Your erotic stories

So there I was – fifty-two years old and planning to commit adultery for the first time in my life. I’d been married to the same woman for thirty years, and never been unfaithful. I’d negotiated my way through the modern world, seemingly made up of human beings obsessed with sex, and managed to avoid that one mortal sin at least. But tonight was going to be different. Tonight I was going to going to cast myself into the pit of lust, treachery, and deceit.

I was going to have sex with a woman I hardly knew, and who was twenty years my junior. Why was I doing this? Well I’m a middle-aged man (going through a mid-life crisis) and she’s a younger woman who fancies a bit on the side – so the reason is obvious isn’t it.

Or is it?

Well no, it wasn’t quite like that. In this tale I want to explain to you why I did what I did – and why I’d do it again without a moment’s hesitation. My story is based on real people and real events, so anyone looking for quick cheap thrills, better turn away now. What I offer here is mostly true, and, as is often the case, truth can be both less and more than fiction. My tale is in many ways quite ordinary, and yet at the same time I hope it’s unusually honest. But however it may seem to you, to me it will always be the most amazing experience of my life.

It was about seven o’clock on a Friday evening in November. I was driving through the countryside in southern England to meet a young lady named Eliza. We were planning to spend a (dirty?) weekend together in a hotel in Sussex. I’d made my excuses to my wife and she’d made hers to her husband. I was expecting to arrive around nine – and I was scared shitless!

Why?

Well that’s a long story, and without going too deeply in to my past history, let me just say I am somewhat inhibited (OK, I’ll be honest – I’m scared of sex!). In 30 years of marriage I’d never had sexual intercourse with any woman other than my wife. Worse, when I got married I was a virgin! As you will have deduced, by the age of 52 when I first met this lady I’d only ever made love to one woman in the whole of my life!

Alright, I’d had (both before and during my marriage) several relationships with women that whilst not leading to intercourse, were nevertheless sexual in nature. Moreover, many opportunities to have intercourse presented themselves to me. Why it had never actually occurred was a combination of factors. Inexperience leading to performance fears was probably the main one – but guilt at betraying my wife was another. And frankly bad timing (or simply bad luck) was also a significant contributor. All these factors combined together in a way to act like a brake on my actions whenever I came to some critical point. I certainly never consciously decided to be faithful to my wife, it’s just when it came to it I was too bloody scared to actually have intercourse with anyone else, and that probably had more to do with the inexperience of my youth than anything else. Although habit too sets in after a while. The older you are, and the less experienced you are, the harder it is to change.

Having said all that, I now realise there was another component. I’d simply never met anyone who tempted me physically. No, that’s not quite true – what I mean is, I never met anyone I really cared enough about to make me want to break through my internal barriers. Like everyone else I had my sexual fantasies and masturbated of course, but for me normal heterosexual sex was never all it’s cracked up to be. I’d got bored having sex with the same women, and I’d come to believe sex itself was overrated.

At the same time there was always this expectation (hyped up by the media) around the notion of ‘performance’, and as I clearly wasn’t any kind of ‘stud’, I didn’t particularly want to be made to look a fool of in front of someone I was trying to impress. Sex always seemed (to me) to be so much easier for a woman. I mean, if you’re female you just got to lie back and ‘take’ it, whereas the poor guy has to ‘get hard’, keep going without cumming, and then make sure he knows enough about female anatomy to properly ‘satisfy’ the girl. If he fails to achieve any of these, there’s something wrong with him – he’s a ‘bad’ lover. For a woman, however, if you’re not lying back and letting him ‘do it’, you just got to rub this big hard thing a few times and he cums – and you can safely assume it was ‘great for him’ and everything’s alright (although, of course, it often isn’t).

OK, so none of that’s exactly true (it just seems that way sometimes), but for whatever reason, in the end the only person I really wanted to have sex with was myself, and I was never concerned to have intercourse outside of a legitimate relationship. At the same time my wife was not particularly sexually active (or interested), and our experimentation was rather limited (to say the least). I suppose I eventually consigned sexual intercourse (like eating and drinking) to that category in my mind reserved for practises overrated in real life. I put ‘being in love’ in that same category too. Romance and all that went with it was a product of ‘Hormones and Hollywood’, nothing more.

