Their first night:

I never thought something like this would happen to us, he said, his hand resting in her heartbeat.

She rolled toward him. The atoms in his skin spread out, making room for her breath to seep through.

I knew, she said.

How did you know?

The first time we ever met, standing on that path, you were already so familiar to me, like we had known one another forever.

But we had never met before.

That’s how I knew something like this would have to happen to us.

So we would know each other forever?

Before you were born, I knew you.

I see you, he said. / I see you.

Expectation. Forgive me.

I miss you when you are gone, and when you are near I miss you in anticipation of your next departure. There is no such thing as closeness. Objects can be no closer than they are, co-arisen and inseparable. Everything interpenetrates and yet I long to be penetrated, as if something is missing, as if something is lost. Who am I, if you do not know me? You ask me to write the answer on your face, yet you insist that it must be spoken, it must be in words. For a moment, before you explained your request, I thought you had understood. You said, with your air, or, with your breath, but all you meant was talking. You just wanted me to talk, as if that might bridge the gap. Oh, you do not know me, and I cannot tell you, it would only prove me right. What do you know without words? I am touching you and you are writing words on a screen. You are transmitting thoughts to someone else and you are not totally here. I leave and wonder when you will notice my absence. This is the only reason I leave you, so that maybe you will experience the lack of me, as I experience the lack of you. No matter how close I pull you, even into my very body, I lack you.

We stood on a cliff looking out over the edge of the world. It is so big, I say. It is so still, you say. Back in the town we had touched the leather horse things, and you said, they are made for something so much more powerful than we are, and you said, they are made so well, better than anything for people. And I touched them all with my hands, bridles and halters and bits and saddles. Oh September. The saddles the blankets the crops. Neither of us has ridden a horse. We will talk of the trips we have taken. I will tell you to buy a certain toy for a child I do not know. I hope that child is me. Once, you bought black shoes with white lightening bolts on them. I do not care for shoes because my feet are so big. You put metal to glass with duct tape. You remind me of my father.

My father called me, thinking I was thousands of miles from where I am. I have not returned the call. They say that fathers who have been absent ought to write to their daughters and apologize, even if it is the only thing they can do, even if their daughters will never forgive them or even acknowledge them. This, God bless him, my father has always done.

I want a long dress; I want a knife; I want a baby. We talk of Henry Miller, of his honesty, and the air is so light at the edge of the world, and so many of the trails are unauthorized. Why don’t we worship our ancestors here, you ask. In my family, we do, I say. And in another world I am writing to a stranger about how Georgia is like Russia and already I have nostalgia for the future I might share with the person I would tell this to, the person who might understand. You shove your arms in a heap of manure to see how warm it is on the inside — the people give you a look.

I can feel it all through me, the future we will not act out, the future we have already had, the future we have shared from the beginning. There was never a beginning, there was never. There was the edge of the world. It was so large. It was so still. And the birds on the rocks were sensitive, and the waves were sensitive, and the eyes that saw it all were sensitive.

It was simple: I loved someone and I wanted them to know it.

I would take you with me. I would take you into the hole in the center of my chest where I do not exist, have never existed, the laughter of permeability, the air. I would take you where I cannot go myself. God, this pain is exquisite, and your face, I write on your face, I take you on my life boat, I die in your arms as you change from a boy to an old man and back again, over and over. You are a completely different person. You are a mirror. I want to walk to the edge of the world with your DNA in my body.

Lying in the black bed with black bedding next to black bookshelves in the basement bachelor apartment full of metal and glass and the skulls of a few smallish and not-so-small animals and books about the influence of race on intelligence and various other warning signs I was mostly ignoring because I was nonetheless so turned on by the man who possessed them, perhaps because he possessed them, he had been turning me on this way since I was 18 and all the years-long gaps in the seduction had recently been retrospectively filled in, and we had just had sex or were about to have sex or were consciously not having sex.

This is when I decided I wanted to share the fantasy, so I said: do you have any fantasies?

he evaded the question by telling me that us lying together as we were right then was his fantasy, so I asked him if he wanted to hear one of mine, and he said by all means, so I told him:

I am sitting stone still like a statue on a altar in a temple. Outside the temple door is long line of men, waiting quietly. One at a time, they enter the temple, bow before the altar, where I sit cross-legged like a boddhisattva or an oracle. After prostrating, the men come forward, carefully insert their penises into my open mouth, and become instantly enlightened.

I had never told anyone this story ever, and after hearing it, my lover only asked: are they Japanese men? I said, that wasn’t important, the faces of particular men were never seen all that clearly, but I wondered how much he knew