I will not be absorbed. Having been dissolved into nothing, a pill beneath a tongue or light dissipating low across a plane of grass, feeling diffuse and less-than-real, feeling like the ghost of a ghost of a ghost, this body haunting the body of us, the body of our people, who make one body by their conformation, feeling like I am just an arm, leg, finger, the nail on a finger, important, yes, but certainly amputatable, having been dissolved and feeling dissolved, I will not be absorbed any further, will not sink into the mire, the soup of bodies you’ve been cooking for me. For me, as in to make me a part of it. For me, as in making it my fate. Everything in the pot softens and flavors that which is also in the pot. Everything in the pot blurs into all one thing. I am one thing unto myself. I will not be absorbed, am not absorbable, my borders distinct, firm, fixed.

What is uncondescendingly mutual, rooted in freedom and, equally, care? To love each other, but never like children. The root being, never, an elision. How do I enter you the right way? Do I enter? The lust toward being consumed always beneath the genital feeling of nearness. The genital feeling of nearness moving you always toward. Looking toward you, an other, I want to feel your heat upon me, your imagination upon me. Wanting to move myself out of myself like a too-small house. Wanting to — Don’t take from me, I might say, or — . Can I be uncondescendingly mutual? Rooted in freedom and, equally, care? Loving myself, but never like a child, us alike in that love, having that love in common, its quality and extent? Believing that there is something I offer you that the world will only offer once? And bound to you by it? Bound by it to our mutuality. You bound by what you offer, but freely, mutually, like a mother, someone might say, but, really, altogether apart from one.