Too many men, these last few years, are unable to hide how they feel drawn to me. What about me is different now than before? Is it my childlessness, my deceptive youthfulness accompanying my greying hair and maturity, my last decade before menopause, or some long delayed but found at last comfort within my skin and openness of my body. Or is it my erasing shyness and genderedness that reduces some distance with them? 

A few of them led me to believe it was their age, and mine, and the years in between; the combination of fading youth and dawning wisdom at my gender and age that made them feel accomplished and yet younger in my company. Men touching 60 or a few years beyond who cannot help but gaze at me and sometimes find their feet walking toward me. I have been quiet but sympathetic to some of them. Of course other than the one. 

And then there are the men about my age and some younger who I've felt be surprised by me, and how they are pulled by my gravity and playfulness. 

This is a strange age. In which I'm both lamenting the death of a younger me and celebrating a quiet but confident coming of age of sorts... all that feeling undesired in the first couple decades of my life is turning on its head within my know and seek circle of people; with random strangers that make up the somewhat inanimate world around it's a little of the opposite, when i was young I was supremely conscious of my growing body and their eyes on it, now I am defiantly oblivious of how they look at my shape-changing body (other than the hungry desperate men in and around swimming pools sometime, who also fail to embarass me).

And then there is something of the nuance we all gain with a decade or more of being married or beyond, that helps us discern the myriad ways in which you can feel for someone. The lack of jealousy of someone's spouse when you feel yourself drawn to them, the understanding of what it means to have known someone half or more of your life and to have lived the small moments with them as they change and do not change, as they bewilder and frustrate you and yet feel so predictable, and how their proximity and distance go unnoticed sometimes. Marriage cannot be explained in words, and married people's understanding of love, affection, attraction, lust, friendship, and those unnamed froces that bring and keep people together - that inexplicable chemical magnetism that's almost superhuman and telepathic, and that calm naturalness of someone's close presence and touch - is unsurpassed. There was a time I wrote about being safely able to be friends with the opposite gender only with married people aware of their commitment; now not only has that barrier melted with age and years, it seems to have become a catalyst for unsaid unnamed inexplicable warmth and connection.