Sleeping With Strangers: An Attempt at a Personal Ad

That is what I search for each time. If it isn’t there, I’m done: I’ll give up on you. Because then it’s not, as I said, right. But I am wrong to think this way, I know this, or, I should know this. I am looking for something more than just physical but I don’t know how, or where to look to find the other type of connection. I am looking for love and I don’t know how to find it. How does one forge love without “making love”? In the realm of sex, in the bedroom, everything goes without saying. Words deceive. I am taken in. I don’t know when this happened. When did I become adherent to the gospel of body language, to the science of tactile reception? Isn’t it all, from a biological stand point, cause and reaction? Isn’t it all a mechanism? A formula?

But the feelings…

The connection in the realm of my bedroom, it is… unarticulable. And isn’t love the same way? The stronger the love between two people the harder it is to express, wouldn’t you say? If there is logic, if there is reason, there is room for articulation. If the power of love comes from the fact that it exists solely between two distinct people, how can words manage to convey it? It is unarticulable. It is not within reason. A reasonable love… it sounds paradoxical. How have I come to the conclusion that what cannot be expressed is more real? But a connection that defies the constraint of verbal expression transcends the limits of our reason, and instead, comes from something much more primitive, more instinctive, and therefore more pure. The unarticulable connection in the bedroom has no place for “wrong” or “right”. Such words lose all meaning in its vacuum… all that is left is feelings… under the authority of feelings we are free of the dictatorship of “ought”; there is no room for agendas in the realm of the bedroom with the unarticuable connection. The mind is at rest. For once, the mind is serene and still because it has relinquished direction. But where else can I look than to the realm of the bedroom?

Where else can I find a connection?

I have found the type of physical connection of which I speak maybe once or twice, so I know that there is something lacking. For love to exist, there needs to be more, because I have yet to have fallen in love. But it is for me a prerequisite. And yet, because I have never slept with anyone I love, how can I know anything for sure? I don’t. I know I don’t. But I would like to understand… why in my romantic relations with men, I have never searched, never opened my eyes to that possibility of an articulable love… the certainty that its definition, or rather, that its assertion can bring. No, for some reason that it reserved, in my mind’s eye, for my friendships, for my family, for the determined stable who have never had to find me… Am I lost then? Is this my attempt at being found? Or am I simply afraid to be deserted, since lovers have the most transient types of relationships… how often do ex-lovers become friends?

I would like to know.

What is it about me? My actions and my ideals, they must come from somewhere, or more likely, from a plurality of things in my past experiences. Like my intimate acquaintance with an overwhelming irrationality in my everyday temperament… A private acquaintance. One that has often kept me in the shadow of the lamppost in the living room of my home, the rest of my family fully shaped under its light. They could never see. Perhaps I am too familiar with feelings that don’t make sense. A lack of sense that therefore appears to me, as a proof. But look. I have only surfaced what I mean. I wish I could tell you what I mean when I talk about this irrational temperament…