I have to look celibacy up. I know what it means, but, without the dictionary, I’m not sure how much it’s a choice thing.

Turns out it depends which dictionary you look at.

It seems fitting, somehow, that lack of clarity. I’m pretty much celibate most of the time, and I’m not sure if that’s a choice thing, either.

When I say ‘pretty much celibate,’ I mean that I might have sex a couple of times a year, but even that is far from guaranteed. I’m thirty-four now and I lost my virginity at seventeen, and, except for a period of four years, it’s been that way my whole adult life.

Does that bother me?

I’m not sure about that, either.

In my twenties, it didn’t, not really. Back then I liked the thrill of the chase – which is something I miss now – but pretty much all of the sex was uniformly awful.

And then I started having regular sex. And sure, when that stopped, for a while, I missed it.

But now? I miss it, but the things that stand in the way of me chasing it have grown more numerous, more insurmountable.

In my teens, I’d seek out sex by getting hammered (which I liked) and going to nightclubs (which I didn’t, but I did like getting fingered, so it kind of evened out). I don’t do either of those things anymore – I’m more self-conscious when I’m drunk, and nobody I know goes dancing. Which again, for the most part, I don’t mind.

Plus, when I was a teen, all I worried about was people noticing the physical side of my disability. I didn’t worry about my mental health, the emotional effects of disability, or my weight (or, I did, but god, I had no idea) – all of which make me crazy fearful of rejection now.

Most of the time I want to walk away from my own body, so the last thing I’m tempted to do is let someone else walk away from it too.

Rejection is exhausting. It’s easy, if you’re straight-sized and able-bodied, to suggest that everyone should learn to handle it, that if you just put yourself out there enough, eventually you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Perhaps. But the fear of rejection sets me back a long way, the reality of it yet further. I like sex, but I miss touch.

And neither seems worth jeopardising my sense of self for.

I’d rather never experience intimacy again.

Okay, first things first. That’s not my photo, obviously. That photo is The Wave, Douglas, Isle of Man by Simon Park from the Landscape Photographer of the Year competition in 2012.

I love that photo. I think it’s sexy as hell.

As a kid, I was super privileged. I’ve been to a lot of nice places. Barbados. Mauritius. The Maldives. I’ve swum on the Great Barrier Reef.

But beautiful, azure, calm sea, the kind that’s warm and laps quietly at the shore?

That kind of sea is nice – it’s almost certainly my favourite kind to swim in – but it’s not sexy.

I wouldn’t describe the sea as a kink of mine (although a certain type of seaside certainly is), and yet it taps into parts of my brain that kink also taps into.

What do I mean by that? I guess rough sea, choppy sea, sea with decent waves, provokes in me a mixture of fear, anticipation and adrenaline rush that I also feel just before I play or before I fuck someone I don’t really know.

I don’t like not knowing what’s under the surface. I don’t like feeling seaweed brush against me. I don’t like the way that, in the sea, my imagination runs away with me in a way that never happens in a swimming pool.

But the swimming pool is symbolic of the kind of relationship I should want, but never seek out. Transparent, calm, safe. The ocean is symbolic of something darker – you think you know what you’re getting into when you wade through the shallows and out into deeper water, but you can never be completely sure.

And that, that not being completely sure? That is what I like.

The below is an entry for #FreshlyPolished by Ruby Estella.

Passport to happiness

Yesterday was the third consecutive day I haven’t looked at my ex-lover’s Twitter account. 

The first day of fighting back against the addiction of my social media stalking was Tuesday; quite a significant Tuesday, marking three months since he ended our affair, a quarter of a year lost to emptiness.

He wanted me to be happy, he said. He couldn’t make me happy, he said. He couldn’t give me what I needed, he said.

Among the many things I didn’t say in response, because I couldn’t trust myself to speak, was to question how the realisation of my single greatest fear – that he would choose between the two women in his life and I would be the one discarded – would make me happy, exactly? When I was only truly happy in his company; when the days without him were a life lived in monochrome.

The truth is that the end of the affair was more about messiness than happiness. Of the range of choices available to him, he opted for the one that was least messy, with less far-ranging consequences, with fewer people impacted. Far easier to end a relationship that nobody knows about than to complicate a world shared by mutual friends, argue about custody of the cocker spaniel and split a shared book collection.

His emotional pendulum had yet again swung to its furthest point from the passionate intensity that characterised our happiest moments together but which was inevitability followed by the emotional distance that accompanied his guilty phases.

It wasn’t the first time we parted. Each separation results in a further erosion of my self worth as I fail at life without him and he seems equally unable, or unwilling, to live a life without me.

