from Equations (2011-2023): #15

for Jena Strayner 

With Heather, Wendy, Julie, and the others: mostly hokey contrivance. All roads must lead back to Jena, because she is where this road begins. Picture a nineteen-year-old woman in the first bloom of rich youth. Not material wealth as in money, but in looks and everything else. Jena stands about 5’6, she has cornstalk blonde hair, cut short into a pageboy. Her large, bright blue eyes tend to widen when she is pleased or aroused, and her smile is wide enough to split her face in half. Thick lips, a roundish face, high forehead, skin just pale enough to make her whole contours have a quality of shock about them; large breasts that do not even have the thought of sag in them; flat stomach; long legs that she deliberately displays in such a way that the adjective “coltish” seems appropriate. Jena was born and bred in a small town; it would be inconceivable that she would have sex for any reason but love. We work up to sex over a period of two months. Because we are working in tune with our emotions, because we let ourselves fall in love first (at twenty, I have been in love before, but never like this), when we get down to the business of physical passion we do it with no holds barred, so that nothing, no roles, no equations, no rigid striations, needs to be contrived. At twenty, I don’t quite realize the miraculous nature of what I’m getting; I have no idea how far, how fast, and how bitterly I will have to fall after Jena. I just naively swim into her, her into me, and every squish that happens between our bodies strikes a chord felt by us both.