This is it. After this column, I will no longer be shuffling your sheets, but shipping my Canadian booty back to the land of beavers and moose. As such, an elegy to travel and sex is in order.
Clit rubbing, dick dipping, toe sucking, inner knee licking and back scratching have a completely different texture when you’re on the road.
There’s something almost mythological about the entire process of travelling. When boarding the plane, there’s the tantalising possibility of sitting down beside the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen and they’re charming, funny and make 14 hours seem like 20 minutes. Of course, usually, you end up beside the large Jamaican woman who’s forgotten her deodorant and folds over her seat and into yours while you wipe tiger balm under your nostrils in an attempt to make a seal between the ambient air and your olfactory neurons. If you’re with a partner, it’s time to decide if you can join the Mile High club, or if the row beside the toilet will smell your pheromones and stare you down before you even have a chance. Then there’s the Transnational Train Holy Rollers Club, where you fuck while crossing Canada! Or even Russia! Oh, transit sex.
Whoever you meet at the hostel, the club, or the local supermarket could lead you through that spark of serendipity, that completely unfathomable notion of being from another part of the world and somehow meeting in one space, at one time, without a past or a future. You meet them in the neutrality of the effervescent present. It doesn’t matter if you don’t speak Swiss, German, Farsi, or Creole. It’s gaze, rhythm, sobriety, inebriation, delicacy, and assertiveness. It’s fornication with a veil of different tastes, scents, and possibly creaky guest house beds It’s also about the sheer implausibility of breaching the gauze of parallel worlds through the most minor of physical touches.
All romanticising of these encounters aside, it makes a great legend for your friends back home, who want news of grit, Turkish alleyways, the massage you didn’t want from the Thai lady in your private stall, the acrobatics of the small French man you met in Vietnam, the genderfuck who kissed you on a night out, or the monk who leered at you on the way to the monastery. Weave yourself a tale of nightly erotica and seduction with your global tiptoes and do not be afraid to suggestively interact with the strangeness of the unknown.
I leave you with a colonial plea to Kiwi-juice baptise the world (safely) upon your travels and embrace the rainbow of bodies you’ll find therein.
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The Sheet Shuffle - 14