Sooner or later one of us picks up the phone and summons the other’s presence or lies in wait at a familiar street corner anticipating the wordless embrace that sets the cycle anew. And then we begin again the most addictive phase of all when we use sex to convey the feelings we won’t speak aloud missed you so much will never hurt you again trust me different this time I love you I love I love you

Sometimes, it is he who initiates the phone call, conceding defeat. Come to me? Please? I make him wait while I choose how to give myself: slutty underwear to be torn away or am I inclined to tease him with bows and hooks? A dress I can lift over my arms revealing my eager nakedness or skinny jeans I command him to peel off before he’s permitted to fuck me? Other times, it’s me who lures him with a breathless phone call or a filthy text message and I wait, splayed naked on my kitchen table so he sees immediately my greedy cunt glistening and engorged in anticipation.

And this morning, three days after I last spied on his social media presence, my body’s aching for him becomes more than I am willing to bear. I choose to blink first. And so, as his 08.03 train pulls into the railway station, I wait just beyond the ticket barrier. I wear a purple shirt dress and high-heeled ankle boots for what I have in mind.

I open the top button on my dress to reveal a hint of bra lace.

He sees me. He bites his lip as he walks towards me and I recognise his hesitancy in this gesture. 

As he stands before me, I notice his eyes take in the curve of my breasts where I’ve unbuttoned my dress. He raises his hand, places two fingers on my shoulder and moves them cautiously, slowly, gently along my collarbone until he arrives at the central point under my neck, all the while his eyes fixed on mine. Then his fingers change direction and move, feathertouch soft, downward to the cleave of my breasts. The touch, although light, is everything – the sudden warmth of my pussy is followed almost immediately by glorious wetness.

We have not yet spoken. I take his hand in mine and lead him, fully compliant now, past the information desk, the ticket machines, the coffee franchise, till we reach the passport photo booth. I gesture with my eyes for him to go inside. I follow him in and pull the curtain between us and the morning’s commuters.

He sits on the stool and there’s barely any room, just enough for me to place a leg on either side of him. His hands reach up eagerly to touch my face but I push them down. It pains him to be forced to wait. With deliberate slowness, relishing his frustration, I tease each button of my dress open. Beyond the curtain is the flurry of places-to-be train travellers.

Only now do I lower myself down to sit astride him. He places his hands on my butt cheeks and pulls me towards him, banishing all space between our bodies.

I can feel the stiffness of his erection as he reaches again to touch my face. This time I don’t stop him. He kisses hard with an intensity borne of our three month separation, lips clumsily mashing mine, hands quick and rough over my face and my neck. We grasp and clutch inelegantly.

Finally, the first words whispered turn around and as I turn my back to him I hear the sound of his trousers unzipping. 

His hands pushing my thighs apart

His thumb between my legs, pushing my knickers to the side 

His cock inside me

Filling the emptiness

Me gasping

Shhhh

His hand over my mouth

My hands flat against the screen 

His balls slapping against me

His thrusts

Urgent and fast

Until he moans

And drops his head to my shoulder 

His grip on my hips loosens

His arms envelop me

He gently guides me round me so I’m facing him again. He fixes my dress into position and closes the buttons, lingering for a moment as he reaches the top button to place his lips against my breastbone.

He sits and pulls me down onto his lap. He looks around as though this is the first time he’s registered where we are. How does this thing work anyway? He pocket-rummages and finds coins; we pose playfully for photographs. As we emerge from behind our curtain and wait with exaggerated innocence for our passport photos, I put my mouth to his ear and whisper I can feel your come trickling down my thigh.

Today will be our perfect day. We will phone our excuses to work. We’ll spend the day in my bed kissing, laughing, tickling and teasing, flicking and fingering, sucking and fucking.

The recriminations and reproaches will come later, sometimes days later, sometimes weeks. Eventually, there’ll be an event – a birthday, perhaps – that pulls him back to the emotional responsibilities of his other life.

Then he will be lost to me again.

And I will have lost myself in love again. 

‘Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world’ – Marilyn Monroe

‘A woman with good shoes is never ugly’ – Coco Chanel

‘i would hate for someone to look at my shoes and say, ‘Oh my God! That looks so comfortable!’ – Christian Louboutin

‘Too many women think shoes are unimportant, but the real proof of an elegant woman is what is on her feet.’ – Christian Dior

‘I can’t concentrate in flats’ – Victoria Beckham

When I participated in Sinful Sunday for the first time, just before I turned 30, I wore stilettos for the first time in my life, and I loved them. I couldn’t walk in them, but god, I wanted to be able to. If I didn’t like heels, I’d have a much simpler relationship with them, one that would roughly equate to can’t wear them, doesn’t want to wear them.

