Just Us

We failed to register the details, had too much reverence for the signal, a flock of saints dressed as peasants, the beauty of clamor and paradox shot through the brutalized universe of mathematics and reduced to “on” or “off.” In the interim, there were trees. A mess of obstacles that solicited a strange choreography we saw only later, in the playback. We swapped recitation for rehearsal, a unified vision for a field of noble gasses. God itself became an aerosol, passed through surfaces and sex and close talking. We celebrated the ease of transmission, not worrying about the ease with which sickness would eventually seize the capital. We opened all the windows. Inside the protected tropical hallway, the mythically inflated arcade, traces of life on its way, ripping the perimeter of escape. This envy, no matter how theorized, eats and hurts and inflames. What issued from that unspeakably beautiful land route was two attachments to the future, two ways of reacting to food, autonomy, absence. Two potencies. Two rooms for which a third had to be made, a pocket in the wall. I came into it, then out. At a certain speed, this flutter between opposites is pleasure itself, the reason for flight, the necessary basis for day and night. We put too much trust in rubrics, we trimmed fat and fascia and play. We forgot that difference does not have to kill affinity. Tripping comes as no surprise. It was simple, a hook so good it left a gash in every lap around the rink. I caught her rearranging her time, the woman who made me. For that, apparently everything.

Wendy Lotterman is a postdoctoral researcher in literature at the University of Oslo and a senior editor at Parapraxis. She is the author of A Reaction to Someone Coming In.
Originally published:
December 15, 2025

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