My Oasis

My oasis

Most days were manageable, just, because I was lucky enough to have a good job that I loved and hated at the same time, working with and for people I also loved and didn't love quite as much. So, my life seemed normal enough at forty-one years of age, as a divorcee carrying a few more pounds and inches than I should, but still with all the curves in the right places and not a victim yet of southward migration on my chest.

It was the 'not most' days that were the problem. They seemed to come out of nowhere and knock my feet out from under me. I used to feel like someone lost in a desert, a place full of light but almost empty of life. Unlike the desert, those days were dark, as if I was groping my way along under a cloud of volcanic ash and yet, miraculously, surviving. Hungry and parched, with no idea how to find the food and water I so desperately needed to bring my inner woman back to life.

It was on those days that the video player in my mind would run through the whole chain of events from that fateful day when I was asked if 'Auntie Maggie' was coming in our car when we went on holiday back to Wales.

'Auntie Maggie', it turned out, was more than an honorary relative. I liked her enough and I trusted her, but that was before I found out that my husband already knew her much better than he should have done before we got married and kept that relationship alive and very well concealed.

The body has a protection system that sometimes works for people with terrible injuries. I wasn't physically injured, but the pain was no less when my life split wide open and I had to run on instinct and to force myself to focus on my responsibilities as a mother and to concentrate on my work, as I tried in vain to find out where I had gone wrong, how I had made my husband look for his comfort in another woman's bed. If you've been there, you'll know exactly how it works. If you haven't, I don't want to spoil your day.

I know we should forgive. If it had been a flash in the pan I might have done, for my family's sake. But to my way of thinking, he already knew this was happening even as we exchanged our vows. I couldn't find a way to repair that, I still can't, but my ex was, is, without doubt, a very charming man and he can be very persuasive. I became the enemy and basically lost my closest family.

So, what do you do as that video plays over and over? I tried loads of things. I tried to boost my self-esteem as a woman by sleeping with just about any man who asked me to, but it isn't eagles and noble animals that hang around over the relics of a dead relationship, it's scavengers that cash in on a free meal.

Not the best way to build self-esteem. A good way to end up with nasty pelvic pain.

How it happened, I don't know, but my guardian angel must have been working behind that dark, suffocating cloud. I managed to hold my job down, even to do well at it. People either didn't know or didn't let my private life cloud their impressions of me.

When the video started up one day, actually on one of the most miserable days I can remember, when everything from the drenching incessant rain to my aching body was conspiring to make me feel down, it suddenly stopped. It was a ping announcing a text message that did it. All it said was 'Message from Sian', with an avatar that I carry round with me all the time in my purse, a picture of one of the loveliest, kindest faces ever to shine on our world.

Sian and I had been neighbours after I got married. She and her new husband moved in next door but one to us after we had been living there for a couple of years.

It all started when her firstborn was taken quite seriously ill at a very young age. I'm not a children's nurse and definitely not a doctor, but I know trouble when I see it and decided, maybe foolishly, to get her and her little one off to the local hospital A&E Department immediately rather than call an ambulance.

Mercifully, that child survived and is now a lovely girl in her late teens. After that, Sian and I became close friends and we had many an opportunity to help each other out over the years. For some reason, my overwhelming feeling in her company was an incredible sense of peace and deep comfort inside. It didn't seem like love, and it certainly wasn't passionate or even remotely sexual, we were just very close friends. Which is why it was such a dreadful wrench, on emerging from the shipwreck of my marriage, to have to move away, back to my parental home with my daughter, who had far more positive feelings about my Mum and Dad, neither of them with us any more, and that made life a lot easier as I moved into a new job in the lovely familiar setting of what is now my own home.

Happily for Sian and for me, we were able to keep in touch and it was one of the best days of my life when I heard from her that she and her family were moving to the Midlands!

So, to get back to where I was (sorry for all the side-tracking), there was a very simple message from Sian: "I'm coming over, make sure you're not out!".

I knew her well enough to know that I didn't need to worry, but I was a bit perplexed.

I replied: "Shall I order a takeaway?"

Her response was a smiley, followed by: "Tell me where to collect it. You can pay me when I get to your place."

An hour and a half later, we were sitting in my lounge by the coffee table, stuffing our faces with delicious Chinese dishes. We were almost at the bottom of our first bottle of wine and we were busily steering our conversation around the elephant in that beautiful room, looking out over the moonlit garden, my newly adopted labrador staring with breed-typical curiosity at the goings on amongst the shifting shadows from the bare branches on the big chestnut tree.

