The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

Lightness of Being. Kierk, charmed by the synchronicity between the two covers, is drunkenly struck by the repetitions and cycles of history, imagining how within individual lives the same choices are presented again and again like notes in some grand song . . . and that there must be a Hegelian synthesis between Eternal Return and Unbearable Lightness, that maybe there is a road not yet taken, that lives were lived again and again but sometimes a choice was made and this time around everything was different; that history was a giant chaotic system of attractors, different versions of the same identities living over and over like Buddha’s previous reincarnations in the Jātaka tales, each one building and cycling on the ones that came before it, sometimes identical but sometimes coming within a hair’s breadth of their previous incarnations until a single choice changes everything . . .

“Lost yourself?” Carmen says quietly, standing beside him.

“Oh, hey.” He collapses back, a rain of thought coalescing again into form.

“Hey.”

The lights flicker, then surge and go out. There are cheers from outside.

“Let me get some candles.” She paws through a cupboard, Kierk gives her his lighter, and soon the apartment is thrown into flickering relief. Out the windows they see, one by one again, candles being put in other windows. To which Carmen puts a candle on the sill over which they lean, watching more and more small points of light flicker into being.

Then their leaning forms are suddenly very close, and that same deterministic force is now drawing them together, the city itself conspiring to bring them in slowly until their lips meet, and there is the hesitant movement of hands unfamiliar, and it seems to last forever, just their lips touching, their hands hovering about the other’s body, then one hand goes to the back of one neck, another hand locates soft and burning skin underneath a shirt, and the two close completely. There is a soft bite on a lip and there is laughing as shoes are removed without the kissing stopping and then it does and an immediate seriousness takes over as a shirt is slowly unbuttoned and a cool small hand slips inside through the breech, and it is now that the other’s body becomes a buzzing drug absorbed on contact, every touch two shots of gin, the air becomes breath, and a billion years of history is immanent in a departing shirt which sails across the watery air of the apartment, a hand literally shakes as it tries to unclasp a belt, and where the hell is the bed, and where are your lips I want to bruise them, I can’t get enough of everything about you, you are my missing shade of blue, please, put your hands here, there, the small curve of her back is a cool arch, his chest is broad plane of heat, I want to feel your body in my body is the thought as she pulls back briefly and the bra falls to the floor and the whole-skin embrace that follows after the jeans and the socks and everything else sheds off in the darkness . . . if we can just get a little bit closer we’ll breach flesh bone thought maul me with your hands all over me a push a shove a kick back a reaction an action up against the wall and then after a time back to the other wall another push a hand pressing against my lower back and slipping lower, yes, I haven’t forgotten how to do this just like riding a bike and I feel the hot pebbles of nipples under my palms and she licks me on my collarbone and we fall back I fall back she falls back onto the bed yes I run my hands up her legs back on top now her legs wrapping and grasping behind me I push my hands past the titillating barrier of his boxers to find an outpour of flesh yes, to grasp what I want to grasp—I don’t have a condom . . .—Fuck it, I can pull out . . .—Oh really can you control yourself when I do this . . . A bite of his ear and then I am pushed back onto the bed and we are separate for a moment again and his hands slide up and hook a thumb on my panties and both his hands caress down my leg and the panties are cast out into the darkness and I open my legs and I run my hands back up her legs as she opens them and then lower myself down on top of her biting at her nipple with my mouth his mouth is hot his teeth tug out I arch out my hands behind her back and pull her close as I begin to enter the hot deep core of the world and she makes a sound like she’s being murdered and then says—Oh god yes put it in, and he does and is now heavy over me, yes, push me pin me grab my wrists bite my neck own me fuck me, there’s that feeling of stiffness penetrating me and the heat of it as everything is opening around the grinding core of the world, the stretching and filling and shifting, the securing of a position, the thermodynamics of skin, the rhythm of a feedback loop as the movement begins to fill and open me and all I can think about is this movement and gasping and moaning and the weight over me and pushing away this pillow corner obscuring my mouth and my sticky strands of hair and then his one hand is cupping my ass and the other up against the wall far above me for counterforce and my body is lying underneath a thrusting body and moving to the thrusting body and it all makes sense because the universe may not have been made for us but we were made