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- I went to White Sands that Sunday evening.
-
- After our argument I had spent the weekend in a fugue. An
- automaton, I spent hours at the computer..achieving little
- but an excellent score on Xhextris. By Sunday the pain set
- in and I had to mobilise or sink into a depression and
- emotional agony so vast that I could not contemplate its
- ending with any modicum of rationality.
-
- It was 6pm when I set out. The summer sun still harsh and
- bright on the road with the only consolation the traffic
- streaming towards me in the opposite lane. I had thought to
- go to Scarborough but the lure of deserted spaces directed
- me to the open beach.
-
- White Sands has little to recommend it. A grey beach,
- sodden to mud at low tide, ineffectual ripples of waves
- sucking desultorily at a shell-less beach. The
- ocean burps rhythmically there...it does not roar with the
- depth required by a broken heart. It does, though, have a vast
- empty expanse and rocks on which to sit and feel the sharp
- reassurance of being alive...and human.
-
- By 9pm the sun relaxed. It cast gold anodynes over the sands
- and I stood barefoot with the water feinting shyly at my toes.
- The horizon blankly returned my stare and a sharp well of
- pain rose in me. Alone, I allowed the desperate well to fill
- and I heard my own deep, vocal pain challenge the North Sea.
- It arced harshly over the suddenly frozen swell, a highlighted
- gold offence.
-
- "Shit!" The voice, alarmed, sounded behind me.
-
- I spun. A man, ten yards from me stood glaring in horrid
- fascination. His stance was a parody of a running
- man...a thwarted escape and frozen concern.
-
- Much later I rationalised my movement towards him. Misdirected
- anger, misplaced love, emotional yearning...a driving to fill
- suddenly empty places. To his tribute he stayed, braced and took the
- force of my arrival with a sharp expulsion of breath and firm
- surrounding arms. His heart was beating fast...the shock of
- the scream still alarming his blood. Then I sank into him, this
- stranger, with the live pulsing of an intensely loving animal.
-
- We fucked. I barely remember the shed of clothes...just the
- sudden thrill of naked body heat and the vibrant stroke; his
- sliding, shafting of me. Each leaving an ache and return
- a jubilee. This man filled me with the hundreds of lusts
- echoing in the sea...the brittle reality of grinding sand
- and the numb warmth of human knowing. I craved him and he
- completed me...urging my hunger in the cooling embergolds of
- the dying sun. I rose to him and he weighted me...I opened
- to him and he entered. I swole holistic and he prevailed.
- More than that he freed me...
-
- Long after the throb and revel was spent, my senses pulsed.
- That Sunday, I passed the mundane...the caught chill moment
- of the banal. I leaped into a strange dimension where all
- men and women meet in complicity...the Human. No man is a
- stranger...each an image of those who exist before and
- after, no body an `other' but the grouped and massive beat
- of the thousands of aching hearts and naked lusts.
-
- Each time I feel the new rejection...the sharp foil, I feel it
- shared by everyone, everywhere. I feel the abandoned child
- and the beaten women, the terrified and the starving, the
- strange eyes of the unfulfilled.
-
- Each time my blood seeks levels in the afterglow of this screaming
- bond it feels the deep swell of human tides...the grit and
- aliveness of a pulsing union.
-
- Each time I look for freedom's gate I find it in the electric blue
- blaze of a stranger's eyes and deep gold dusk of White Sands.
-
- --