“Ordinary people can never fall over the walls, because they never dare climb high enough to see what is beyond the walls.” - B. Traven

Cordelia is sucking down the last of my semen, voracious and desperate. It pierces, for some reason, and she’s making loud slurping noises that I’ve not heard before in real life. I’m wondering where it all goes in her little body, whether or not this could be construed as some form of cannibalism. Is she not, in effect, eating and swallowing, devouring my - or possibly our - future children? How do alien subcultures think of us from their outposts on the Moon?

Luckily, we’re both Jewish and non-secular at that, but imagine if both of us or one or the other were Catholic? What a slew of metaphysical crises would we undergo in this situation? It’s difficult, anyway, as ever since we began our lurid and incredibly intense love affair whirlwind circus, I’ve had trouble not with erection or maintaining stiffness, but rather with attaining climax.

Cordelia seems to pop off every five seconds, moaning and groaning, gyrating and trembling non-stop, carrying on like some mad banshee shrieking from the bowels of the Ninth Circle of Hell alongside Brutus & Pals. But, maybe she’s merely acting Meg Ryan style.

No, it’s not that I don’t enjoy sex with Cordelia - it’s raw and pure, it’s volatile, fast, hard, and rough. She’s a whore, and I’m a loser, and somehow together, there’s some kind of cataclysmic explosion of the likes I had yet to experience. I believe that it’s not about pleasure or Jouissance, for me at least. Our lovemaking, to me, is more about a very visceral sensation of being wholly haimish. It is like home.

“We fit,” as Cordelia reminds me once, twice, and again. I tell my friends that, “I’ve met a girl who’s so perfect for me, it would scare you (and most other people, too).” Love is a word, a symbol or abstraction; the feelings we share are far more ganglionic and impossible to express verbally. Many couples say the same, but rarely are they who bring RCA cables to bed.

It’s difficult to reconcile my intense emotions for this fallen dove, but the truly incomprehensible task is understanding what it is she is thinking, and how she feels inside, sincerely and without filter. “Are you humoring me?” I long to ask her at each turning moment (and often do).

Experiencing as I do the Hegelian totality of our relationship all at once, the fait accompli that has already happened and will happen infinite more times throughout the Sisyphean courses of the Universe, I experience too at once and with all else, the end of our relationship, that future date when we are no longer entwined in one another’s arms or when I cannot feel the scar running up her chest, when the opalescent burn on my wrist has already healed over into a mere fleeting memory as opposed to constant stinging reminder that my only Cordelia is out there, lying in wait and thinking of me, too.

To handle this crystalline cherub as anything other than a character I invented - whether consciously or unconsciously - is a task that I may not be up for, but: guess what? Tough. Like her soul, I think. Then again, we just met four nights ago.

* * *

When I’m not with Cordelia, something feels dreadfully wrong. Her therapist would say that this is a “red flag,” that my attachment to her is somehow detrimental to something-or-other, and all the rest of what Henry James would call “the twaddle of graciousness.” It matters little to me, though, as, if Cordelia’s therapist is anything like the other therapists I’ve known - friends and colleagues of my mother, who happens to be one - the day will soon be upon us that the woman will be leaving her house wearing two hats on her head.

The only time anything feels wrong when I’m with Cordelia is when she’s crying so furiously that I can’t tell whether it’s all too much for her or whether it’s all not nearly enough. No, and then again, there was the point in the night in which she gave me a knowing look and placed her lacteal, lank wrist against the white-hot scalding-hot brass burner of her makeshift vaporizer. And then again she burned herself, impelling me to give it a go, but with the tip of my finger; my, the thing was hot and left a quick blister at the tip of said digit.