I want to wear them.

That’s why I wore them in that photo: it was supposed to reflect me as I’d like to be seen, and I’d like to be seen as the kind of girl who wears heels.

Even though I think, rationally, that every one of those quotes above is bullshit.

It’s not that disability gives me the ability to not care about what I wear on my feet – that’s not a privilege disability buys you. At job interviews, weddings, formal dinners, I’m expected to look as elegant as the next woman. And yes, you can pull off elegance in flats, but they’re often not an option either – I can’t keep ballet pumps (or any court shoe) without a strap on my feet, so I rely on Mary Janes being in fashion each and every time I need to buy shoes for a formal event. Guess what? They’re not. And even when they are, I’ve grown to dislike them. They make me feel frumpy. They remind me that my body, not my mind, dictates the footwear I can and can’t wear.

I’m not the only one, of course. Every time the subject of shoes comes up on Twitter, a whole host of women commiserate with me because they can’t wear heels either. The reasons are myriad: arthritis, balance issues, hemiplegia, cerebral palsy …

It makes me feel less alone, but it also makes me pretty damn angry. Inspirational quotes are fine –they have, I’m sure, their place in life. But there is something about the way they describe some kind of everywoman – one who lives for shoes, kittens, handbags, chocolate and prosecco – that makes me angry. I can choose whether or not to define myself through most of those things, but believe me, when it comes to shoes, I, and many others, can’t.

I guess what I’m saying is please think twice before you use a woman’s choice of footwear to judge her more intangible qualities. Wearing heels shouldn’t be a marker of being elegant, grown-up, sexy, kickass, or anything else. To suggest otherwise just gives women like me another thing to beat themselves up with for not being feminine enough.

Wearing heels is indicative of two things:

• the ability to wear high heels
• the desire to wear high heels

It really shouldn’t be a marker of anything else. But, if you see a pair of cute, nude, mid-heel, elegant courts with a strap and maybe some embellishment, before the wedding I have to go to in May, please do let me know.

I hate hot cum.

You know the kind I mean – it’s everywhere in erotica and porn. ‘Ropes of hot cum,’ men who ‘spurt hotly,’ ‘semen […] so thick I struggled to swallow.’ (These last two are taken from a bestseller … no, not that one).

Real life come isn’t glamorous. It’s not hot, it’s lukewarm (and, as someone pointed out the other day, it cools on the skin remarkably quickly), and ‘thick’ isn’t a word I’d use to describe it either. Attempts in fiction to eroticise the substance itself fall flat, because the substance itself isn’t erotic.

What’s erotic is what it represents.

I love a good souvenir. Aged 11, I kept my unofficial Take That helium balloon tied to my bed long after it had gone flat. This year, I bought beautiful underwear to mark a fantastic trip to New York. For me, semen is a souvenir from a great fuck.

On my way to work there’s a deli that serves great hot lunches. Even before 10am, the smell of garlic hangs in the air. I kind of feel that before breakfast, it should turn my stomach, but it doesn’t – to me, the smell of garlic cooking symbolises warmth, nourishment, comfort, even. And I’ve been thinking about how much that contrasts with the dates I’ve been on recently (bear with me) – dates that have essentially been cold, restrained, polite affairs, the kind that would follow the ‘Don’t eat garlic if you’re planning to kiss somebody’ rule. And I don’t want that. I want warmth, spontaneity, affection.

And when a guy comes inside me, I have a sense of all those things.

The great Cammies on the Floor wrote a post recently about semen as evidence of pleasure, and I share this view entirely. Just as I’ll revisit bruises time and time again, there’s nothing I love more than the wet patch on the bed, white marks on my knickers – that sense, essentially, that even if a guy walks out of the door after sex, it was real, it happened.

Semen makes me throw caution to the wind. When one guy and I had been seeing each other a few months, I went on the pill. There was a whole conversation I intended to have with him: ‘I’m sick of condoms, let’s get tested*, I want you to come inside me.’

That conversation never happened. I can still remember the exact fuck. It was this one, in fact. It was another first for me, sex without a condom. When he mentioned contraception, I was already bent over the sofa, knickers and tights round my ankles. I didn’t want to kill the moment by moving to the bedroom to find the Durex. Being able to say: ‘It’s ok, I’m on the pill’?

Best. Thing. Ever.

*For the record, we did both subsequently get tested.