I’ve written before about how sometimes I use sex or women to make me feel alive, to come back from a pervasive sense of deadness that unfortunately seems to be just a feature of my lot in life. Maybe it’s having lost my mother at age nineteen. Maybe it’s having been at least partially abandoned by her at age four or five. But I journey through the world with a pretty profound sense of cold, numb deadness much of the time.
One reliable antidote to this sensation—or really lack of sensation—is the thrilling back and forth that can happen between me and a woman: learning about her preferences, her mind, her body, the earning of her trust. All of that as a way of bringing my body to life, undoing the preexisting deadness. Reviving.
It’s been a while since I’ve been involved in a relationship with these features. And notably, I haven’t really been trying all that hard to remedy that situation. I’ve been investing in myself with more solitary, even solipsistic, forms of sex and sexuality. Maybe this is a little bit about my growing older, about my libido either waning slightly (or more than slightly) as I descend deeper into the depths of my 50s.
Or maybe it’s something else.
Maybe it has something to do with astrology.
I don’t know. All I know is that there’s a distinct shift and ebbing.