I don’t sound like a very interesting guy, do I? Well I guess I’m not.

So how did I actually manage to do it on this occasion? How did I find the courage to make arrangements to go to a hotel in the country, with a twenty-eight year old woman I hardly knew, knowing full well that for some of the time at least, I’d have to be making love to her?

Well part of it had to do with Eliza herself. This woman was something entirely new to me. She was strong-willed, intelligent and an immensely insightful person. I had already spent one afternoon with her (not having sex) and been surprised at how ‘comfortable’ I felt both physically and mentally. Unlike me, she was entirely uninhibited and clearly had a great deal of experience. She was also extremely attractive and desirable, and she seemed to understand me in a way my wife never had (where have you heard that before!?).

Don’t get me wrong, although Eliza was most definitely a desirable woman, her good looks and obvious sexual experience were not what attracted me. Quite the reverse in fact, they frightened the life out of me! What attracted me was partly her inner strength (in other words she pushed me into it!), partly the fact she seemed to want to be with me (which I found both odd and incredibly flattering), and partly the excitement I felt whenever I was with her. She was the kind of woman other men would admire you for being with, and wish they were in your place. In other words, she was good for my Ego.

But all this was combined with a growing feeling on my part, that it would soon too late for me to do anything ‘crazy’ in my life. I felt trapped, enclosed by a wall of routine and normality. My life had started to seem empty and pointless, and without ultimate meaning. I had tried to be a ‘good’ person, and ended up being a ‘boring’ person, and somewhere deep inside I wanted to change that feeling. I wanted just for once in my life to do something bad or naughty or wrong. I wanted to be ‘the villain’ just for a little while. That said, I was utterly convinced the coming weekend would be a total disaster.

You see there was no sexual component in my desire to sleep with Eliza. As I have said, sex for me was a non-entity. Indeed rather than being drawn forward by desire or passion, the fear of my inadequate sexual performance was the major obstacle I felt to the whole exercise. I guess I am, like many men, very egotistical, and I had no desire to be seen as inept or inexperienced, and the same thing that stopped me having sex with anyone else was a very strong drag on my desire to go away with this Lady. Indeed I had to make an extreme effort of courage even to consider it. As I said, in practice I was terrified!

In the same way I had no expectations of it being an ‘erotic’ experience. That thought simply never entered my head. My drives were about freedom, and braking out of the straight-jacket that was my life. It was about self-expression, about no longer seeing myself as weak and incapable. Sure I wanted to be with her, but sex was something I would have to ‘fake’ as I had faked it all these years with my wife. The reward was ending up with someone young and fresh and different. Physical joy was an illusion, at least for me, and my mental preparation for the experience was about finding ways of ‘giving’ sexual joy without my partner realising I didn’t know what I was doing, and ‘being seen’ to take sexual joy when really all I wanted was for it to be over. In other words, playing whatever part I had to play in order to keep the woman happy. Much of my life has been like that – I’m afraid to say.

I was particularly scared that once I was in bed with this young woman I wouldn’t be able to get hard, so I abstained from any kind of sex in the weeks leading up to the trip. I also read every sex manual I could get my hands on, as I was painfully aware of how much the world had changed in the last twenty years. I believed the normal ‘bump and grind’ I was used to would never be enough for Eliza. I only wished there was some kind of Night School I could have attended to learn how to satisfy the modern woman. I just knew it would all go wrong, and I had a terrible sinking feeling after this weekend, she be looking at me with utter distain and walking out of my life forever.

II

I arrived about eight forty-five, after a long drive through the darkening countryside of Sussex. I’d spent most of the journey telling myself I could do this – and not believing a word of it. Indeed I couldn’t believe I’d actually turned up at the Hotel. It says something for the emptiness of my life that I was willing to risk so much just to tell myself I’d done something crazy at least once.