The wine must have been mixed with some kind of substance that loosens locks up. We were well down our second bottle by the time my first tears came, as Sian made me face up to realities that I was too scared to address. She had that knack. She just had to look at me in a certain way. I was so engrossed with her and why she made me feel that way that the reason for my tears was pushed out of my mind for a while and I saw her in a totally new way.

Neither of us is what would be described as 'beautiful', but we were both very obviously women and neither of us was carrying too much measurable baggage. I think her dress sense was, is, better than mine. Even when she wasn't at work, she had an aura about her that was well complemented by her clothes and her minimal make up. She is lucky in that she has absolutely beautiful hair that seems to frame her face in a way that makes it glow.

That face! She is just stunning to my view. Her eyes sparkle naturally, her skin is well cared for, but not to the point of obsessiveness. There was something really comforting about the soft roundness of her features, beautiful lips and just the cutest nose. Sounds corny but I don't know how else to describe it.

The respite from the tears didn't last for long and they splashed carelessly into the third bottle of wine as we talked and talked, then talked some more.

Having a dog is often very helpful, because her need for a late evening walk meant that we both had to take time outside in the very cool fresh air. Sian wouldn't let me near the canal, because she thought we'd both fall in, so we walked round the village green. For the first time in my life, she held my hand and I felt deeply comforted by this, but when alcohol has weakened inhibitions, tears tend to flow more easily. I don't think my poor dog had a clue. She did look very curiously at me, but she seemed to sense that I wasn't in any danger.

The rest of that evening is a total blur. I remember making coffee for us. I also remember feeling I was going to lose all the delicious food too. Thankfully, I didn't. Somehow, Sian held her alcohol much better than I did and successfully steered me to the bathroom, my toothbrush and mouthwash and then left me in private while I needed to be.

My first clear memory after that was waking up on top of my bed the next morning, miraculously in my usual knee length T-shirt, with a rather angry head. But the memory I will always hold is of Sian's lips as she kissed my forehead and told me she had brought me some tea and that my dog had had her early walk.

I half smiled through the pain and tried to sit up a bit too fast. The room was spinning and it was only Sian's strength that stopped me from falling off the edge of my bed.

I do remember sipping my tea, taking a couple of fizzy tablets, then just sitting there while Sian stroked my hand in a way that almost had me back in tears. I felt loved.

I don't remember how long it was, but the hangover alarm gradually began to change from red to yellow and, in what seemed an unusually short time, I felt slightly shakily normal. Now it was my turn to hold Sian's hands between mine. All I did was smile at her, but it must have betrayed my inner feelings towards her, because she leaned forward and, for the first time in our lives, we kissed on the lips. I have never experienced a sensation like it.

I had no idea how sensitive lips can be emotionally, as well as physically, but what I picked up was not just a friend. Sian and I both knew we now wanted to be even more open to each other, but we were not going to rush.

The kiss lasted for ages, but it still wasn't long enough. Almost at the same time, our hands moved gently to the other's boobs. Even at the height of sexual passion in the past, I had never felt anyone touch my boobs like Sian did. My own hands treated her beautiful body like the finest porcelain, but bathed in the radiance of that warm, silky softness.

I know that this is the time when both Sian and I should have been kicking our heels off, unzipping very expensive dresses and peeling down ridiculously expensive silk underwear. So, I'm sorry reader (if you are still there), but we were just two very ordinary women, one just turned 41, the other 4 years behind her. That didn't mean that we were any the less deeply moved by the lovemaking that followed. The unbelievable sensation as she took my knickers off and took me to a place I had never visited before as her tongue and lips became intimately acquainted with my body.

I cannot forget how it felt to be there naked together, her hands under my bottom as she buried her face between my thighs and made such beautiful love to me, taking me through innumerable tremors before the inevitable massive eruption made me cry out in a way that even shocked me.

Don't ask me how long it was before I came round from my trance, cradled with my face against Sian's boob. As the inevitable progressed, I experienced new highs and intensities of sexual ecstasy and emotional comfort. I felt as if we were two of the most beautiful women on Earth. As it happened, to each other we were just that; nobody else mattered.

I think she deserves some privacy, but I can say that when I drank from that beautiful fragrant oasis, the inner woman inside me came back to life. I made love with the most beautiful woman, the loveliest person, I have ever met.