Fiercely Beautiful. A Memoir

The doctor who has just prescribed the medication for my insomnia implores me to seek professional help, but I’m broke. He strongly recommends—stopping short of begging—I write down what happened as a therapy exercise to join the dots on how I ended up here, which could point me in the direction of my recovery.

Seeing no alternative, I take the advice. Upon starting, I begin to remember that, for a period, there was an extraordinary feeling guiding me.

I used to feel a particular type of warmth, as if a thick blanket had been wrapped around me, a vibrating in my cells that I’m certain anyone standing next to me could hear it.

I first experience this ‘warmth’ years earlier after a chance meeting with a beautiful biogenetics student at college.

When I kiss her, my entire body is outrageously warm and literally humming. I’m also able to interpret and feel thousands of data points, my heart and mind somehow processing months’ worth of life all at once.

Our affair sets off this scarcely believable chain of events that sees me pinball around the planet.

One day, this warmth randomly detonates, atomically explodes—I’m instantly white-hot—and I lose complete control of my body during an ultra-orgasm in a hotel shower in Lisbon, Portugal.

In the split seconds before blacking out from the pleasure, I can somehow glimpse into the future, seeing my impending brush with execution as clearly as the page I’m writing on.

This hyper-pleasure also illuminates a fleeting, yet lucid insight: the laws of physics which govern us are benevolent despite appearances. The bad things which happen—this is life doing these things not to us, but for us.

I’m now searching for why I’d forgotten the messages coming from this warmth and how the mystical areas of my brain were trying to communicate with me through my body.

In doing so, I’m beginning to understand how ‘the intelligence behind the best sex is the same intelligence we could be using in confronting life.’