Love Letter Day 3

I am flattened by my vaccine booster shot though I was initially excited by the soreness in my arm, and spent my afternoon off playing and shopping, then came home and jabbered with Hannah while we listened to contralto women crooning all night. I think you know what I mean when I say that the soreness felt good.

This morning, I required feats of extraterrestrial will to get up. A vaccine hangover. My body was obliterated. Do you know what I mean when I say that sometimes the body relishes in its obliteration? The tender care and attention I give myself in the aftermath of an absolute drubbing, worth the salt of all the moisture we create between us.

Have you read Bataille’s Story of the Eye?

Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, "Story of the Eye" is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

I was introduced to it in grad school. What a revelation. I once insisted on licking the eyeball of a lover, having taken the title as a literal prompt. I wonder if you taste better under wanton distress like I feel I must today. Wondering is its own want.