Teen sex was fun for me. That’s the great thing about losing your virginity to a friend with no emotions involved. It meant there wasn’t any confusion.

I didn’t go looking for love and settling for sex. I never even told D that he wasn’t the first. I remember the first time we had sex. It was on a bunk bed in a dorm room. It was the first time love and sex combined. The kid knew what he was doing. I was just so happy to finally bring him into the fray.

Afterwards, he spent five minutes looking at his biceps in the mirror. I think for him, sex meant he was now a man. He was 19. He wasn’t a man. He didn’t even know how to make ramen. But somehow he felt transformed. And I got to be a part of it.

It was never great sex, but it was imbued with the purest form of love. It was sweet.

Sex for me is always about bringing out the best in a man. I’m always gracious. I’m always kind. But it isn’t as if everyone is blessed with the power of touch. I can count on one hand the number of men who focused on me.

Good sex, great sex, Samy sex, soulful sex, transformative sex. I’ve been lucky to experience them all.

I know women and gay men who call men ‘trash.’ I know these guys. They think they’re pulling one over on you. With silky words and a lot of oral foreplay. They promise to call you. But if I cared in the first place, I might be waiting by the phone. I never do.

The sex might have been good, but they didn’t get all of me because they couldn’t even begin to fathom who I am.

To date, there have been four men who even began to ever see who I really was. The first got me to NYC, but he never saw my soul, just my brilliant mind. But he taught me my worth. He’s long gone.

The second became one of my closest friends, but I saw his game and I didn’t want to play. I never felt cool or daring enough for him. In the years since we’ve met, we’ve slept side by side like brother and sister, on a bed we once reserved for other things. Just once have we gone back to see what once what was. It felt like tickling myself. Whatever magic was once there is gone. But I love him profoundly. He’s never far from my mind.

The third…he not only saw my soul, he pierced it. He left me with a need to go deeper inward. In the two years since I met him, I’ve become three new people. No one has ever made me want to be a better person more than he. No one has ever looked at me the way he did. No one ever felt more like looking into the mirror than swimming in dark eyes beneath curly tendrils. No one ever surprised me the way he did. From him I would take a month of Sunday’s dispersed throughout the rest of my life.

And the fourth, well, he could have been everything to me, but it went awry. I would have given him everything. But he had been broken years before we ever met. And it didn’t matter how much I understood. He was set in his ways. When he gets hurt, he locks part of his heart away, and I don’t know where he threw the key.

I need sex. Sometimes from those boys with the silky words. They make me feel good for the night. We lay in bed naked afterwards. They tell me things in post-coital vulnerability. They figure out too late that I am not just a woman. I am a formidable force. But they don’t have the depth to deal with me.

But mostly, I need that male energy connection. I don’t get women. I’m not one of them. I am most at ease when I make a man happy. Not because I need to feel needed, or out of some antiquated female role. But because to the right man, I am the perfect compliment. I thrive in making others grow.

But for only one of them will I ever swoon. I get light-headed. My arms flop to the side like trout. And my head is a balloon flying high above my shoulders. Just a thought, and I am back to those times. I think we must have unfinished business from previous lives because nothing else explains why we connected.

I need sex. I need to feel my naked abdomen at rest. I need to hear him sing Dylan. I need to witness him at peace, asleep. I need to enter the tesseracts that open when time folds onto itself.

Maybe his role in my life was to allow me to access my true worth. Or maybe we have karmic dealings to work out. I don’t judge him for his disappearances or silences.

I am a panther lying in the darkness, the only visible part of me are glowing eyes that radiate through the foliage.

When I see him, I will know.

But until that day comes, I pray for sex like my ancestors prayed for rain. In its presence, beautiful things grow from cracked earth.

It is me that grows in the presence of this adulation. I have so much growing to do.