As I parked the car and wandered into the bar in search of Eliza, my one thought was alcohol. Maybe a couple of very stiff drinks would ease the butterflies currently holding an end-of-year party in my stomach. It’s cold in England in November and there was a bright log fire burning in the corner of the bar. Inside the bar was Old-World with big black beams and oak tables and chairs. Sitting to one side of the fire, clutching what seemed like a bottle of Lager, and dressed in jeans and a baggy red sweater, was Eliza.

She was about five one in height, with close-cropped dark auburn hair, cut almost boyishly. It made her look child-like sometimes, and more than once she’d taken my breath away with how young and beautiful she looked. Her bright blue eyes sparkled out from under strong dark eyebrows, her face was long and lean, and her chin ever-so-slightly pointed. Her lips were full and naturally red.

In personality she was entirely self-possessed, not afraid of anything or anyone. As I’ve said her mind was razor sharp. Often in the past she’d cut through something or other I was rambling about, to challenge some deeply hidden and often unconscious assumption. I’m not a particularly ignorant man and I’d found this sharpness of wit both unusual and alluring. She seemed to see so much more than any woman I’d known before. She’d seen my sorrow and my emptiness, for example, and she wanted to change that – to give me some meaning and purpose in my life. She was a pretty unique character.

Over the few months I’d known her, we’d talked about everything from work to politics to God, and many a time we’d have heated discussions from diametrically opposed viewpoints. I could tell she loved the challenge of an argument just as much as I did. She’d connected to my mind in a way I never knew a woman could. I would love to have been her ‘friend’, but with men and women it never seems to stay that way. Also, as I said, she was a ‘hot’ lady, and she clearly wanted to bed me.

As I wandered up to her table, she suddenly saw me and gave me a broad, relieved, and at the same time, conspiratorial smile.

“You made it then?” she said, in a voice that was both sarcastic and welcoming at the same time.

I grinned, feeling anything but relieved. It wouldn’t have worried me if she’d not been there.

“Have you checked the room? I asked.

“No, thought I wait for you … if that’s ok?”

“Yes, fine,” I murmured. “I’ll get a whisky and chill out for a moment I think.”

We sat around the fire and chatted, whilst I tried to drown the partying insects in my stomach with whisky. Eliza briefly apologised she wasn’t ‘made-up or anything’, explaining in soft tones how anything more would have made her husband suspicious. I knew how unselfconscious she was, never seeming to worry about how she looked, so I just dismissed the issue casually. That’s not to say she never dressed feminine – far from it. She’s the only woman I ever knew who wore stockings to work (although I never realised this in the early days). She didn’t wear stockings just for the men though. I think she was an instinctively sexy woman, and she wore them as much for the way it made her feel as she did for the effect it may have had on anyone who noticed.

I was quite content, sitting there and chatting – anything to put off going upstairs. After about half-an-hour, however, Eliza indicated she wanted to make a move. Reluctantly I got up and went in search of somebody who could show us to our room. In fact the first room they showed us wasn’t big enough. I may be useless with women but I’m not afraid to make a fuss in other situations. I could see Eliza was impressed by my firmness with the hotel manager, and I felt reasonably good about myself by the time we were shown to a bigger and better room.

It was smart and clean, and furnished with all the normal accoutrements of a reasonably priced hotel room. After the manager had gone, I stood for a moment looking at the double bed. There was a small light shining above the bed and I guess you could say it looked cosy and inviting. That was not how I was feeling however – to me the bed looked scary. After all it represented the main challenge of the weekend. It seemed to me like a pit of burning coals, which very soon I was going to have to walk over barefooted. I didn’t feel in the slightest bit sexually aroused, and a small dark voice in the back of my mind was repeatedly asking me how I expected to get hard in this environment.

But it was too late now and I knew it. I done all the preparatory work I could, and I was in God’s hands now (which considering I was committing adultery was not the most reassuring thought!).

