I stood near the statue my lover sculpted of the Buddha during her writing fellowship and I drank the wine from the bottle and the wine was good. From our balcony, the world let out a breath.
“This must be how it feels in Asia,” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Asia!”
My lover, nude on the couch with the Sudoku, smiled.
“Let’s make love now,” she said.
“How can we? There are so many starving people in the world,” I replied. How heartless could she be? I untied my ponytail, furiously.
“I’m sorry I snapped like that,” I confessed. I began to weep. The world let out another breath. I felt it against my bare chest. It felt like clarity.
“It’s okay. I deserved it. I beg your forgiveness,” she cried out, tossing the Sudoku over the couch, and kneeling against its arm.
“You always already have it,” I said. Then, we kissed with tongues on the coffee table, knocking over the scented candles and the Starbuck’s Double Shots.
*
What does it mean to (not) be a love-maker in a world with so much suffering?
Have we yet to transcend the bounds im/explicitly of the self enough in order to realize the matheme of otherness?
Must an ethics include sex with so many starving people existing in the world? Perhaps it must. Perhaps it must not.
Or must an ethics include sex with starving people, if an ethics exists at all. Let us consider the counter position. What might it (not) mean if we did (not) have sex with starving people? Is there a sex with(out) a certain starvation? Or, is starvation the non/essential indexical of all sexual experience?
Alas! Perhaps the starved are the most sexual of all. Perhaps from them we must learn and we must refrain from instruction. How arrogant are we! We must not make love to starving people - no, must allow them to make love to us. For their starvation holds the key of sexuality.
Make love to us, starving ones. And let the world breathe upon us.
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