It is our peculiar punishment that we know things change and we want this to be otherwise.

The sex that is presented to us in everyday culture feels strange to me its images are fragments, lifeless, removed from normal experience. Real sex, the sex in our cells and in the space between our neurons, leaks out and gets into things and stains our vision and colors our lives.

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside.

Sex can be renounced -- but sexuality cannot. We can't avoid sexual issues by avoiding sex, or by dismissing its importance, or by showing disrespect to our own or other people's sexual feelings.

You don't write. You get out of the way.

Sex is a game, a weapon, a toy, a joy, a trance, an enlightenment, a loss, a hope.