Sex is a game, a weapon, a toy, a joy, a trance, an enlightenment, a loss, a hope.

By letting go of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room. I have more space, I can move. The pursuit of another, elusive body, the body someone else says I should have, is a terrible distraction, a side-tracking that might have lasted my whole life long. By letting myself go, I go places.

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside.

Sex can be renounced -- but sexuality cannot. We can't avoid sexual issues by avoiding sex, or by dismissing its importance, or by showing disrespect to our own or other people's sexual feelings.

Sex is a game, a weapon, a toy, a joy, a trance, an enlightenment, a loss, a hope.

The sex that is presented to us in everyday culture feels strange to me; its images are fragments, lifeless, removed from normal experience. Real sex, the sex in our cells and in the space between our neurons, leaks out and gets into things and stains our vision and colors our lives.

Sexual acts are one of the primary means by which we can act out our inarticulated inner lives.