I grieve for sex.
I suppose, that's not a huge surprise, although it surprised me, how keenly I felt it, and how quickly- in the days following Tony's funeral, it was, bizarrely, one of the things I mourned the hardest.
Not the sex, itself, I guess. (Good Lord. Mum, close the browser window now). Although I do miss that.
But, really, I guess, if it was just sex I wanted, I could get that just about anywhere. I don't find physical attraction a difficult desire to manifest.
It's the intimacy.
I remember- somewhat vaguely, but it's there- sex with people, while I was in that dating phase of my life, before I met Tony, before I found my perfect Purple life. Nervous and exciting and fumbling and awkward, and trying not to embarrass myself.
It's a very different thing to making love with someone you're intimate with, someone you know. Someone you're married to.
When you're deeply in love with someone, you can laugh over mistakes and noises and interruptions. You can try things, things you never thought you'd trust anyone enough to even disclose. You can build an internal erotic barometer of what the person likes and what they don't. You can judge by their sighs, the way they move, if you're doing the right thing.
It's nights in the dark, trying not to wake the child in the next room. It's whispering "Don't hurt the baby." It's confessing you've only ever seen that done on movies you shouldn't have been watching.
It's curling up, in the dark,under the covers, giggling and whispering and inhaling the scent of each others breath.
It's trust, in the essence of the word.
And, being the physical, intimate kinda person that I am... my heart, my soul, my skin... it aches for it.