A Burning In My Loins

There is a guy who comes to my workplace every Thursday morning to pick up the rubbish and scrap from the yard.

The community sauna where I work is set up in a car park at the back of an old industrial building and the top of this guys truck is pretty much level with the hessian covered fences which create the boundaries of our space.

The guy has a swarthy face with wide chiselled cheekbones, dark stubble and piercing blue eyes. He wears shorts and a flat cap pulled low over his eyes, a short-sleeved shirt and dark tweed woolen waistcoat, accentuate muscly arms sleeved in tattoos and strong calves in his heavy work boots. He has the kind of look I can imagine driving horses on the front of a brightly coloured vardo or a fairground boy all grown up. The guy carries himself with the energy of someone who knows he is enigmatically attractive. Irascible charm the like of which I cannot resist.

It is early morning on a grey November day and I am playing experimental drum n bass loud as I go about my cleaning duties. Sweeping floors, laying out non-slip mats and wiping down sauna benches. There is a crackle of something electric in the air as I notice this man on the top of his truck, notice him notice the music as I turn it up. Perhaps he noitices me, a pique of interest as he hoists wooden planks and bags of cement up on to the roof instructing his colleague on how to lift, when to go steady.

Photo from Etsy, lyrics by Kelis

I have not felt this charge of animal attraction for a long time. I am reminded of how I used to whisper messages in my head during ecstatic  dances, imagining reeling men in towards me letting my body move with the music, closing my eyes. I liked to allow animal energy to roar through me as the bass pounded. I do it on this day too - without the dancing - teasing myself, willing him into the space, projecting energy outwards, “I'm here." It feels like a game I haven't played for a long time but I sense his curiosity over the fence and I open to it, invite it in.

All packed up and ready to leave, the man and his co-worker hustle through the doors and into the space.

"What is this place?" he asks.

"I saw it being built, my boy would love it here, he loves this kind of thing."

I show them around, the saunas, the plunge pools, talk them through the booking system, laugh when I say the price wrong. I am slightly stunned by his closeness, excited and there is a part of me that senses maybe I have disappointed him. Like up close I am more midlife woman than sexy, young thing, the energy he sensed incongruous with reality. The spell slightly broken.

This week he is back again, dragging planks of timber from the junk pile, pulling straps taught on his truck. I notice the polite way in which he speaks to his colleagues, a contrast to his rough and ready appearance. I enjoy the frisson of watching him out of the corner of my eye as he exchanges contact details with my boss, moving between the yard and his truck.

It is a relief to feel this part of myself again. To feel attracted to someone. To feel alive and present and full of possibility. But I realise as well that I no longer know myself in this space. I have grown into an older version of myself in the vacuum of single-mothering and the thought of being with a man is disorientating. Disorientating mainly because I have been single since breaking up with my son's Dad, my 'baby-father' almost exactly 8 years ago to the day. Disorientating because I haven't had sex in exactly 8 years. Disorientating because my sons Dad was 13 years younger than me and I still felt young myself when I fell pregnant at 37 and now I am almost a decade older. The men in my arena all that much older too. In all of that time, I have kissed only one man. Another man who wore shorts in winter, had strong arms and calves and that innate sexiness, an older man with that rugged charm that I find hard to resist.

I have never been a typically 'pretty' person, never the head-turner but I have always been highly aware of an innate 'sexiness' something which when younger, I seemed able to switch on, a power calling certain types of men towards me. A power I could manipulate to a point but which ultimately landed me in many uncomfortable situations with men that I couldn't get myself out of. I sometimes wonder if this ability is a weird by-product of being sexually abused as a child, an inner knowing of sexual currency, or sexual vulnerability oozing from my pores. Or maybe all women have it. I don't know.

But I am older now. And sometimes having been single so long, I forget this. I still feel like the young girl but really I have grey hairs and wrinkles, slowly drooping eyelids (a weird genetic disorder from my Mums side of the family) and sagging breasts that I can't always be bothered to hoist up in a bra. I'm not sure whether this version of me is congruent with attractiveness, with sexiness, how I am seen from the outside, how I might inhabit a physical relationship from.this body. Would it still be the same? How might it feel to be with someone, kissing them? Holding hands? Going to bed together?

All my previous partners were met through mutual friends, at weddings or through work. I've used a dating app once in my life for about 3 weeks, finding the whole swipe right excruciatingly uncomfortable. I've spent the last eight years locked into mothering a child who struggled hugely with sleep and separation anxiety for years. Lack of funds to pay for babysitters, lack of energy to go out, lack of friends to socialise with, chronic illness and pain. How the hell to even begin dating from this place? And a painful rejection under my belt from someone I knew well and had high hopes for, who hurt me more than I realised.

But here I am with an unexpected and not unwelcome burning in my loins, the frisson of possibility in the air. A weekly flirtation on the horizon. The reawakening of a part of myself and the excitement of possibility. There is a guy who I fancy with sparkly eyes and he will never be more than this but it feels good.