Content note: cancer; bereavement; fisting
2011.
The email was sent just a few minutes after midnight.
I slept on, oblivious. Back then, email was still something I only accessed through my computer. Ignorance was bliss, yet a part of me desperately wanted to believe that I would feel something when the time came – how could I not?
I did feel instant trepidation when I opened up my inbox. This was never going to be good news. I held my breath as my finger left-clicked.
“It’ll be okay” had been my personal mantra since the day her cancer was diagnosed. After two failed bone marrow transplants and months in hospital, I couldn’t say those words out loud any more. She was not going to be okay. And neither was I. But I needed to retain some glimmer of hope: our bond would survive this experience, even if her body – and my heart – would not.
Over a decade later, when my cats died, I was wracked by uncontrollable sobs. But it took months for my tears to land after the death of my lover and soul friend – my anam cara.
Our relationship had been both tumultuous and fated. I was a moon drawn into her orbit, circling her until I picked up enough courage and momentum to declare my undying love. She didn’t understand (nor want) the fullness of my desire for her back then. She thought she knew best about everything; in her eyes, I was a puppy, and she wanted a lion.
I roared, but I was never loud enough for her. Until, that is, I wrote my heart onto the page.
Words became spells, and I cast them with the full intention of reeling her in.
Sharing my words in handwritten letters – disclosing my desires and dreams – was the key that opened the door to a corner of her heart. Her heart housed many during her lifetime, but she told me that corner was mine alone.
We wrote our fantasies for each other and enacted them passionately. Not all of them – but enough to satisfy the mutual itch of curiosity and yearning, and enough to know that we had something remarkable.
“Breathe,” she reminded me, and her fist formed a ball inside me. She fucked me slowly and deeply. I could smell the iron tang mingled with the sweat from us both, and the scent of her arousal. It was a heady concoction that lifted me to an almost ethereal place. We were joined in such a deep way, and I wished that her hand would never leave me. It felt like she was reaching in to touch my heart, leaving the indelible imprint of her fingertips there, claiming me in a way that no one had ever done before and maybe never would again.
Desire Lines, Anna Sansom
Years passed. I grew from puppy to cub to lion, finally becoming the person she believed (and wanted) me to be. Eventually, however, our gravitational pull shifted, her tides stopped being drawn by my moon, and we drifted apart.
Our lives diverged, but a golden thread – that which exists beyond the superficiality of bodies and lust – still bound us together.
Now, fourteen years after her shift into another dimension, we are still bound. I’ve kept writing – just like she’d wanted me to – and have surpassed every goal she ever set for me. I wonder if I’ve finally done enough.
When I first declared my undying love, I was right. And every anniversary of her passing stirs something in me that needs to celebrate the extraordinary person she was (and will always be), and give thanks that I got to journey with her for a while.
So here’s to you, my anam cara.
I love you absolutely.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.