There are several very meditative pieces in my book Gardenias, but the most special one I wrote for men. I put a very healing guided visualization in it. I’ll give you the opening of that piece and the music that went with it. It’s from a trilogy, and I will give you the buy link to my book if you would like to read the rest.
One of my strongest healing moments was in yoga, the physical practice of “letting go” — lying there on a little mat and just exhaling. I could hear the men in class next to me breathing, and sometimes you could hear the interior sounds they made, come out with the breath on an exhale. This piece is about taking you there, just for a few minutes. Into a place where you, too, might experience that moment.
From the short story “Haiku” in my book Gardenias.
I don’t have a name, or a history. I’ve been invisible for so long now that I have forgotten the place I started out once upon a time. I can’t remember myself. Was there ever a time when I was innocent? When, as a child, I walked freely and a pebble called to me?
Maybe I don’t want to remember myself at all, he thought. I’ll invent a new reality for myself and a new name to go with it.
The chair was very comfortable. It seemed to be made of a kind of cloud-like pillowy substance and he felt warm. He had positioned himself as she directed, naked and blindfolded on this large white chair in the middle of an empty room. And then he waited for what seemed an eternity for her to arrive. He listened to the rain outside as it pelted against the window. Just the rain and his breath, that’s all. Silence in the dark. The velvet blindfold felt strange to him. It made him even more invisible inside its darkness. I’m a mass of secrets under velvet, he thought. No one will ever know me. No one ever has. I’m afraid.
When she entered the room he felt the air stir around him in tiny ripples. A kind of chill ran up his spine and every hair on his body seemed to lift at once. He was afraid, but her presence made something in him quicken and vibrate. Suddenly he was aware of his nakedness, but he had chosen this. His cock had never felt more vulnerable in his life. He had always used it as a sort of weapon before, against the world, but that would change now. He was tired into his bones, of women and men and his history. I don’t know who I am anymore, he thought. I don’t know why I am here, or why I have chosen this experience with a stranger. She’s here now, with me, in this empty room. I can feel her…
“I’m going to wash you clean,” she said.
Her voice was soft and it tinkled like a little bell near his ear. He felt the brush of something delicate, like silk against his arm. Music entered the room, suddenly, and pierced the air with Buddhist flutes that sounded like Japanese cranes in the wind. He heard the ringing of temple bells and the low keening sounds of the flutes crying. Under the blindfold, a tear escaped his eye and trapped itself wetly against his cheek. The music called to him inside, someplace very deep, but he couldn’t have explained its effect if he had tried.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said, and her cool hand traced up the skin of his thigh. He shivered and trembled a little under her fingertips. She seemed to take hours brushing over his thighs and chest. Her hands were so dreamlike they swept over him like feathers, or like the sound of the flutes calling in the distance.
She moved over all the skin on his body that she could reach, like wind from some distant high mountain plain. As she touched him, his fear of her lessened. I’m floating like a cloud, he thought. Just the bells and the flutes and her touch and the rain. I don’t know who I am. Who am I? Where do I begin and where do I end?
She took his hands in hers and guided him to his feet.
“Wait here a moment,” she said.
I wrote the piece while listening to Japanese flutes just like these:
Enjoy the peace of reading this. The story is erotic, but entirely soft as a woman bathes a man, and returns him to his center.
My book is available in iTunes, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 