The evening was the smell of greasy Chinese food and spit. A series of continuous beeps kept us alert during the intervals.
We tried to get into the divine image contained in each other, in the sweat coming off us, in gnawing and prostrating ourselves; yanking an exorcism out of the nape, the ears, the ass and so on. We dug into each other until we were numb, reducing ourselves to an animal rhythm. I spat out something like a pearl and admired it. For a moment I didn’t exist. Whatever there was to me was left condensed into this waxy pearl.
After sex, anecdotes came to us easily. Things that made sense to tell each other; the one about the boy who stayed too long at the party and found himself with no choice but to walk home with half a gram of coke, running into all sorts of unfortunate circumstances on his way; or the one about the family that couldn’t eat without entertainment and when there was a blackout they all nearly starved to death; the man everyone thought was a flasher with suspiciously ample hips and something swinging between his legs who turned out to have a third leg and ended up on the street; life-size replicas of French gardens floating in the middle of the California wilderness where you’d get lost and slip out of time; alcoholic uncles abused by sober God fearing aunts; illnesses that ran in the family that haven’t caught up to us yet; acquaintances that fled the country with despicable debts and ex-girlfriends trying to reach them; missing this or that friend who used to sing entire medleys badly before falling asleep.
She kept humming Auld Lang Syne and would, when she stopped minding herself, slip into an off-kilter Amazing Grace like she trying to conjure something between the bedsheets, a second set of hands to help us along. There was a distinct lack of trust in pure religiosity in her that seemed to come from some inherent understanding. She understood the Upanishads without having ever read them; the Talmud, Borges, the Hadiths, the nature of the Dao, Khalil Gibran and another myriad ways of knowing and being known without granting them too much importance. In a sense she was often the only true mystic in the room. She didn’t trust it. She found it more logistically sound to lean away from this inclination. Most people tend to lean into it as a form of pride in their abilities, peacocking their tremendous mnemonic understanding of how this or that works or what God is versus what we demand he be. She knew that an inclination that insists on the transient and incorporeal nature of things removed her from society in a way that only love, was she to let anything do so, should. As a result, my looking at her the way I did would cause her severe discomfort like she’d been caught in something that she’d failed to prevent.
Her eyes still seemed to burn with heat. Something about them made it look like she was always trying to look away from something just around the corner. She thought she could see what was coming at all moments but was grounded enough to not always believe it.
The small movements of her pouty lips betrayed this about her and I couldn’t help but stare. My intensity bled out and so did hers, they might’ve been at odds but were both too infectious.
