And then I would go home and lock the door and feed the cat, eat if I was hungry, delaying the time, the moment, teasing myself.

And then the time would come when I had no other obligations, and I would lie on my mattress on the floor and slide into meditation. The lips would speak into my ear—the full, red, glistening lips—and She spoke with clarity and purpose, gently, and told me of the pleasure I had given Her that night.

And She proceeded to give me pleasure in return.

She appeared to me always in one of two forms. When I was awake, meditating, the lips would speak to me, and while I saw them only in my mind’s eye, I knew each crease, each wrinkle, in her lip, each curve of white tooth, each glistening dot on the tip of her tongue.

And when we scampered through the void togeth­er, listening to music, She was merely a whisper of fog, mutable fog that danced and swirled and tickled as gleefully as any playmate.

Sometimes in the void we would just listen to the music, and I would calmly sit while She acted out the sounds, as if She, the fog, was the very substance of the tones. She changed as the music soared; She swirled as a delicate mist; She expanded to great mounds of rolling fog and obscured my sight as She fell on me and wrapped about me, tickling, teasing. The music must have been of Her creation; no one else could possibly have imagined something so beau­tiful, so perfect, so essentially suited to our relation­ship, our experiences, our personalities, our togetherness and love.

Other times we would just talk, Her wit, experi­ence, and lightning-­quick anecdotes a joy to be around. But mostly Her essence was that of love, and when I was with Her, I was loved, totally and com­pletely.

It seems incomprehensible now, but it was a long, long time before I realized that I had no name for Her, nor did I really know Her. My loneliness and longing to touch another’s soul became confused in the light of this brilliant and loving personality, and I thought I had found what I had been looking for.

Maybe I had, indeed.

She, certainly, had found what She had been looking for when She found me, and She milked my devotion as completely as I milked the lifeblood from Her victims.

In the name of love.

The days lengthened, Easter came and went, the belching buses ceased to bring tourists, and brown patches began to appear on the mountainsides. I came out of the winter as if arising from a deep sleep, awakening from a slumber so fraught with night terrors and strange sounds that reality held little but suspicion.

Melted snow ran in the streets, down the hills, and great floods and mud slides were the plight of those who lived below us.