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?