The point is to get far inside her without causing discomfort. As she opens up, you get farther inside. When things go well you wind up feeling like something has fallen open and also like you’ve been buried someplace warm and active. She’s fallen open, your penis has been buried inside her. I’m not clear on the geography, but like, you’re up her hips and there’s no space between her pelvis and yours. Your knees have gone someplace else and the two of you are busy intersecting, which is unfamiliar and highly intense work that involves a different relation to one’s hips and spine (and pelvis) than one is accustomed to. It also involves close attention to the person looming below and around you, this foreign entity that has hoved so close, this set of nostrils and ribs and ear lobes and pussy that makes up your current universe.
You search for movements that show she likes it; whatever she likes you do more of until you see something else that she likes. Chiefly you pay attention to her vagina. How does it feel? Is it opening? Wet is good, but opening is how you really know a person. Catch how the muscles shift in her pelvis and you can move with her, and the chances go up that she’ll open more. You do this sensing with your pelvis, which normally you sit on, and you do even more of it with your penis, which normally drains wastewater. You’re searching around in someone’s guts with a robot contraption where none of the knobs hook up with the right gears, and the way forward is marked by a wagging cylinder. The whole thing would seem silly, except that it’s high-intensity: a siren goes off in one’s ear.
The intensity is justified by the girl’s reaction. If she falls open and you go deep, then something big has happened. If she doesn’t, you have a bored audience and you’re a flop. Everything then is anti-climax, the sort that melts in a drizzle about your head and doesn’t go away for days. You’re saved from that mess by paying attention and having a mobile pelvis. The second can be a puzzler (for the reason mentioned above), so I used to go heavy on the first. Now my pelvis is more up to speed, so I’ve leveled out the emphasis. You still need to pay a lot of attention. It helps if you’re the child of alcoholics.
Bomb squad duty may feel the way sex feels to me. The bomb team wouldn’t give up their work: everything seems flat beside it. But their nerves hurt. Well, that’s how I am. Before sex I waste hours on cleaning and arranging, burn up time so I stay distracted. After sex I drink hard liquor and skip through Mad Men on Netflix, fretfully looking for office scenes. I do this into the night, and days pass before I knit myself back. In between these two phases, a girl and I try to get my penis up near her liver, which is a place it cannot go. Grappling with this task is a highlight of my life.
Yes, I’d feel silly except everybody else is doing it. And, as it is, I feel silly anyway. But that’s sex. That’s what we’ve got.
—Follow C.T. May on Twitter: @CTMay3