“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.

Later over the course of the evening, she would give me what her ex-girlfriend Sammy refers to as a “smiley,” a simpler burn of that from a heated liquor-store lighter. It took her two tries to get it right, and then she flew off to the bathroom to grab the toothpaste that she ended up rubbing into my smoldering skin in order to cease promotion of more blisters.

“How did you know how to do that?” I of course had to inquire.

“I used to burn myself a lot,” answered she with that lilting, charming voice of a toddler at the top of the stairs. She judiciously daubed and spread the toothpaste like ointment on my arm, then covered the affected area with a red Crayola crayon sticker, and all was good.

Earlier, when Cordelia had done it to herself with that vaporizer of hers that doesn’t work very well and that reminds one of a old-time lantern with a 7-11 Slurpee straw jutting out of its side, I had pondered whether or not she did this to impress me or because she really wanted (had) to do this. But, I’m getting over such deliberations: they’re needless anymore, and after all, why should it matter? The fact is that she did it, she does it, and I’ve found a girl who burns herself and loves me dearly. So, I’ll just enjoy the ride, no?

Yes, and that’s not all. No.

There she was on the toilet in the bathroom, “micturating,” after telling me that the people in her MFA class felt that this word synonymous with “pissing” is a little too ostentatious to be employed as a garden-variety $64k word in her book-thesis. She told me in the same breath nearly that the females in her class had grown cross with her for revealing that girls need to “go to the bathroom after sex in order to avoid a UTI.”

“You’re not supposed to put that in a book!” they chastised her loudly in class.

But, Cordelia just laughed it off, as had I when earlier before this, our first fuck of the night, I had been lying in her bed - me in my self-made brown-and-yellow SARCASM IS FONY shirt and nothing else, she in her dishabille turquoise chemise with the spaghetti straps that tend to drive me to the brink of ripping them off, seemingly tattered country-girl skirt from Wal-Mart, and her damned black hair with electric-purple streaks that made me fall for her along with her sapphire-in-the-sky blue eyes - and she says to me - also in those green, knee-high socks with white stripes at top that I had purchased for her (us) from American Apparel - “Where do you want to cut me?”

Now it was all a bit too much for me, and so I began to laugh, cackle really, holding my closed eyes betwixt my fingers as one would who wishes to relieve a headache.

“Are you in the right headspace right now?” she asked me with maternal care born of my having lost it a little the last time we smoked together in her cluttered art-shack where she grew up and now lives on her own.

“I’m fine. It’s all a little too perfect,” I told her. Then we went for it with a razor that she had materialized from Some Other Place and a tab of sponge-like paper drenched in rubbing alcohol.

I didn’t try to make a “Hi” on the inner part of her silky-smooth thigh, but that’s what came out. That and her taking my finger to “show me what I did.” No, not the “Hi” mark now reddening and becoming semi-permanent for all her future lovers to admire under the sheen of her sweaty passion, but rather her most intimate and womanly part, now moist and wet with exuberance. “You made me cum,” said she in that same pedomorphic moppet voice I need to hear so regularly these sordid days.

So, I suppose that it doesn’t matter anymore, regardless, whether it’s for me, for her, for us. Here we are. Some people prefer vanilla and are made to believe and promulgate further that vanilla is all that one should eat. We prefer chocolate. I know I do, and I believe now more than ever so does Cordelia, whose gift to me at night’s end was a card that she hid in my computer case, one that read on the cover a quote from Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (“This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph”), and a cartoon kitty on the cover of said card, with an inside inscription written in sober, spare, feminine writing: “Mathew, I love you, and I love when you strangle me. – Cordelia.”