That Sensational Touch

Tales of Gender Relations : I

 

 

 

 

I was in love once. It was as natural as the mountain streams, flowing effortlessly but with great hopes of expectation running along its banks. It was my first and it lasted exactly one week.

 

It occured to me in retrospect that a man ought to mind his sense of love for himself and that which is for another. It is quite discernible in his experience but a young mind is not yet prepared to look at all the nuances of love, nor its nature and cultural origins or even differentiate it from a sense of the fleeting pleasures we sometimes seek.

 

In falling in love for this person I had known for almost four years, it appeared to me that on that fateful night under the stars, she was coming to reveal her feelings as much as I was prepared to be open with my own. She told me a few days later that she had viewed our relationship as good friends and nothing more.

 

I found her behavior inexplicable, confusing and downright bizarre compared with all that we may have gone through in our on / off relations, culminating in the happiness that we had encountered that night after not having seen each other for almost a year. More so, I was totally taken back by my own display of emotions. It was like a drug injected into my mainstream, it opened up the vistas of the world and it answered all the questions I may have had about my expectations of the life. Friends? I guess, friend was cool .... eventually.

 

In the meantime I came to the utmost suspicion of my own emotional make-up .... that I had a tendency to take things for granted. That, in regard to my own hefty self-confidence, I considered it true simply because, I thought I was a careful tenderer of the passions.

 

I changed my mind about that and sent myelf up, into something resembling a Kansas twister, then came back to the ground again some years later. I've grown to like myself recently .... I think I'm okay. And .... I think I'm coming to understand women and men a little better these days. I might even be prepared for any more new surprises.