We unpacked the cases and Eliza decided she needed a bath. I didn’t undress as I waited, but shaved as close as possible and smartened myself up as best I could. I’d been on a diet for the last month to try to reduce the ‘spare tyre’ I was carrying, and in fact it wasn’t too bad. However, at fifty two and not in particularly good shape, my body wasn’t exactly athletic or attractive – and that was another thing I was trying really hard to forget about.

Part of me wanted to escape and parted of me wanted to get started. I knew in situations like this, once you’d begun you tend to concentrate on what you’re doing and the fear isn’t so bad. Time passes more quickly as well – and that’s what I really wanted, to turn round and find it was over and I had a good excuse for going to sleep (or at least pretending to be asleep).

When Eliza came out she was wearing a white dressing gown, which relieved me a little, because it meant she was feeling a bit shy too. I murmured something about ‘my turn’, hurried into the bathroom and locked the door. As I undressed, I suddenly realised I didn’t have a dressing gown, and wondered what to wear when I went back out. I decided on a T-shirt and boxer shorts (I could never have gone out naked!). I ran the bath water, and proceeded to scrub every part of my anatomy as clean as it was humanly possible to get. Then I just sat there for a while playing with myself, trying to get some response. But the thing between my legs seemed as dead as the proverbial dormouse.

“Oh God!” I whispered to myself. “What am I doing here?”

III

Eventually I knew I could put it off no longer, and I opened the bathroom door and stepped out. Eliza was in bed, the cover pulled up to her chin. I pottered for a moment, putting away my clothes and bath gear, and then I turned and approached the bed. She smiled at me, a warm and really caring smile, and as I made to get in beside her she pulled the cover back in a wide sweeping motion.

For a second I just stood there looking down at her. She was curled up below me wearing a pair of panties and a red low-cut bra with a broad cleavage. Her breasts, neither small nor large, looked both desirable and scary. It was a long time since I’d seen another woman’s body so close, and this body seemed small and petite and very beautiful. It was the kind of moment that makes you gulp.

“Oh … my … God!” I whispered slowly, and with real feeling.

Strange, but those words seemed to ‘break the ice’. She laughed and I slipped in bedside her and took her in my arms.

I don’t really know what I expected – all women are different after all. But whatever I’d expected, the reality of the experience was as different as it’s possible to be. We kissed, slowly and gently, and before I really knew what was happening I found I was starting to relax.

At first I’d begun by going through the old ‘routine’. You know, start slow, kiss her tenderly, take off her bra, etc. I wasn’t hard, but I was frantically hoping that following traditional steps would have the desired effect. However, she seemed quickly aware of the ‘mechanicality’ of what I was doing and stopped me. It wasn’t obvious, and it didn’t come across as a criticism, but she turned me round on my back and gently indicated we should slow down.

At this point my memory becomes a little uncertain and confused. I remember how she kissed my face, my cheeks, my eyebrows, and my lips. I also remember clearly how she kissed my eyes, her tongue flicking slowly across my eye-lashes and how strange and deeply moving that felt. Her hands lifted my T-shirt and her lips explored my chest. She was surprisingly soft and tender, and both her touch and her kiss were unexpectedly sensual. Sometime around then she lowered my boxer shorts, and whispered with mock sternness that there was ‘nothing wrong with my body’ (I’d been pretty self-critical about my figure in the past, telling her how ugly I was – I suppose I was afraid she’d be disappointed when she saw me).

Very slowly and very gently she touched my penis, which (thank God) had begun to harden. She murmured some words of praise, which surprised me, and she lowered her head down towards it. Like all men I enjoy oral sex, but my wife was never very keen or very good, so I guess I was a bit nervous about her taking me in her mouth. As she engulfed my cock, I instinctively crouched backwards slightly, as if trying to withdraw.

After a moment she lifted her head up, leaned over, and whispered into my ear.

“Stop defending yourself … I’m not going to hurt you.”

I felt a stab of embarrassment, knowing how clearly my inexperience was showing, and for a moment all the old fears welled up – and of course my penis immediately began to deflate. For a moment I felt like that was the end and it would all be downhill to disaster from here. But she laughed and kissed me again, softly and sweetly. As she held my flaccid penis, she began to nibble my ear and lick my face. Her hand was gentle on me – it felt warm and loving – and to my surprise I began to harden again. As I did so she slipped her head back down under the cover.

