Lewis sat at his workstation, glancing at his desktop, distracted by the reports and files relating to his ventures and desperately trying to get something down, to write again. The phrase “writers block is death” was all that rolled around his head and it was nearly a mantra as he sat there staring at the blank page. He glanced up and saw Trillium at the far end of his office.
Even at 34 she was still a beauty, the sunlight streaming through the wall of window where she sat highlighted her curves underneath the sheer nightie she wore.
He thought about calling her over, there was no doubt she could help him past this block, but increasingly he was resorting to that method and his writing was suffering because of it he was sure. Why it was that the mind cleared so well following orgasm he never understood but that was for another time. The page before him was blank. His thoughts were hazy. He looked at her again, at her looking out the window, like a cat. At her face, expressionless, neither pain nor longing nor happiness. With that came a thought and he began.
Not everyone can understand loneliness, some claim they do but they're usually the ones who have spent no more than a month alone. I could argue that you'd never understand loneliness no matter how many years you donated, no, dedicated to the study, because every minute of loneliness accumulates on the last and each moment gives its own level of understanding. For most people there is always too much.
People tell me you can be lonely in a crowd, I know that is true, but what they don't realize is that you can stay lonely even with friends. Even with people gathered around you who have a common purpose, even in circumstances that nearly everyone else would say they aren't lonely at all. Surrounded by friends, caring individuals, even here you can be lonely because true loneliness is a sickness of the soul.
To show everyone you meet a false side. To fill your day with things to do and places to go and people to meet, knowing that none of them will see the true level of hurt in your soul. Never to understand that the smile you wear, the jokes you tell, the hugs that you give are simply there to camouflage the loneliness, the pain, the void, this is true loneliness, beautiful loneliness.
To be truly alone is to understand that there is nothing that can fill that space. And in time, numb to the misery, you begin to appreciate that void, you start to feel uncomfortable, irritable, anxious when it isn't around. You yearn for rejection from the people that you sought out in those brief times of desperation when you felt a strong need to belong. You yearn for rejection as you attempt to latch on to them because once they do, you can stop trying, you've failed, you can now be alone again, and it's OK to be alone and in pain when you've been rejected, right? Once loneliness is your friend the panic attacks become smaller and they pass, like gas.
Part of the problem is that I don't really like people that much, I'm not really fond of animals either. Animals are just dumb people who won't leave you alone even when you say “get away from me” and children, don't even get me started on children.
Although I've never actually hurt any of them I like to stay in keeping with the theme of a comedian from the beginning of the movie age named WC Fields. When asked by a character in one of his films if he like children Fields responded “it depends on how they're cooked”.
I joke that children belong in the freezer between the peas and carrots. A comment that suitable offends people enough to end the discussion right there. Otherwise they chuckle off thinking I'm joking.
Again, although I've never done it there's little doubt in my mind that it would only take a particularly unctuous child and a bad afternoon to have me pulling that month's rack of lamb out to make room.
Now the really fun irony of all this is that despite my statements above I'm the best selling romance novelist of my day. I write stories that are instantly made into musicals or mini-series, movies or songs, artists regularly steal from me.
My mixed metaphors of marriage or swinging descriptions of sexual congress surround society like wallpaper. Sex therapists quote my books, I hear women at the back of the Korean Deli I frequent share tidbits of technique from my latest tome as if they were reciting the latest secret ingredient to a fabulous desert. I hear men in their locker-rooms after games boast of sexual conquests that are not only from my books but impossible to accomplish because they're fiction.
Not that all of my stuff is impossible, oh no, my fantasy life is more real than my real life, true to the point that if I imagine having sex with someone I will usually experience my arms giving out or a pain in my back and on many occasions soreness in my knees. Truthfully when I wrote the zero gravity chapter in my last tome “Space Pirate Horse” I couldn't get past having one male character, an athletic brute named Hehner, getting space sick from disorientation, a feeling I experienced as I wrote.
Well, perhaps my fantasy life isn't as good as I thought for it's just occurred to me that I could not imagine the zero gravity sex from a trained Astronauts perspective, someone inure to the effects of micro-G's, but instead I was living it from my own perspective.
I had to finish writing the chapter with both characters in a pool, underwater, wearing breathing apparatus and then I had to go back and edit out the gear so I could fit a few kissing details in...
Lewis stopped. What constipated rubbish! Half ideas and nuggets of insight sure but mixed in a dismal soup of distraction. He saved the file, sure that later a clear head could mine the rant for riches and then looked at Trillium again.
A clear head is what he needed and what ended with one usually had to start with another so he called to her and she rose.
Approaching him, doe-eyed, “does she really enjoy this?” he thought as he undid his pants and swung the chair around for her but the thoughts left quickly enough as she slid between his legs and her seasoned lips took purchase.
As the build to release, and its companion of clear thought, began, Lewis dropped his head back and thought about twins.
