There’s romance in youth, but real beauty is forged by living.

“Nothing is true except what is not said.”

Jean Anouilh, Antigone (1942)

Dreams, dreams, dreams. When good, they alleviate the fear of the unknown endeavour with experience in lew of living it. At worst, lift the unknown into a fear of endeavouring at all. We are tried and tested together in equal share, as fallible at sleep as we are in life. I never quite know what to make of that. When tried, they feel more Faustian than Freud; when tested, I always take the Freud.

And though I hesitate with an “always,” or single word, it always depends on reference: those imagined joint frames which differentiates themselves from real life, but without its collective circumstance.

And so, we become fluid: from collective to a frameless reference state.

Without it, there’s no shared reality; without one: no truth, or recipe for stable dreams … unless vanilla sex was the foreplay for the kind of fucking, impossible to describe without feeling required to write a trigger warning—for myself.

Like I said, Faustian. Some cunt is going straight to Hell, no collecting their $200 call-girl—or was it two hundred virgins?

Nb: quite why anyone gets excited about virgins, let alone two hundred? I’m sure the connoisseur of high-class sex, would choose the high-class call-girl over two thousand rookies.

Surely?

No Less of an Age

Which brings us back to dreams and Anna. Sometimes it’s difficult to determine which is which. The older I get the less convinced I am of the difference, if there even is one, or whether it matters at all. She has never been quantifiable.

Oh—she’d love to’ve been put in a box—and ask no questions—but defined?

Desired, yes. Categorised, no. Restrained, yes. Described?

And yet she’s not indescribable—evidently—but that’s where post-truth does feel real.

I describe her best with my eyes closed, inaudibly; she’s somehow too vivid for spoken words—she is fine lines, a changing illustration; a picture impossible to pin or pause—a still constant, a moving whole, and without the mistakes we err in when awake.

And when with words: no one will know her. There’ll be no one else who recognises her; she is illusory in form. Where deep-dive impressions, abstractions, and whisps of shape are made solid, only then do they become suitable in other graphs, in other diaries: perhaps the only place that lets her power cuts, and my memory and manuscripts scrape her for an unfiltered first draft of the dreams which do change things.

So, what of this power, these unsayable impressions which infect even waking days, and lifetimes in dreams?

Last night we were older than we are now. Anna smiles as she traces the grooves I wear across mine. She, is, beautiful. Time hasn’t dimmed her, and her eyes have never concealed it. Her face is framed by the platinum throw of runaway hair she flicks across her chin. Will she ever not intoxicate me? She wants to be read, by me, and wants me to listen. Read, she says. Will it be a fiction request; or non-fiction demand?

She begins and decides while she starts. I can never tell when she’s left the text and started improvising. A dropped book? A subtle arching of the back: not with the animal curvature of her youth, something more refined, deliberate and precise. It is a second hand on my head; a change in tone and temperament, position of my mouth? It is imperceptible. She has never needed affectation or pretence: were it non-fiction, I’d be immobile, her posture upright, seamlessly interjecting imaginary copy with what she wants, what she intends to do with me. Always “with.”

When she wants something—she demands I make her convince me. Like I said: indescribable: an inversion in our shared intellectual and sexual world made whole by words, with words. We relish each other’s substitutions while we assimilate each other’s distortions and mimic each other’s desires.

It will’ve been forty-five years this night, and still we have more novelties than surprises to share: we outgrew needing need a long time ago. We communicate with looks, and let our aged bodies tell their story: the fuck; and the loving. It is mutual, and voyeuristic—I’ve always loved watching her hands: they’ll always be works of art in miniature.

“Will you read to me,” she says. It’s not really a question and I ask her what she wants.

“You choose,” she says. “Will you help me get changed?” She means undressed.

“Let me find a book.” But there is no book. She says to make it a good one.

She knows there is no book.

I begin to tell her the story of two lovers, before they were lovers as they learn to be lovers. I unbutton and ease her from her dress. Haste is for our younger selves. There is no rush: she helps herself to my words and offers a view of her skilful hands: still dextrous, still masterful, and we share each other’s pleasure. I indulge in sight, her in sounds. Even now, we fuck as completely as we ever have.

We still fuck in haste—but slowly.

Then sleep.

—JustD

*The image is Shelby McQuilkin’s, Story Tellers Painting