I made a conscious effort to relax and not ‘defend’ against her, and before I realised it her lips had parted and she had taken me in to her mouth. The sensation of my penis in her mouth was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. Her tongue was a velvet brush, gently sweeping and caressing my cock. She sucked me so sensitively and so skilfully that my burgeoning firmness quickly turned to a genuine hardness. She was right, she wasn’t hurting me. She was arousing my passion and giving me sensations that were totally new and unbelievable.

I suppose it was her skill derived from experience. She understood the male anatomy far better than my wife, and she was working hard to make what she was doing a genuinely erotic experience. But it wasn’t just her skill that surprised me. As I slowly came to realise, she wasn’t just sucking me because that’s what a woman does to arouse a man. She was sucking my cock because she wanted to – because she loved doing it. In between ministering to my flesh, her mouth would occasionally lift, and she’d whisper words of admiration and joy directed at my penis. I can’t remember what she said exactly, I can only remember how it made me feel. Here was this beautiful young woman holding and kissing my cock, embracing it with her mouth, and all the time telling me how beautiful it was, and how wonderful it felt to touch me. Suddenly I began to forget my fears – they just kind of faded away – until I’d been transformed in a way I could never have believed possible.

When she finally surfaced, primarily because I didn’t want to come in her mouth, even though she seemed entirely happy at the prospect, I’d been awakened to something wholly unique in my experience. I began to kiss her and touch her, not because I had to, or because if I did it might her on, but because I wanted to.

I can only recall snatches of those moments. How exquisite her breasts seemed, for example, and how I felt this desire to kiss her nipples. I recall one moment when she lay over me, her breasts hanging down just above my face, and I marvelled at their shape. They were pert and curved and full – with sharp firm nipples that begged to be taken in to my mouth. I held them softly in my hands and they felt so smooth and warm and exciting. And when I kissed one, and gently drew a nipple in between my lips, she began to moan softly as if she was really genuinely enjoying my touch.

It was so strange, but the more she seemed to respond to my (perhaps clumsy) efforts to pleasure her, the more I wanted to give her pleasure. Suddenly I was in no hurry. Suddenly I found I was enjoying taking my time. Suddenly I wanted to feel her body under my hands and under my lips.

Emboldened with a new found confidence, I lay her back on the bed and began to explore her body. I kissed her face and her hair, and ran my tongue down her beautiful neck. I kissed her arms and took her fingers in my mouth, one at a time. She seemed to respond to every touch, every movement, with some indication of pleasure. A sigh, a moan, or just the way she lifted or turned her body to give me access to some unexplored part of her skin.

I suckled at both her breasts for a long time. I’m not sure why but I found her breasts so erotic. They seemed to me perfect in every way, and the more I took them in my mouth, the more I wanted to. I remember how she called me ‘baby’, and told me I could do that forever.

Slowly my lips and tongue descended, until I found myself down between her legs. She was shaved and smooth, and I remember being surprised as I kissed her vulva. I confess I’d never been too keen on giving oral sex – or very good at it. But Eliza was different. Whereas before I’d never been entirely comfortable – either because I wasn’t sure what I was doing, or because it was all a bit messy down there – I suddenly discovered I was actually enjoying kissing her in that most intimate of places. Somehow it didn’t feel strange or off-putting. I was comfortable there in a way I’d never have imagined I could be. I can’t really explain it. I don’t know if it was the smell or the taste or what. It was an entirely holistic experience, and I wanted to be there. I wanted to explore, to push my tongue deep in her vagina, to uncover and gently brush her clitoris, to burrow with my tongue into every fold of her flesh. It didn’t seem like an effort and I wasn’t trying to reach some predetermined goal, and time itself seemed to lose its meaning. Indeed, when her body arched and her mouth cried out with joy, I didn’t see that (as I usually did) as a sign that my job was done. I wanted to continue. I was turned on by her pleasure, and I soon lost count of the number of times she responded to my stimulation. As I said, it felt right, and so comfortable.

