Athena (redux)

Like most (all?) of us, Athena is scared. She fears… I’m not sure what. Something to do with letting go, with being out of control. Maybe she fears what she wants. Maybe she fears how much she wants. Maybe she fears powerlessness.

She manages her fear effectively with denial, affecting a stance of confidence, poise, command.

There’s a voice in her – a loud voice, but one she has accustomed herself to pretending she doesn’t hear. The voice preaches the gospel of letting go. She longs to let go well, truly, comprehensively. But she fears what might lie beneath.

I’ve known her now several months. Long enough to become familiar both with her longings and her fears. Not, of course, as familiar as she may be with them. But familiar enough.

And, I have a certain… familiarity… with the ways in which we (and in which women, often, in particular) respond to our/their bodily hungers.

Athena’s resting sexual position is one of easy, bemused confidence. She knows the power her beauty affords her over men. It’s not hard for her to capture her prey, once she identifies it.

It is hard, though, for her to allow herself to be captured. Safely. Pleasurably. (As opposed to violently, non-consensually.) Which, my gut tells me, she has a deep longing to experience. And a deep terror of experiencing.

She delights in pleasing, in dancing along the line – if markedly on one side of that line – that separates giving freely and freely allowing herself to be taken from.

One day, one day… She will experience a sensation of safety, containment, security, that will allow her to let go as she longs to do. To enter the zone in which she is profoundly liberated from thought, and can simply feel, can become the giant erogenous zone we all long to be (once again).

I have a small hope that I can be present at this moment, that I can be the first to taste her as she finally, completely, relaxes, lets go, and sinks back into her body, her eyes fluttering to the back of her head as her muscles go limp, as she gives in to what she has spent so much energy, for so long, resisting.

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