Sex=a way to stop. In the space between the morning and the afternoon we did the things we knew by heart. We built up slowly, until finally we were like animals—groaning and panting and begging each other for it. We’d stepped out of time—into the forest where the past and the future swarm together like insects in the tree tops. My mind rose high above this teeming cloud of memory and illusion on an elevator of pleasure and pain. I followed the phenomena of phenomena itself—traveling far out to the edge of the abyss where there were no more words, slip-sliding across the surface of things, but somehow always remaining tethered to that which was familiar—the elaborate system of interwoven contexts that was conjured up by the simple word, “home”, and made real by the presence of his lips.