Primordial: An Abstraction

46

My wife and I have an open relationship. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

I fall in love with my eschatology professor.

The swell of her bust cuts me deeper than the curve of her hips.

We make love beneath the moon.

Afterwards we lie naked on our backs in the grass and discuss the probability of the moon derailing from orbit and slamming into the earth like a great ball of scrimshaw, craters revealing themselves as open bear traps and vagina dentata etched into the ivory.

She ends her thoughts on the matter with a soft, awkward explosion from her lips. But not quite an explosion. More like a pop. And yet more violent than a pop.

“What lies between an explosion and a pop?” I ask her.

“Discourse,” she whispers. “Rhetoric.”

I take her breast in my hand and massage it. She tells me it doesn’t feel good. I massage it differently. She says that feels worse.

I look at my hand.

The fingers, I realize.

The knuckles, I wonder.

My eschatology professor rolls on top of me. We set aside the pretense of language and gaze into each other’s eyes. Our pupils have swallowed our irises. I can see the starlight reflecting off of my dark matter onto hers.

Later, we have sex in every public bathroom on campus, just to say we did it.

I do something she doesn’t like. I say something she doesn’t like. She tells me she doesn’t like what I’m thinking.

She orders me to temper my metabolism.

I breathe in and out, in and out, in and out until I accomplish a fluid synesthesia, all of the extensions and vicissitudes of my sensorium called to stiff attention.

“I can hear your breathing,” she remarks.

“Well I have to breathe. Don’t I?”

“Not that way. You don’t hear me breathing that way.”

I release a cataleptic sigh. “I don’t know what you want. I have tried to involve all of the senses. I have tried to account for the full breadth of human experience and potentially the experience of the moon. I am not the moon. I don’t know what the moon thinks or what the moon desires or what the moon intends to do. You can’t hold that against me.”

She brushes a sandbug from her nipple. “I can hold anything against anyone. Your existential crisis is hardly my affair. Pull up your trousers and pretend you’re a man. Better: pretend you’re the moon. This is not a sitcom. We are all going to die and be forgotten someday.”

There’s nothing I can do to counter the argument. Once the certainty of oblivion is invoked, disavowal shotguns into plainclothesed entropy.