Connie’s Reviews > The Lost Steps > Status Update

“We remedy the inelegance and haste of our first encounters, mastering the syntax of our bodies. Our limbs are comfortable, our arms where they should be. We select, determine, in marveled experiments, the attitudes and postures that will mark the rhythm and the manner of our future couplings. We teach each other in the forge of lovemaking, giving birth to a secret language. Delight procreates an intimate language, off-limits to others, that will be the dialect of our nights. It is a two-part invention, with terms denoting possession, thanksgiving, sexual suffixes, vowels conceived by the skin, sobriquets unknown and unimaginable before yesterday, employed when others are out of earshot. Today, for the first time, Rosario has called me by my name, repeating it endlessly, as though its syllables must be constantly reshaped—and in her mouth, my name has a sound so singular, so bewildering, that this word that I know best sinks me in a kind of rapture, and I hear it as though it were only just created. We live the peerless elation of thirst shared and slaked, and when we look out at our surroundings, we seem to recall a country of unknown flavors. I jump in the water to wash off the dry herbs clinging to the sweat on my back, and I laugh when it occurs to me that what
violates nature's rhythms—that I am in rut, and she in heat, in midsummer.”