Existential

As I grew older, I lost the secret of how to get the girls to take all their clothes off just for me. To get them to reveal a deeper kind of nudity than just the holiness of bared skin, freed from the tyranny and coercion of clothing. I loved the smell of those naked girls, not sugar and spice, but soap and something as clean as grass under the warmth of summer sun.

I didn't keep score or anything puerile like that. I didn't play that kind of game. It was not a matter of numbers. It was not to be used for boasting and strutting either. I never told anyone else, certainly never told those few other men and boys I could talk to.

This was just between the girls and me. It was a private, personal, sort of thing that should remain our secret, even from their own boyfriends. For the boyfriends would not understand that there was something special beyond mere macho sexual boasting, a completely new world hidden and unknown to them, unreachable by mere ordinary male understanding.

The boys would have to let go, learn to set themselves free from the chains that held them rooted to the rocks of the male understanding, the male psyche. It was hard, too hard for them to give up on what had been so painfully, so recently learnt. They were all standing on the edge of adulthood, learning the rules that separated the men from the boys: how to walk; how to talk; how to touch and how to fear. Without an understanding of these rules they would never be able to walk the corridors, the streets of manhood, never find the key that unlocked the code that would reveal how to be one of the lads.

But, while they were all doing that, I was off with the girls, learning something else. A different way to talk, to walk, places to touch, where to kiss and a wordless language of tongues. I was an initiate into an old religion, perhaps the oldest religion. This was something quite holy, and religion only truly matters when it is private and personal. It was only between the girls and me.

I knew the boys would never understand. I knew they would never see that I wasn't taking anything they believed belonged to them. I was there to receive a gift, a benediction, freely bestowed by someone else, some other really free person who could belong only to herself and all promises of fealty were declarations of slavery that contradicted all decencies. It was an authentically free act, and through it, we became free people who could almost understand and make sense of our young world.