It was near midnight when we left the pub.

      When we arrived, she asked me to stop as we came to the block where she lived. The street was empty, the night-breeze still warm. It was quiet, now. We, too, had become quiet. We got out of the car. She pointed to her house, down the middle of the block, but asked me not to follow her there. She said that she needed that space to become herself again. After our final embrace and a kiss she turned away without either of us saying another word. Those words would have been too difficult to say. I watched her silently. She never turned back until she reached her house.

      I felt sad for this 'failed' ending to such a brilliant day as it had been. I felt sad, because I felt that deep in her heart she had wanted this ending to be different. She drew the line in the sand to prevent the sexual intimacy that she spoke of and evidently wanted, but couldn't allow. If she had commented that sex isn't such a big thing in comparison to this day of light that had unfolded between us, I would have accepted her answer with joy. It would have reflected the truth. Our day together had been pervaded with a most wondrous glow of joy from beginning to end. This glow had lasted for hours upon hours. No sexual intimacy, elation, excitation, or whatever, has ever measured up to the splendor of our 'endless' day and the memories of it that were now lodged in my heart. She had denied herself the realization by experience that very little would have been added by sexual sharing, to what we had already established. I was sad to see her walk away, realizing for what little thing she forced herself to close the door to the brighter things that also mattered.

      I watched her silently until she reached her house. Only then did she turn around. She turned back to me and waved, happily so it seemed. Now we spoke those words that had been impossible to say for either of us, earlier. Those words rang loud and clear for all the world to hear them. "Have a wonderful life, Peter," she called back. Her words cut through the stillness and echoed in thought.

      "I love you, Erica," I called back to her and waved. "Have a great life, too."

      "I love you likewise, dearest," she replied in a happy voice and disappeared into her house.

      It seemed that those happy sounding words were also the hardest words that were spoken that night. They even caused me to have some bitter regrets. I, too, have had the urge to call her, dearest. This would have been honest. Except, a deep lying fear stood in the way that it would be misunderstood. This fear had blocked the admission. Consequently the admission was not made. Now the opportunity to do so was gone, possibly forever. I shuddered, realizing how sadly we had both failed to treat each other as human beings, even though we had moved so far, and so daringly. I felt a great sense of compassion at this moment for the whole of mankind that faced still greater challenges and greater obstacles. I felt this compassion, because two of mankind's most promising soldiers in its struggle for freedom and humanity had suddenly quit and thrown in the towel for the sake of one little thing.



      The street suddenly felt emptier as I turned back to the car. It was emptier by one person. The world had become silent. I felt chilly in the night-breeze, though in my thoughts her warmth was still with me. I could feel the warmth our last kiss and our final embrace, and my desire to call her, dearest, which would now never be fulfilled.

     

      I stepped back into the car and started to drive away. I drove away sadly. I should have been happy for this wonderful day that we had had together. That's when I shuddered at the thought that the most advanced thinker that I had encountered, with whom I had made a daring step forward into the realm of love, had found it nevertheless impossible to take the last step that would have challenged the world's conventions more fully and dethroned their poverty. I shuddered for realizing that if this daring pioneer and scientist, and I who had become rather daring myself, who were aware of the world's self-imposed poverty and its implications, couldn't free ourselves from its stranglehold, what chance did poor humanity have to do this with a much lesser scientific background? I realized that we had both succumbed to the world's ingrained poverty, to its near universal dishonesty, so that we both couldn't move honestly in respect to the truth in the final moments when it really counted for taking that one last radical step. Some heroes we were! She was right. Humanity is more than ignorant of its own focus on poverty, and I had to admit that I wasn't much farther out of that hole than she was or everyone else.

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Stories about  Sex from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche