Loving Eugenides

I say 'I love him' and I wonder if I mean it. I love his words. They do something that effects both my brain and my stomach in a way that reminds me of sex. I want to have sex with the words he has written. I have no way of expressing how wonderful these words are. The only way would be to open my mouth and take them in, eat them and be filled with them as a result. This is how I sometimes feel about my friends. I love them in a way that is inexpressible. I want to devour them and to share this experience with all the world and yet also I am jealous of them, as if I alone should be able to experience the pleasures of their company. No one else loves them in quite the way I love them. The only way to express this effectively would be through sex.

I want to have sex with my friends. I have written a whole book that speaks to this. I read a collection of stories by one of them and I feel myself opening, my chest, my mind, my cunt. Sex would express this, and yet sex is never enough. I have forgotten the disappointment of the morning after, waking, and knowing that the only way I can speak to them again is to fuck again. Knowing that I am the only person who would like to fuck continually without stopping. Knowing that there is then the disappointment of conversation, a time when our skin goes back to what it was, something untouched and clothed.

I want to have sex with Jeffrey Eugenides for all the reasons that I want to fuck my friends, not because I love them in particular, but because I love their work, or the things they say, or their small acts of kindness and it breaks my heart to watch them and not respond with my whole body. When I finish this book the disappointment will be like waking up with a new lover and sitting beside them at breakfast, remembering that we are separate people and that my feelings belong wholly to myself. This writing and reading is the most intimate of things and for the duration of this book I will be the lover of Eugenides. I will stop and wonder at his words and know that we have found some connection. I will kid myself that my reading of his work has everything to do with his intention.

THis morning in the bath I masturbated with a copy of "The Marriage Plot" in my other hand. It was not a sex scene and yet the placement of words was enough to make me come, not the little rise and fall of an orgasm that is the result of my current consumption of pornography, but instead a back-arching tremor that seemed to centre myself in my inner thighs. This is the kind of orgasm that I cannot currently achieve by watching double penetration and yet these words have dug a pit of emotion and my chest has opened and I say 'I love him', meaning perhaps that finally I have found a moment in which I can love myself.