This notion of ‘comfort’ may seem like a suitable euphemism for being ‘ok’ with giving oral sex, but for me it is much much more than that. Somewhere along the line, and without me quite realising it, being with Eliza hard started to seem ‘natural’. No, it was more than that – it really truly felt like ‘coming home’. You’ve heard all the songs and stories about being people ‘made for each other’ – it’s all crap isn’t it? Well, no it isn’t. I felt that way, and as the evening went on I felt more and more that way, until I knew (even as it was happening) that I was experiencing something unique and magical, and far beyond my wildest dreams.

IV

Why was it so good? How can I explain it to you? How can I paint the picture of a feeling and an experience that even now I can hardly believe or understand? Words just aren’t enough.

It was in the way she curled up in my arms like a baby, in the way she sighed with pure joy at every touch, in the way she gently moaned and giggled as I kissed and nuzzled at her vulva, in the way her eyes went glazed and distant till she looked like someone else – like a Goddess or an Angel. But more than anything else it was in her unselfish consideration, giving me all she could of herself, working tirelessly to stimulate, arouse, and pleasure me – whilst at the same time losing herself in the act of sex, and revelling unashamedly in every moment of pleasure.

But it was also in what she did to me.

She moved my soul in a way I’d never experienced. I never even knew that part of me existed. Suddenly I came to life and began to return to her the joy she was giving to me. My hands started to caress her skin, touching every part of her. My fingers were suddenly alive, and I could sense each gentle delicate touch. I wanted to touch her, I needed to touch her, and I conveyed this message in the interplay between her skin and mine. I kissed her as tenderly as I knew how, and whispered words of love with every kiss and every touch.

I was discovering all I had known and believed before was wrong. Sex could be a wonderful, awesome, magical experience. What is really important is the person you are with – and Eliza seemed like the home I had always been searching for. She was amazing, and with her I was suddenly nowhere near as bad as I feared.

And when I finally entered her, the sense of comfort, of coming home, broadened and deepened until I felt like I was having a mystical experience. It was just so right – simple as that – just plain right. How on earth can I describe what it’s like suddenly finding another human being who feels like the other half of your soul? Who fits you physically and mentally? We moved within each other as if dancing to a melody we both knew and loved. I have no clear memory of the details; all I have left now is this tune in my head, this dance of love. I could have cum a thousand times, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to lose the moment, and whenever I felt the danger of release I slowed down and let it pass.

We made love all night long – yes, really and truly – all though the whole night. It never happened to me before (and never will again). And what’s more I could have continued all day too. I really and genuinely (for the first time in my whole life) wanted to be with her, wanted to touch her, wanted to lie in her bed. She was so mature, so adult, so uninhibited. She lost herself in the act of sex. Her eyes took on this quasi-mystical quality. Yet, at the same time, she was so cosy and comfortable, and cuddly. She took away all my fears. Indeed she was the warm darkness at the heart of all fear – she was simply amazing! I fell in love with her that night – body and soul.

We tried many different positions in our many acts of intercourse, but slowly and gently, and with the utmost consideration. Somehow I didn’t need instruction, even with actions and ways I’d never tried before. We became entwined, entangled, merged – until our bodies became like one, not metaphorically, but in a real and tangible sense.

But don’t go away with the impression this night was without passion or lust, because that’s not true. We talked about doing things, to and for each other, that previously (to me at least) had seemed crude and dirty. Sometimes she wanted me gentle, sometimes brutal – and often I would increase her passion by talking dirty to her as I thrust myself deep in her cunt. Many times she told me I could do ‘anything I liked to her … anything!” No, what this night lacked was guilt, not lust.

