nathan’s Reviews > The Italy Letters > Status Update

We were just leaves that knew how to breathe and we were just animals that had teeth we could use. And, having teeth did not imply that we were destined to be hunters or that we were born to roar. But these who dined before me may have been roaring or they may have been dancing bears, waiting to tame their dreams.

Sometimes sharing throbbing walls with another was just merely that: throbbing walls. But people put too much meaning or significance into things and space and intent and pure chance. This overkill of overthinking of overanalyzing of over-connecting could violate the existence of self and others and one’s sense of volition over time.

Most people fuck because they have to fuck—but I think I wanted to fuck you because there was no other way to be. Our desire would have climbed these high stairs. At the top where there would be no more steps—we would fuck as if through fucking we named an intimate evolutional human event like the first time art was carved into the wall of the cave Willendorf.

When I kissed the back of your neck, it would be a place where a heartbeat opens its first provisional door before pulsating into a fit of radium. But more than anything, I wanted to understand your body like I have never understood a body in its short lifetime. I wanted to understand if our caress has brevity. That if you came to open yourself to me would passion have a limit.

That you knew what I wanted before I knew what I wanted. That when you touched me— that touch had already trafficked my skin decades ahead of its human time.

And if my muscles were not the river that pulled your thighs into my river? What then? If we do ever make love and you reciprocate the content of my appetite, I imagine our lovemaking would be gentle and vehemently ardent. I imagine that you would measure how long it would take your kiss to arrive to the doorstep of my body.

What if between us was not a lake? And if our nipples when integrated were not mountains? Then what? If my hips and your hips were not two sedimentary rocks collided by time.

Everywhere, your skin. The tone of my ache. The resilient nature of our hunger. I thought about the atmosphere of your tongue. The density of our lovemaking. The first time my fingers would run through your body. These fugacious, fragrant thoughts as they covered the entire continent of my imagination. Mainly, I wanted to understand the geometry of our intimacy.

She didn’t answer your question. You had asked her the same question last year and she didn’t really answer. She was also deaf or was greatly hearing-impaired.

You asked me, “How will you rest your weary heart?” You also asked Chris Kraus last week why she and all her characters moved all the time in her stories. Why she didn’t describe interiors and it annoyed her. You were not sure why it annoyed her. It was your perception. Like a little needle.