These are the thoughts I can never write—or, if written, never share. How could I ever admit that I’m crazed beyond control just by the imminence of feminine energy? No, not just sight—though women always make the scene, for the spectacle of femininity has no compare. Nor just touch, nor soothing voice, nor enchanting fragrance. Though just light accidental brushing against women can thrill me with chills, and a woman’s unexpected whisper too near to my ear can claim my mind, and a girl’s blossomed fragrance ever compels me to fantasize myself as Pacino playing the blind Lt. Colonel in Scent of a Woman. Of taste? Don’t get me started—I can’t dare talk about that. Yet not one of these alone, or even the compilation of all, ever approaches—or even constitutes—the mysterious allure that female energy has for me, in and of itself.

I’ve been on battlefields with spectacular histrionics, in fights of gallant kinetic involvement, awash in the ocean surf’s captivating and rippling rhythmics, at times soothingly intellectually massaged to my mind’s core. Immersed, engrossed, wrapped up, and absorbed in drugs, extreme sports, dark missions, far odysseys. No match. There’s no match throughout the abundance of all…to one moment of exposure to the vibrancy of a woman.

So what comprises the source of this captivation? This magnetism which can be even empirically meager? This essence disembodied yet pulsing from the incarnate? So am I driven and ensconced in endless reflection…but reflection, like Narcissus, merely shows me myself. What Echo is there that I now long to hear, the actualization of which was clearly once near…but dispelled and now latent in reverberation’s valleys?

Ah! Valley Girls, I muse (in response to myself). Probably as close with this answer as with anything else.