I'll never know quite how I convinced her to give in to my cockamamie scheme - though perhaps the following lines from my
commemorative poem of our first
Valentine's Day had something to do with it:
My pitcher pours into your own
as yours pours into mine
Though liquid same, my fluid's dull
where yours gives shame to wine.
For most teenagers heavy petting, dry humping, oral sex and the occasional full penetration were sufficient to constitute intimacy, but I had other ideas - that was all merely crass sexuality expressing itself in stilting, clumsy and abortive actions through our hormone-honed (or dulled?) bodies, minds, hands and mouths. Really we had little to do with it beyond being in the wrong place at the right time.
I didn't want to get "some." I didn't want to "get off." Those are what the lesser, animalistic and rutting people did, not fit for the exalted intercourse of a Poet and his Muse. (Always his Muse, never hers - it would be years before the patriarchal trappings of this romanticized Classicism would occur to me. Oppressors are so cute when they first fall in love.) Rather than her carnal pleasure, it was to please me to subsist only upon her hot breath and steaming, streaming tears - between them, my own nectar and ambrosia.
It makes perhaps a nice metaphor, but I meant it more literally than most. So it was that we found ourselves, lips not merely locked, but forming an airtight, nigh-hermetic seal, my Muse preparing to receive inspiration from myself (I had a pretty odd sense of humour, even for a 16-year-old) - the greater part of this indulgence was her involvement, and a functional, though distinctly unpoetic, compromise was arrived at: that with the greater lung capacity, I would exhale into her (with my abhorrent skanky ole teeth-unbrushed boybreath - really, these teen goddesses can do better than their peers) so as to keep things from arriving at a stale gasp for a few seconds longer.
Comfortable rhythms we'd had some experience familiarizing ourselves with, but this was very diferent - for to give to her meant depriving myself in a very palpable way, trading lungfuls (lungs full? Hardly one at a time, legendary yogic muscular control lacking) in inverse synchronized breathing, like passing an egg back and forth in spoons hoping for someone to drop it.
Racing pulses of hot-rod adolescents made quick work of our oxygen supply; unwilling to separate, grips tightened - our once-hallowed air, could it be seen, doubtless fetid and green.
She broke free. Later, she broke free. Illusions shattered regarding metaphors that work better on paper than in flesh, I could never again bring myself to revisit this stifling place with anyone else.
Perhaps a more fitting node name would have been rebreathe her.