Sometimes you meet a person who somehow reaches deep inside you and touches something elemental. They pluck a string and your mind and body resonate. Such was Paula, one of the members of a writing workshop that I was part of back in 2000-2001; another time in another world.

Never to escape and never to want to.

Before either of us ever said a word to each other, on the first day I attended a meeting, I was intensely attracted to her. It had nothing at all to do with intellect.

She always seemed to be in motion. She’d sit restless in the studio where we met, curled up in her white plastic chair, long and lean and olive skinned and so lovely that it made me slightly dizzy. I often wondered if she knew. She was like a coiled spring, all potential energy and thought and emotion and so deliciously alive. She’d stretch in her chair, spreading those long arms and legs and groaning slightly, one heel drumming against the carpeted floor of the studio, and I’d think of cats, of a tigress resting but alert in a patch of sunlight. Such power she seemed to have, barely contained.

It seemed that with the right touch, a kiss or lick or caress on the correct spot, she might suddenly transform, metamorphose into something else, not Paula or woman or human, but something utterly new and as ancient as the world. A myth made flesh, Circe or Medusa. She’d squirm and growl and sprout tentacles that would engulf me and wrap sweetly around my arms and neck and legs, constricting slowly, with irresistible strength. Never to escape and never to want to.

The day of that first workshop, or maybe the second, was the day of the Central Street Fair. I was to meet my wife there in the afternoon. After the group broke up, I wandered the fair with Paula. It was a warm late June day; more than once I moved in close behind her, trying to catch the scent of her long dark hair. I realized I was unconsciously steering us away from the place where I was to meet my wife, wanting to be alone with Paula for just a few minutes more, a few more fleeting moments of harmless, heady fantasy.

I still remember these thoughts from those warm, moist days. Dangerous thoughts for a married man

Dave Ventre
A hyper-annuated wannabee scientist with a lovely wife and a mountain biking problem.