stream through the window. I was happy in a sad sort of way, because I knew this was never going to work.
Work. Not work. What do I mean?
If someone had told Mallory that he would climb Everest but die in the attempt, still he would have climbed it.
What does the end matter?
Here, now, is enough, isn’t it?
You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.
I said I was afraid of not living.
I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
Here’s my life—I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed.
This is my chance. Take it.
You rolled over so that I could stroke your back.
Sex between women is mirror geography. The subtlety of its secret—utterly the same, utterly different. You are a looking-glass world. You are the hidden place that opens to me on the other side of the glass. I touch your smooth surface and then my fingers sink through to the other side. You are what the mirror reflects and invents. I see myself, I see you, two, one, none. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to know. Kiss me.
You kiss me and the glass grows cloudy. I stop thinking. Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.
Dear love—with your hair like a bonfire that somebody kicked over—red, spread out, sparks flying. I don’t want to conquer you; I just want to climb you. I want to climb through the fire until I am the fire.
Love has got complicated, tied up with promises, bruised with plans, dogged with an ending that nobody wants—when all love is, is what italways is—that you look at me and want me and I don’t turn away.
If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can’t work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter.
Let me in.
You do.
In this space which is inside you and inside me I ask for no rights or territories. There are no frontiers or controls. The usual channels do not exist. This is the orderly anarchic space that no one can dictate, though everyone tries. This is a country without a ruler. I am free to come and go as I please. This is Utopia. It could never happen beyond bed. This is the model of government for the world. No one will vote for it, but everyone comes back here. This is the one place where everybody comes.
Most of us try to turn this into power. We’re too scared to do anything else.
But it isn’t power—it’s sex.
Sex. How did it start?
In the strange dark history of our evolution, there was a shift, inevitability, away from self-reproducing organisms—like bacteria—towards organisms which must fuse with one another to survive.
You see, bacteria know the secret of eternal life. They do not die unless something kills them. They don’t change, they don’t age, all they do is multiply.
Fusion allows complexity and diversity, but with it, we don’t know why, hand in hand, came death in the first of her many disguises. Death disguised as life.
It was our only chance. We took it.
So those morbid medievals and those burning Romantic poets weren’t wrong. Sex and death belong together, joined in our imaginations as they are in our DNA.
Sex and death are our original parents. For some of us, the only family we’ll ever have.
Sex. How did it start?
That hotel room in Paris. Dinner at Paul’s. The walk over the bridge. Champagne in the afternoon. The rain. Your face.
And before that? Before I saw you?
I’m looking for something, it’s true. Looking for you, looking for me, believing that the treasure is really there. I knew from the moment I saw you (as the saying
Work. Not work. What do I mean?
If someone had told Mallory that he would climb Everest but die in the attempt, still he would have climbed it.
What does the end matter?
Here, now, is enough, isn’t it?
You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.
I said I was afraid of not living.
I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
Here’s my life—I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed.
This is my chance. Take it.
You rolled over so that I could stroke your back.
Sex between women is mirror geography. The subtlety of its secret—utterly the same, utterly different. You are a looking-glass world. You are the hidden place that opens to me on the other side of the glass. I touch your smooth surface and then my fingers sink through to the other side. You are what the mirror reflects and invents. I see myself, I see you, two, one, none. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to know. Kiss me.
You kiss me and the glass grows cloudy. I stop thinking. Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.
Dear love—with your hair like a bonfire that somebody kicked over—red, spread out, sparks flying. I don’t want to conquer you; I just want to climb you. I want to climb through the fire until I am the fire.
Love has got complicated, tied up with promises, bruised with plans, dogged with an ending that nobody wants—when all love is, is what italways is—that you look at me and want me and I don’t turn away.
If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can’t work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter.
Let me in.
You do.
In this space which is inside you and inside me I ask for no rights or territories. There are no frontiers or controls. The usual channels do not exist. This is the orderly anarchic space that no one can dictate, though everyone tries. This is a country without a ruler. I am free to come and go as I please. This is Utopia. It could never happen beyond bed. This is the model of government for the world. No one will vote for it, but everyone comes back here. This is the one place where everybody comes.
Most of us try to turn this into power. We’re too scared to do anything else.
But it isn’t power—it’s sex.
Sex. How did it start?
In the strange dark history of our evolution, there was a shift, inevitability, away from self-reproducing organisms—like bacteria—towards organisms which must fuse with one another to survive.
You see, bacteria know the secret of eternal life. They do not die unless something kills them. They don’t change, they don’t age, all they do is multiply.
Fusion allows complexity and diversity, but with it, we don’t know why, hand in hand, came death in the first of her many disguises. Death disguised as life.
It was our only chance. We took it.
So those morbid medievals and those burning Romantic poets weren’t wrong. Sex and death belong together, joined in our imaginations as they are in our DNA.
Sex and death are our original parents. For some of us, the only family we’ll ever have.
Sex. How did it start?
That hotel room in Paris. Dinner at Paul’s. The walk over the bridge. Champagne in the afternoon. The rain. Your face.
And before that? Before I saw you?
I’m looking for something, it’s true. Looking for you, looking for me, believing that the treasure is really there. I knew from the moment I saw you (as the saying
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