Art/Proze

Making love in July
Altin Topi
Alb-Club Nov. 2001


As the year rounds up, each season accumulates enough memories to transform my ordinary calendar into an astrological chart. It has been always a cliché that June is the month of romance, and often in poetry and adolescent fancies, love arrives this month, in June, accompanied by starry skies and the awakening of bird song of early mornings. My daytime dreaming has had its different moods, and with passing of years has become more down-to-earth, more hedonistic in nature. It has changed from day dreaming about love to a recall of real life, into love making. Well, that's how it is in my dream now, the other way around, after daytime dreaming, I wake up, and I try to recover it.


I must have dozed, because I hear Leah shouting at me, - "Let's get the cooler. It is time for a gin and tonic." I stretch out on the red rock, hugging the heat up to the core of my body. Leah is a short, reddish, diminutive and probably very pretty girl, in her late twenties. It is warm, and I stretch completely to reach for her feet buried in the sand. I'm very much in love with her. I put my ear to the rock; I can hear a thousand miles of ocean calling at me. There are some memories that portend mischance and loss while others inspire a mood of anticipatory happiness. In retrospect, it seems to me that I was born with awareness that I was an incurable romantic and for years the meaning of this evaded me. Sometimes, I have wondered whether it might resemble some kind of genetic handicap.

Now, long later, having assumed the role of psychiatrist to myself in an attempt to interpret my surreal vision, the pictorial metaphor of my sexual taboos of that time, the barrier has been overcome. Romance in the time of June, season after season, year after year, represented the conflicted desires and inhibitions of my adolescence. Romance being a subjective act of creativity, built over the blindfold of desire. Deprivation gave to romance the seductiveness of things unattainable, but after all my frustrations, I felt more infatuated than ever. As an adult, nowadays, I can dispense my sexual stirrings with specificity, and once romance in the time of June has become a new cliché, making love in the hot days of July.

"You think that is time for a gin and tonic? Okay, my love." I open the cooler and with my amateurish bartender passion prepare in rush the drinks. She puts the book onto the beachrug, spreads it carefully with her tiny hands, and then grabs the glass. I'm pleasantly aware of her shapely, toasted brown legs. I know that the tight-fitting bathing suit induces me in that state of mind I would not take for granted for long. The water is calm, oil calm, as the islanders say, only they pronounce it in one word: oilcam.

Shadow cuts the rocks of our pocket of the rocky beach, a hidden place dipped under the crust of the earth, turning the day suddenly to afternoon, while the surrounding rocks remain directly in the light. It is afternoon, and to be precise, a Saturday afternoon.

For a moment, I doze again. I wake up feeling Leah on top of me. She is wet, cold, like a sea creature. She climbs on the top of me, her hair dragging like kelp across my back. - "Oh, you're warm, I can feel your warm”, - she whispers. She stops moving when her body has covered mine completely. Her body fits perfectly, like a piece of puzzle, exactly onto mine. She opens her arms, stretches, grasps my palms and knots our fingers together. We have become two star fish locked together, sucking nutrients out of our bare bodies. Her pubic bone pushes into my tail bone lingering a hint of sex. But not this time, she is only after my body warmth. I realize it, feeling her good body weight on top of me. Her breath smells gin and lemons, she is sleeping. Soon we breathe in synch, we're both asleep.

The last thing I remember before I wake, is the feel of Leah's body next to me. A light breeze is coming from the ocean and the air is filled with gulls lifting in the air to catch the tidal change. In the evening dimness. I feel her up, I'm not sure how is happening, but suddenly, with the sun on our skin, the salt, and the fresh air, I kiss her and she kisses me back. She kisses harder, puts her hands on my buttocks pulling me closer. "You are a good kisser," she says. I kiss her again and again, slide my hand up, she arches and I reach behind her back. A snap, and the top of her bathing suit is dead shot in my hands. I kiss her more, until I feel I'm ready for her. She slips her hands down in my bathing suit, cups me, and then pulls away. Neither of us says anything, Walking way, she maneuvers out of the bathing suit bottom. Our arms, hands, elbows, our bodies shrug, molding in one around each movement. The movement’s rhythm becomes violent, resembling a wildcat moving under a bed spread. We hear those loud spasmodic sights, drunk of each-other.

Eroticism stands on the edge of abyss, love has become pure erotic, and it is dangerous. Sex is not enough until it becomes too much. When it becomes too much, we're deadbeat, shhhhhh, the sleep takes us slowly away again. Light is already coming off the sea, it fills the air with gulls again lifting to catch the new tidal change.