Occasionally we’d rest and whisper to each other – mostly words of love and praise. Then we begin again, a long slow dance of love. I remember at one stage we spent long time inverted (in the 69 position), with my tongue contentedly flicking and probing her vagina, and my lips occasionally embracing her clitoris and drawing it into my mouth – whilst at the same time she was worshipping me with her velvet tongue and taking me deep in her throat. I knew she wanted me to cum in her mouth – I think she saw it as the ultimate gift – but I resisted, right until the morning sun crept through the curtain and licked her auburn hair.

Finally, after a night of unexpected and unsurpassable pleasure, I relented, and as her mouth protected and comforted my penis, I let her hands bring me to climax. It was an orgasm like no other I’d ever known – and as the lights went out in my head and my soul filled with wonder and joy, she noiselessly swallowed my gift, and completed the act by telling me ‘how wonderful’ I tasted, and thanking me over and over again.

As I said, we made love, we didn’t have sex. I never knew how different the two things are. One is just physical, and the other is physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual – all at the same time. We touched each other in so many dimensions and in so many ways. I genuinely believe we were both awed by the experience. You see it wasn’t just her skill that made the night what it was; it wasn’t just that she was an excellent lover. I mean she was an incredible lover, but she’d also found something in me that had ultimately surprised her almost as much as it surprised me. It wasn’t just our bodies that had melded than night – it was our hearts and minds and souls.

V

Sometimes I wonder if other people are as ignorant as me, or am I alone in being the fool who never understood. I had lived a whole life time and never known that all the things they say about love are true! That all the songs, all the soppy movies, all the silly Mills & Boon books: they’re all true! How could I have been so blind? How could I have lived so long and never known that making love can be more than sex? And that sex can be mind-blowingly passionate and perverted and lustful, and yet still at the same time be pure and clean and wondrously wholesome.

I like to offer you a happy ending to my story – but life’s not like that. I spent another night with Eliza, pretty much like the one I’ve described above. After that, moved as we both were by the experience we shared, we tried for18 months to make it work. I left my home and my family and all I had to be with her. Initially she left her husband, but as she had a young daughter, in the end she reluctantly went back. She was (as I’ve explained) in many ways an amazing woman; but in her personal life she was lost, uncertain, and confused. I believe she loved me as much as I love her, but she felt she had no choice but to let go.

I lost everything I had as a result of that ‘affair’. Do I regret it? Or is it better to have ‘loved and lost’?

Well, in those 18 months I lived a whole lifetime. Being genuinely in love changed my consciousness, and I saw the moon and the sky and the world around me as I’d never seen them before. Everything was so much more alive and real, and full of meaning. There was a ‘quality’ or a ‘feeling’ embedded in every object and every place, and I was moved to depths of appreciation and understanding that before would have seemed impossible. The old ‘rose-coloured glasses’ thing I guess.

I experienced the heights of joy, but also the depths of despair. I never knew it was possible to feel such pain – but that’s another story. How did I feel when it was done? Well I wrote this couple of years ago, just after I realised it was over – but I guess it’s as true now as it was then.

I am like a baby who had the most beautiful firework in the world in its hand – a firework that just exploded! I’m holding the bits in my hand and staring dumbly at the remains, wondering what the bloody hell just happened. Trying naively to work out what I did wrong, and why it blew up, and where the bloody thing came from in the first place. Shocked, hurt, appalled – and yet awestruck with wonder at the startling beauty of the thing. But most of all feeling such a fool for not handling it properly, and for not realising the sheer amazing power of what I just held in my hands. Scared stiff of the wonder of it, but wanting it back. Wanting it more than I ever wanted anything in the whole of my life! But with no idea how to get it back, and slowly – ever so slowly – coming to the realisation that this was probably the only one I am ever going to see – and having no idea of how to deal with the pain of that thought! Such a stupid damn fool I was. Such a stupid damn fool I still am, because I can’t – even now – quite let go. The shock inside, tinged with wonder and awe and amazement, still echoing around my heart and my soul, still controlling my thoughts and my actions, still making me act and think like a lovesick fool.

Maybe I’m just a ‘dirty old man’ who got what he deserved, I don’t really know anymore. All I know for sure of is that, given the choice, I would rather die now, this minute, in her arms, than live another thousand years without her.

END