singing it to the cats at breakfast this morning and they seemed to really like it, but I have no digital file of it whatsoever. And I don’t want to leave you with just the lyrics, because the chorus alone weighs 5 pounds!

So I’ll leave you with this. My mom at 5 years old, and me at 5 years old. I really just can’t tell you how much it means to me that she is in my life, and that she wants to be. Thanks for visiting, gang. Have a super Thursday, wherever you are in the world!! I love you guys. See ya.