#85: It Stuck With Me – No. 05
A vignette titled ‘Older Men – Part II’ – autobiographical piece capturing the moments from my life that remain etched in my memory
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[Image description: Text ‘It Stuck With Me No. 05’ on a lilac background]
Almaz note:
This is Part II of a pair of pieces which deconstruct an essay I had published in British Vogue (‘What It’s Like To Have Sex With A Man Twice Your Age’), five years ago. The first piece, ‘After School Job’, was published last month.
Older Men – Part II
In 2020, I wrote an essay for British Vogue (‘What It’s Like To Have Sex With A Man Twice Your Age’), which began like this:
“When I was 24, I met a man at a literary event. He was 50 and divorced. The attraction between us was immediate. My heart leapt when I got a notification later that evening to say that he’d followed me on Twitter. We chatted online often. A year went by and we bumped into each other again (predictably, he was greyer than before). This time round, he asked me out.
We dated. The chemistry was sizzlin’. The fact that he was more than double my age felt entirely irrelevant (but also, conceptually, quite hot). When it became obvious that we were going to sleep together, he looked me dead in the eye and said, “You’re dying to see my naked body, right?” I nodded.”
I’m going to do a little re-telling of this story because, then, the way I went about writing personal essays was different to how I go about it now.
Then, I’d gloss over certain specifics and details, and be careful not to reveal much of my selfhood in my writing. I got into the habit of offering outlines of experience, moments of heat, maybe offering up a flash of skin, but I’d write as little as possible that was actually revelatory. However, in the passing years, I’ve learned how to show up on the page as an entity that’s much more recognisable as who I really am.
I’ve had to keep telling myself that that revelation doesn’t have to mean ‘confession’. That writing about the complexities of sex, desire, ambivalence and shame can be an act of unflinching self-excavation, even when what you find is contradictory or unresolved. I’ve become more comfortable sitting in the murk of things, in the discomfort. More willing to describe things that don’t always have an acceptable name.
In the opening of that original piece for British Vogue, I wrote that he and I met at a literary event. What I didn’t write then was that it was an event programmed specifically to showcase African literature. The room was full, really full, of Black and Brown people. It was, at the time, the largest number of bookish, intellectual, and engaged People of Colour I’d ever seen gathered in a cultural space. No one remarked on it, and yet it shifted something in me.
I remember feeling both at ease and on edge, aware of how unusual it was for me to feel represented in a space like this. I was a little unsure of how to carry myself within it, how I might be perceived in a room where Blackness wasn’t marked by its exceptionality, but allowed to exist in multiplicity.
This particular context mattered. It shaped the way I saw him, and, I think, the way he saw me. The encounter that followed didn’t happen in isolation, it was coloured by that particular night, and that rare sense of belonging I felt.
A year passed where, we’d DM’d each other on Twitter and emailed and texted. When he returned to London, I was surprised at how excited I was when my phone rang and his name flashed up.
The day of our first date, we met at a south London tube station. He was wearing a traditional Nigerian two-piece outfit. He kind of looked like someone’s dignified uncle, but also like a romantic lead. I was in a clingy maxi dress and had just had a trim and shape-up in the barber’s the day before (Aside: I remember that this particular cropped hairstyle, shaved down to a grade two, with a skin-fade at the back and sides made me feel somewhat like a very attractive boy version of myself).
An older couple spotted us and nodded our way in approval. There was something in this gesture that registered us as correct, coherent, as though they were placing us within a framework, or an image that made sense to them.
We strolled along the Thames like it was something we did together all the time. We stopped at the boat bar that’s permanently moored between Vauxhall Bridge and Lambeth Bridge. We had a couple of drinks on the deck and a little bop to the music playing through the sound system. He twirled me around, laughing, his hands light on my waist.
The same couple from before had reappeared by the boat bar. They called out to us from the pavement, “You guys look great together.” It was their approval in this unsolicited observation, that made me understand I was probably going to sleep with him. Their statement had framed us as already legible as a couple to the outside world, and so I allowed myself to go with it.
A little later, he and I sat on a park bench in the afternoon sun, the tops of my thighs warming through the fabric of my dress. He kissed me. Not politely in the way that I had imagined he would. Instead, it was a lustful kiss. With tongue. I felt my body soften and my senses heighten both at once.
It wasn’t that I had forgotten he was much, much older, but in that moment, age ceased to exist at all. Desire sometimes has a way of scrambling reality. What matters isn’t literally chronological age, but how someone looks at you, how they touch you and how your body responds.
It felt so good. We ended up strolling all the way back to my neighbourhood. He kept stopping to kiss me. And feel me up (!). By then, it felt almost inevitable that I’d invite him in.
To read the remainder of this essay beyond the paywall, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription.
Previous posts in the ‘It Stuck With Me’ series:
I wrote about an age-inappropriate flirtation-of-sorts I had when I had an after-school job as a teen. His attention is addictive, especially when compared to how the boys my own age ignored me.:
In this vignette, ‘The Mooning’, I’m at a sleepover party at my friend’s 10th birthday. Her parents run a pub, so they live in the flat above. As usual, all of us girls are up to mischief. Partially paywalled. To read in full, upgrad to paid:
In this vignette, ‘A Single Playing Card’, I’m nine or 10 years old and together, my primary school pals and I find a playing card in the dirt. It’s pornographic and we are stunned. Partially paywalled. To read in full, upgrad to paid:
In the vignette, ‘School Disco’, it’s the summer of 1997 and I’m having the best time dancing to Hanson’s ‘MmmBop’, the Grease MegaMix and T-Spoon’s ‘Sex on the Beach’ (inappropriate!):
[Image description: Text ‘PRODUCED BY’]
I’m Almaz Ohene, a Creative Copywriter, Freelance Journalist and Accidental Sexpert.
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