I stayed inside her for a very long time. Propped on my elbows, I slowed my rhythm, listened to our breath like bending trees, stopped counting my heartbeats, and felt my heart stop counting as well. I wanted to exist in the exclusively now, as the book put it. The past had nothing for me. I was inside her, and it didn’t matter how long I had been. But the future, well, the future was dangling god-affirming ecstasy, or the little death of need, and maybe a nibble on the neck. All good things. I knew if I so much as twitched my hips, the future would suck me straight to the afterglow. I found my balance and sought her eyes. I wanted her to see my unique love for her as her destiny. She’d seen this look from me before, this forcing-an-epiphany look. She flipped below me like a dolphin in a tank and gave me a look of her own. She rocked me off my elbows and pulled me back like a magnet, rocked me, pulled me. I couldn’t breathe. I wondered what animal pose we were doing. Silly boy, she was thinking, or so I thought, epiphanies are cheap. She growled. I found a rhythm that wasn’t metaphorical and harmonized with her to make something wild and furry we could share. And there it was, she was, when I quit striving for insight: the multifaced feminine deity of my personal pantheon: lips of former girlfriends and a schoolgirl skirt, variably breasted, numerously thighed, arms and legs enough to hold the important bits together: all the women I ever worshiped in a single apparition. I don’t know what hybridized figment she was concocting, but we made what we needed. and we saw that it was good.

Copyright © December 1, 2006