It comes out of nowhere with such extraordinary force that it razes everything to the ground, like an earthquake.

It kicks into gear right away, without any warning. What about the guy who thought it made sense to stick someone in a rocket and shoot them at the stars? Samsa is crazier than the two of them put together. The first person who had the idea of building a pyramid must have been insane. I don’t tell her that what I want is to not be a mother. I tamp down the truth and say all right, let’s do it. I am hooked on the smell of her, on the mix of shampoo and moisturizer that clings to her pajamas and skin, on the scent of every night in a decade spent folded around her sleeping body, of her success and her calm, even of our sad, awful morning sex. Kisses that are tender and ready to sign a treaty. I put my arm around her shoulders and my hand on her chest.

I realize I’m part of her exhaustion, which is still better than not being part of her at all. She’s nervous, receptive, she needs to hold in her belly the child she’s found in her mind. She takes shallow breaths, as if wanting to sigh but finding it too painful to draw in the oxygen contaminated by our conversation. She rests her head on my shoulders and closes her eyes. I light a cigarette I’m so despicable all I can think is that if she gets pregnant, I’ll have to smoke outside the fucking building. The truth is we’d never made any plans, we’d just taken huge bites out of life. I listen with all five senses, I listen to her with my entire body, with everything but my heart, which feels like it wants to thrash the hell out of me. That, somehow, her desire for a child spoils her. She looks at me with those blue eyes that fade to gray in the warm apartment light, and I have the feeling she has everything, that she is one and whole, like a god. She waits up for me and we drink coffee on the sofa. She can’t find it in herself to give me a week. Ridiculous arguments that never stood a chance against the urge they’re trying to shoot down. Having a kid is the same as enrolling in a lifetime plan of suffering. We’d be geriatric mothers, and by the time the kid went to high school, people would think we were the grandparents. I come up with arguments and lay them on the table.

The fact that I hadn’t said yes the minute she asked seems to have exposed the tragic nature of our attachment, of that crushing thing people refer to as the couple. Fucking milestones.Īll I want is one goddamn week. I’ll be forty soon, I don’t have time, she says. Refusing would mean leaving her, so I ask for more time. When she comes, she cries like she’s breaking to pieces, she cries just like a rock. She kisses me, as if a kiss could fill the silence that separates two faraway bodies the moment they surrender to each other. She holds my chin and makes me look at her while I thrust over and over. She welcomes in a desire that I’m not giving her and that roams the corridors of her body like a ghost.

I fuck her and she lets herself be fucked, it looks like she’s not even moving. I get up, brush my teeth, and grab the strap-on because it’s faster that way. The goal of having the alarm go off once or twice a week at an ungodly hour is to awaken love. When she makes sweeping statements like this one, she tends to be talking about herself: when I come home at night, she’s asleep and I’m turned on. She says she never sees me during the day and that we’re too tired at night. The alarm clock went off half an hour ago so we’d have time to make love. She says this and I feel nothing, like I’d drunk arsenic. A sickness that had only ever affected other people. The thing that has no bearing on my life or on the kilometers-long perimeter of life that was meant to protect me from those permanent, timeless laws, the kind that defy all probability.

Submerge myself sentences