Intimate Traps - Excerpt

1.

A clit or a cock is a fruit that plumps, engorging with its fill of blood. Nipples grow firm and lips get wet, yet despite these tantalizing effects of arousal we insist on maintaining the barest modicum of decency and self-restraint, ingesting each other only by degrees, possessing a drop, a mouthful, a swallow—never enough to satiate fully, we sip and suck and lust and long. The nature of our desire defies the very thing it seems to want: consumption; for, if we consumed our darling other, we would no longer have the pleasure of craving—so the goal then of fucking might best be described as seeking the right balance between desire and its satisfaction, see-saw swinging in parabolic arcs that graze the middle but keep us on edge: pinned and fleeing, held and free, caught in our continually thwarted attempts to attain the unattainable.

Sky was enamored with these erotic ideals, which they thought of—thanks to their years of studying world religions as an undergraduate—as ‘tantric paradoxes,’ and which they sought with unseeking submission; in other words, they were fundamentally open to the vast and incomprehensible mysteries of the universe and out of this reverence they never asked of it any specifics, maintaining that maximal psychic strength could only be supported on a base of infinite flexibility. And Sky had submissively sought and found Araceli (in the checkout line at the co-op where Sky had worked the previous year), and when Araceli had invited Sky to move into her apartment in downtown Bardo, MA, Sky had acquiesced, and now Sky was completing the final year of their MFA in Sculpture at BCLA (Bardo College of Liberal Arts), and now forces and patterns had assembled in such a way that Sky had had a dream the previous night—and the dream had been of polyamory, and the dream had been—

Well, the dream had been good, and so, transitioning from dream-state to waking, Sky was making a move.

* * *