skonen_blades

I was never the same after the astronaut fucked me.

I don’t really know why I had the reaction that I did. Maybe it was because he’d actually left the world that I had come to hate so much. Maybe it was because being to space had given him cosmic powers that left my soul destroyed after the sex. Maybe it was because I was descended from space travelers and my cells recognized another space-faring person inside me and responded with energy I had never before encountered. I don’t know. I have no idea.

I know that I was a woman working in Texas and that I was a prostitute. When he showed up at the door of my office, I recognized him immediately. He’d just come back from the moon. His face was on all of the newspapers.

Famous men come to me all the time. I am trained to purposely not recognize them. They come to me for a normal evening, not to be fawned over. My only thought at the time was that the experience would be novel. I had never been with an astronaut. A few test pilots and scientists but no actual astronauts.

I put on my flawless act, the one he was paying six hundred dollars and hour for, and we made small talk over champagne by the window overlooking a wintertime Dallas. I knew he had a family. Most of the men that come to me have families.

I’ve come to think of myself as an escape hatch for these men. They put me onto their cocks the same way they’d put on a disguise. They slip into me and out of themselves. All mirrors leave the room in those moments for them.

Nothing changes at my own center with these men while I am with them. This is my job, I’m good at it, and I’m distant. I’m further away from myself that I am from the men that pay to spend a night with me. They’re renting me and I’m letting them. That’s the foundation no matter what other false intimacy is built between myself and the client over the course of the evening. Even with my regulars.

Not with the astronaut.

I’ll spare you the details of the look in his eyes, the hand on my leg, the awkward smiling hitch of silence in the conversation that always prefaces the first kiss. I'll spare you the provocative way I was dressed, the cleavage, the legs, the perfume. I’ll spare you the description of his calm confidence, his slow movements, the grin that never left his face, and the first button that was undone.

When his hand, the hand that been further away from Earth than anyone else’s hand had ever been except for his two fellow astronauts on that mission, touched the small of my back, I quivered involuntarily. That was new. I was unsettled by it. It was sensual and sexy and he liked it but it wasn’t an intentional part of the show.

I felt a monster inside of me change position. No, an earthquake. No, an ocean. I don’t know how to describe it. Something larger than me that was somehow inside me clenched and relaxed at the same time.

My legs went a little weak before we got to the bed. Again, sensual and sexy but nothing that I had planned at all. Not part of the show. On some level behind my eyes, I started to panic. I felt like a villager at the foot of a volcano who’d just felt a tremor under her feet.

It gets blurry after that. My usual high level of recall is destroyed. His clothes came off, I laid back, and he brushed the hair back over my ears, off of my cheeks. With a shock, I realized that I was crying. Not crying quietly like a simpering, whining little girl but crying like a wounded beast on the plains. I was screaming through gritted teeth as the tears flooded back across my cheekbones. I was laughing too.

The first of those unequaled orgasms, those real orgasms, tore through me like a library collapsing. The next one was a supernova that created entire universes in my chest and in my head. The one after that set my arms and legs on fire. My skeleton ignited. I froze solid, I begged, I spoke in tongues, I melted, the atoms of my body split, exploded and reassembled. I was swirled through the center of the universe, blinking in astonishment. I saw everyone on this entire tiny planet light up like Christmas lights inside my body. I ceased to matter.

He rolled with me, riding the waves, not shocked at all by my reactions. We might have been there for years or for seconds. I have no idea.

My final orgasm, entwined with his, gave birth to my soul. I disappeared in white light, angels singing, and end of the planet Earth as I knew it. Underneath that astronaut, I died. That’s all I can think of when I try to describe it. My old life ended and a new one began. Everything that had happened up until that point had been a hollow television show lie. My eyes opened and I felt as I was seeing colours for the first time in my life.

He rolled off of me, got dressed, thanked me, and left me there.

I cried. I screamed at the ceiling. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Hours later, when I could move, I put on jeans and a heavy coat without showering or even looking in a mirror and I left. I never went back. In the morning, I took all of my money out of my bank account, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I left Texas. As I crossed the border, I called my boss and left a message telling her that I quit and thanks for everything.

I don’t know who I am now. That was seven months ago. I’ve visited each one of the United States and I’m hitch hiking up to Canada. As I write this, I’m sitting on my backpack on the side of highway near Seattle.

It’s 1971 and I am gloriously lost. I am emptier and fuller than I have ever been.






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