You meet her at the court square. The rain, which had been falling all day, made the night fall early. She is disgusted, her mouth is hard and she walks with her fists bunched up. You hug her and try to kiss her mouth. She turns her face away, saying no not now, not here. You say but I haven’t seen you in so many days and I have suffered. She says this cannot go on.

She feels trapped and she wants her freedom back. You would give it back if it was a book you had borrowed from her to read. You don’t say anything but look at the statue in the distance. She sees you have looked away and turns her head to sees that you are looking at the statue. You had passed by it many times before without noticing it till she pointed out to you. This was before she lost her freedom somewhere.

You sigh and say what do you want me to do? She closes her eyes and says I don’t want all this. Does this mean the talk you had at this statue about wishing to grow old together like that old couple cast in bronze? You say she has always been free to do whatever she wanted and make whatever choices she wants to make. She looks at you as if you didn’t understand her at all, which of course you didn’t.

You know she feels responsible for your need for her, responsible for letting your need for her happen. You don’t know how to flush yourself of this need but you have been struggling with it for a while. You say what can I do to help, to make you feel better? You know that there is nothing you can do to help her. The choice is hers to make. And based on that choice, the suffering or joy is both of yours to bear.

She says she didn’t know that it would come to this. What is this? This meeting on a rainy evening? This whirlpool of emotions which seem to be sucking both of you in? She says she talked to her friend who had advised her to first sort out her priorities, determine what she wants from her life and not compromise with anything till she finds exactly what she wants. You say that is what you also believe in but you wonder how this is different from being selfish? Is freedom then a selfish instinct? You have no answers, you only have been talking about freedom, or as he said preaching the freedom gospel.

That’s why you have come to this country, haven’t you? You had termed it escape, in your poems. Escape from all that you said. Only now you are beginning to question, what is that you have escaped? You have answers on the surface; oh I didn’t want to waste days trying to access a printer as it was in that damn country. It was also suffocating and tribal. You had enough of that. You wanted to jump into a crucible of intellectual creativity and set the world on fire. You didn’t know the crossing would also mean heightened loneliness.

You say mournfully fine do what you please. Perhaps you should listen to what your family says and cut this off. She says don’t drag them into this but yes they think I am being foolish. You say yes they may be right, because you see those equations on the board as well. You are poor and still are a nobody to a large part of the world. You haven’t proven yourself. You also have fallen into the habit of flagellating yourself with her words. She says you don’t understand what she is going through. She hasn’t slept for more than a few hours in the last 48 hours. You hold her hand. What can you do? Can you take her place at the hospital so that she can sleep? Can you learn for her? Can you take the pain and suffering, this young girl with cancer, that woman who was infected by her former husband with AIDS, this color of blood from a gunshot, that junkie who has shit all over himself and can barely speak, instead of her?

These individual sufferings, how to make them vanish? You want her to be playful but how can you expect her to be playful always? She is also like you, a human being. She says I just want to have fun. She says she doesn’t want to deal with all the concomitants of this relationship. She would like to do her work, learn as much as she can and occasionally go out on random and fun dates. Is this a comment on how she views being with you? Or is she just being brutally honest? This cuts you to the quick, you flinch but don’t say anything.

You think if that is what she wants to do, she should do that right away, perhaps even this evening. You are sure she will find enough entertainment. But is that which is entertaining satisfying? Doesn’t what is satisfying have to be entertaining? How does one know the difference?

You talk to him and he says you are full of noise. You should let her have it, have this disgust and anger you are feeling. He says you should cuss at her, call her right away what you might call her later in your own mind. He says you don’t have to take this shit. You know you want to do what he says and that you will feel better if only momentarily. But that won’t give you any answers, won’t give her any answers. You have been seeking answers like a madman, but you always stop short of being desperate, being institutionalized.

Later that night you pick up Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and read … “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… do not … seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will… gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

They are together after many days. He now forgets how many exactly. He doesn’t care, she is before his eyes. He can reach out and touch her face. The absence however ebbs and flows between them, a wall in part fluid and in part impenetrable. She wants him to step across that wall. She wants to step across that wall. He doesn’t talk much during these intimate moments. He is afraid his speech will make the moment vanish.

She steps up to him and rubs her body against his provocatively. He wants to talk about this, she wants him inside her. That is the only conversation she can bear. He wants to say this is painful, this coupling and uncoupling. He wants to say he feels separated from many universes which presume that he is still a part of them. And that he wants define a universe for his self. He needs some help.

She makes him hard. This is lust and both of them are animals. He still doesn’t touch her. His hands are cold. This always has been painful for him. Not sex, this becoming and unbecoming an animal. Its violence shakes him, he is afraid it will split him up, this cyclotron. His discovery of the animal was forced by deep pain he wanted to escape, by not being aware of it, when he was quite young. Pain that followed love. What is love anyway? He was in the bathroom, crying in that tomb, running water to muffle his weeping. Then the animal, what is it, a dragon, a fox, a rat?, shot out of his skin. And only then he could fall into a dreamless sleep.

She opens his lips and he pushes his tongue into her mouth. He wants to believe that what they are doing is guided by this mystery called love. But he is not sure if love is equal to solace. He wants to be solaced. She wants to be solaced as well. But they don’t know how to do so at the same time. She guides him into her wetness. He never did that himself except once. His lust only rarely overpowered his need to be solaced. He begins to move because that is what is expected of him. He closes his eyes to the lake of pain that exists between them.

He never could talk much during sex. All talk felt untrue compared to the immediate sensations he felt with his body, that of fire and that of suffering. He had read somewhere that one route to nirvana is through coitus. This felt far from nirvana, there was no calm awareness, which he occasionally glimpsed when he meditated or tried to. Still occasionally when he opened his eyes and saw her looking at his face expectant, he had to murmur words like love you, you are beautiful, each untrue. He didn’t feel any love, only the great distance between them, he was sure that couldn’t be bridged this way anymore. There were too many daggers, few with each other’s finger prints and the rest with others prints in their bodies, to call the mutilated flesh beautiful. And in that violent vortex, it’s hard to say when sex turned into fucking or when it turned into making love. What is love anyway?

They begin to grunt from their physical effort. She moves her hips with desperateness, she wants to transform into something beautiful, she wants to shed this body which she was taught and suggested to hate. He doesn’t think of his body escape as something that imprisons him and makes him suffer. He doesn’t wish to transform it. He only wants to escape from it. They are both separated, running different races in different empty stadiums lost to each other. Or maybe it’s he who had left the track to sit on the benches. He stops himself from ejaculating but in that effort he feels futility wash over him like a wave, futility of this passing moment, this passing act. He feels very tender, he wants to say he felt her beauty when he pointed out the moon through the winter branches and she saw poetry. And that she doesn’t have to beat herself against him.

But he doesn’t want her to read this as disinterest of her body. So he doesn’t stop moving back and forth between her legs, a dark sail rigged to her. Is this all there is to passion? Repetition and movement? He closes his eyes, and even then sees her. She is the female form of everything that is broken in him. It is she who wants to believe that after physical lust passes, something of love is still left behind. It is she who wants to believe in those lies he tells her to ravage her and which he won’t once he too is habituated to her body. It’s she whom he wants to run to, it’s she whom he wants to commune with. Meanwhile the animal leaves him. He is the country of muffled dreams. He is love. What is love anyway?