There was something in her gaze that had not been there previously, a kind of openness. I returned it without equivocation, keeping my eyes locked on hers until they were the only thing I saw, those bottomless wells of love and sadness. We held that gaze without moving or speaking, losing all sense of time. Gradually, I began to feel germinating in me a tingle of joy that continued to blossom, spreading over my entire being until I felt myself starting to dissolve like an aspirin effervescing in a glass of water, as if every part of me that was solid matter was dissipating into the air, only instead of becoming nothing I was becoming something else, something rarefied and euphoric, pure existence. Every time my mind wavered, every time doubt threatened to puncture the precarious perfection of the moment, I nudged it back into that space of pure existence. At the very instant I seemed to have finally passed through the threshold of that purity, it began to recede, or perhaps it was I who began to recede, moving back into corporeality, contracting, solidifying, materializing, until I was once again peering into a pair of eyes, only they weren’t the dark eyes I’d been looking into moments ago but the ocean-gray eyes I’d been staring at in the mirror all my life. It was my own face I was now looking into, my own eyes, and this face of mine was looking back at me. This face leaned toward me and I felt my own lips, which were no longer my lips but another’s, brushing against my new lips, embracing with this new mouth, and the stubble of that other face, which was after all my own stubble, bristled against my soft new skin. The moistness of my old tongue flickered against that of my new tongue. Both bodies, the former and the current, the old and the new, took up that familiar rhythm, the gift and receipt of love, except that nothing was familiar, every sensation was novel and strange. I felt a presence entering me where once I would have entered. Tendrils of shuddering pleasure extended throughout this new body of mine from one end to the other, over and again, as we explored the limits of our bodies, until the body that had been mine for so long came to the natural resolution of its efforts and collapsed upon me, and deep inside I felt it release the expression of itself. We lay next to each other for some time, breaths intermingling, lulled into blissful rest, the light coming through the shuttered window brightening as a new day dawned. Then, looking into each other’s eyes again, we began the journey in the opposite direction.