The body beaten by the blows of those traces becoming a sore. That wound is the one that corresponds to you. There isn’t anything you can do about it. That consoled me. That idea still consoles me: that pain that would never abandon me was, in the end, mine, something I’d accomplished. Meeting the man from the cave neither alleviated nor erased the pain. It was proof of the possibilities of loss, heartbreak, desire.

6

ONE OF THOSE mornings I woke up in his bed, the man from the cave told me things. He, who didn’t say much, spoke. It was a holiday and the only time I’d spent more than two days in the cave. My vagina ached a little like it does right before I get my period, and the feeling that I had to get out of there wouldn’t leave me alone. It was my third day there and I no longer had clean clothes or the desire to bathe in cold water. He was sitting in a chair, his white feet playing in the dirt. An insect was buzzing around an apple we’d left half-eaten. He told me about some ideas for movies he wanted to make and showed me clips of one he’d already made. He pulled out his computer and said I’ll show you. I sat on his lap as an image shot out and started to pulse. It’s like my vagina right now, I thought. The thud of something falling. Of something that expects to be caught and falls with the anguish of what doesn’t come. The ovum. He stroked my shoulder while I watched the image of silver light disintegrating. Something always happened when he stroked me. He did so gently, stimulating the skin not being touched. The part he wasn’t stroking started prickling and the sensation extended throughout the rest of my body. He stroked my forearm and my whole arm anticipated the arrival of his fingers, but his fingers never arrived. And that altered the image. A barely recognizable image of a wing. A flutter or thousands of flutters absorbed by the light. The image was powerful, not because it was a metaphor. He’d soon ask what do you think? And I’d want to say it wasn’t a metaphor. It would’ve been easy to read it as a metaphor and say it’s life that when we answer its call, scorches us. It’s everything that illuminates us only to blind us. It’s the passion or perhaps the power, it’s the public that attacks everything private. Who are the moths: they’re the uncontacted peoples. They’re the poets on the rail trail. It’s the ovum that aches, about to be released. It’s the two of us in that moment (I’d return to his house every Friday, I’d ring, he’d come out, he’d press the garage button, squeeze it, I’d watch his figure grow as I approached, I’d get out of the car, kiss him on the cheek, we’d enter his house, I’d smell cat piss, feel the cold beneath my feet, see in the darkness clumps of moss sprouting from the wall, and I’d always be surprised by a warm humidity, a disconnected beauty, we’d do whatever like talk about the music playing or drink cinnamon water, and then, finally, for hours, we’d make love and then eat, and I’d say I’m leaving, but really I’d stay one, two, or, in this case, three days, and every one of those days was the same, or almost the same, minor variations, as if we’d kept up this silent routine for years, never leaving the cave, never talking about anything that had to do with us in that moment, never going to the other rooms, feeling in the midst of everything unsaid that something definitively was happening).