September 20, 2005

After the passionate shudders, after the sighs whispered in lustful ears, our bodies unclasped and rolled back naked and sweaty to find their boundaries again. We held hands as we regained our breath and dreamed up new adventures.

“When winter comes, let’s walk across the Thames and hear the frozen river groan beneath us,” I said.

“People die that way every year,” she said. “The river never fully freezes and even if you walk on it with snowshoes you’ll crash to the bottom. I don’t want to die.”

“What’s this crazy talk about not wanting to die? That’s the whole point of living!”

“Death?!”

“Yes! All of life just leads up to this ultimate unravelling, this ecstatic moment of non-being.”

“The point of living is not death but all the stuff between,” she said. “I’m afraid of dying.”

“That’s why you’ve got to practice daily — how else are you going to be any good at it? Every day teaches you how to die a little better.”

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” she asked, turning her body slightly.

“No,” I said, kissing my way along her spine. “It’s all in your mind.”

“I hate it when you talk like that. I love you and I don’t want you to die.”

“I’m not going to live forever, and besides, it’s not like it matters anyways.”

“But I want my life to have some kind of meaning, not this emptiness, this dying.”

“It doesn’t have to be emptiness.” I told her about jumping naked in frozen rivers early in the spring, and how alive I felt and how close to death at that moment when a thousand shards of ice punctured my nervous system.

“Perhaps life is just one attempt to die after another,” I said. “Once I read a book about people throwing themselves from tree to tree …”

“Oh, how many bones they must have broken …”

“… just to get a taste of death, of life. And there was one line in particular that struck me, that seemed so true that I had to write it down in a notebook somewhere. And it said, ‘We should all have a near-death experience weekly, twice weekly — how much we’d get done! The clarity we’d know!’ And I think that’s all I want, that clarity, week after week.”

“You talking like this, now, scares me. Just promise me you won’t die.”

“We all have to die sometimes.”

“But this is just stupid,” she said, shuddering again on the pillow. And I held on to her naked body, aroused and afraid of the things I had spoken.