February 14, 2005:

Sex as art.

Spend an hour. Spend two hours. Sweet and tender, slow. Emotion, connection, communion. Build lightly, little by little, deftly speeding up, adding a little pressure. Listen to each other's breathing, watch the color of each other's skin. It's all about the sweet rhythm of acceleration, and the way that sweetness slowly turns to heat. So that, by the time you reach down for the deep, hard friction, your mutual passion is so explosive that it's like you've exchanged skin, that is, identities. The release is not the point.

Sex as intoxication, like drugs, but better. Sex as rocket ride to a better place. Sex as door.

"Mercy fucks." Men who don't care about her. Her beautiful skin pressed beneath an ugly paunch; wrists bound, whether physically or metaphorically you don't know and don't want to know. Practices you associate with pain. Cynicism, vanity, control, ego. Evil. How you hate these images.

"You're like a girl," she says. "You care about it too much." Forgetting for the moment that once she'd said out loud, during sex, at the end of a long and false relationship, "I hate the way he touches me."

Life is so painful sometimes.

People either get it or they don't. You can't teach them what they don't already know. The saddest thing is when they forget what they once did know, because their pain is so deep or their confusion so encompassing or their identity so fragile. Or for some other reason you can't see.