Rapture
To feel an expression or manifestation of ecstasy or passion. To be in the state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion. To have a mystical experience in which the spirit is exalted to a knowledge of divine things.
In those three definitions of rapture, so much emotion. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever been that high. Has anyone ever been involved in mystical experiences in which their spirit was exalted to a knowledge of divine things? Somewhere in my religious past, I’m sure I said as much. But has anyone ever really gone there without the aid of a psychedelic or hallucinogen? No, I would say.
Though who am I to say no? Perhaps someone has. After a long unanswered prayer is answered. A long-time crush becomes a husband or a wife. The big job, finally secured. I would not want to take away from the feeling that arose when those things came to fruition. As long as a believer does not forcibly tell others that the feeling was divine so they can restrict others into a constructed morality, it’s cool. In other words, as long as they don’t use religion.
As for the other two definitions of rapture, well, the first one, being carried away by overwhelming emotion, that happens to me all the time. If that’s all that rapture is, then I get myself stuck in its honey jar every day.
But just having ‘overwhelming emotion’ is an entirely too broad and simplistic version of what rapture is. Though, again, maybe it isn’t, maybe the feeling of overwhelming emotion is saved for those who live directly under the ‘feminine Moon,’ like me. Maybe most people don’t feel overwhelming emotion.
Most days, I do, whether in the form of dread or despair or worry or guilt or any number of other negative emotions. Every so often, a positive one will carry me away onto a kind of lovely puffy cloud where my mind is only capable of arriving at calm and reassuring outcomes wherein I wonder why anyone would ever want to die. In that state, I am thankful to have life.
As for the last definition, the first one when you look it up in Miriam-Webster, “the expression or manifestation of ecstasy or passion,” that one seems to sum up rapture most succinctly and purely, which is a good sign for Miriam-Webster.
Still, even using that definition, have I known rapture? Now as I think about it, have I? Maybe when I came home and found my first Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in the mailbox, that was a rapturous occasion. Being with Kacie on that couch in my parent’s basement, then, that was rapture. The first time, I felt rapture.
April – we’ll call her – was on the couch in the mid-afternoon and she had such a good bottom. She was much kinder than I deserved for such a fumbling first time. Being with her was exciting in a passionate way, that may have been rapture.
There was rapture with Beth in Seattle. The light came in through her bedroom window and the traffic from the Aurora Bridge was above us and Lake Union just outside. She had returned from a trip to Canada and taken a bath and we were like pretzels, trying to get more and more of each other. When I was near the end she took me in her mouth and that was the first time anyone had done that for me. That was rapture.
Or later, when I was someone whose body, it seemed, was rapture, every point of her was soft but not slack. I was with her only one night and it was rapture, the way she asked if I wanted to go to her room, the way her bottom felt over her silk dress, the way her tights reached up her thighs, the way her lips dissipated like cotton candy.
And it was rapture with the one from Montana who asked if I liked it like this or like that. Or when I was sideways but matching parts with a person who was more fit than anyone who went to school for art and smoked weed all day and made collages night had any right being. Or it was after that, in moments with other strangers, finding myself near a bottom I would have never believed myself being near when I could only hold them in the pages of my swimsuit issue.
I find myself now only writing only about the physical aspect of rapture. I look at those last paragraphs and find them, honestly, kind of ridiculous. I’m getting carried away again with an overwhelming emotion.
Though I am certain I do not feel rapture.