Pleasure Of Remaining Hungry

Author: devourer

At twenty-four, I have still never had sex. People like to make whatever small diagnosis they can of that but none of them would be quite right. I am not saving myself for marriage and I love women too much for indifference. When I was younger, virginity felt like a door I was humiliatingly late to open. Now I sometimes wonder whether the waiting itself has become the more interesting place.

This desire has had years to ferment in me. It has become a hunger whose pleasure now lies mostly in remaining hungry. I have grown more interested in tasting than in exhausting desire. There is something intoxicating to me in getting close enough for wanting to become almost unbearable, then staying there until the wanting itself becomes the point.

I notice women too closely: the warmth of skin, the faint animal sweetness of perfume mixing with sweat, the architecture of a waist, the softness where a thigh meets a dress, an uneven smile, a scar, the small change in someone’s breathing when distance disappears. Even imperfection seems deliberate after enough longing, as though the body becomes more beautiful precisely where whoever made it lost concentration.

And perhaps this is the strange luxury of never quite having what you want: nothing has yet been made ordinary by possession. The smallest things retain an unreasonable intensity. A trace of her scent. A glimpse of skin. The warmth left behind after standing too close. A shoulder can remain an event. A mouth can become a distraction for hours. A smell can ruin an afternoon. A woman crossing her legs can still feel, absurdly, like theology.

I used to think all of this belonged to the waiting, some embarrassing preface before the real thing began. Now I am less certain. Perhaps some desires survive only because they are never forced to become ordinary.

What troubles me now is that I no longer want to be cured of the wanting. I only want to love and taste just enough of closeness for imagination to become dangerous, and then somehow preserve the distance that made it dangerous in the first place. Perhaps I want intimacy to take everything from the other person and leave my own hunger intact.

Maybe that is what I have been protecting without knowing it. Not virginity. Not innocence. Just the enormousness of things before they become familiar.

For now, I am still standing at the door, taking only enough from closeness to make the hunger worse, unsure how long I can keep the wanting from asking more of me.