Love cuts
Desire is a constellation of wants and needs, hopes and dreams reaching toward someone or something. When I started dating my husband, it was all desire. The way he would sit with his thumbs in his pockets, as if a pose, looking directly at me. His gesture was jocular, but I was swept away nonetheless. With a shift of his lower jaw or a pushing out of his shoulders I dissolved. He was cocky—this young Oedipus—but, from our first encounter, I offered him my attention as his roost.
On our third date, accidentally, his finger touched mine; our knees, under the table, happened to brush against each other. I became absorbed in the significance of these subtle mishaps. I started to create meaning out of these brief zones of contact—each touch raises a question in need of an answer. As simply as that, I was falling in love.
The ache of desire can give way to love. If desire is projection, then love is about recognizing the emotional contours and experiences of the one you desire. Loving someone is the closest we can get to knowing what it is like to be another person. Love breaks through our serially surging selfishness.
Later in our relationship, I was sitting in the surgical waiting room of the hospital. He was having surgery, a necessary cut, part of his transition. For him, cutting his body was a way of healing, not hurting. By removing deep structures that fill his body with competing hormones, his testosterone would no longer need to fight for a place to stay, a home. It is his cut, his alone, and yet I feel him, feel the thick purple scars on his abdomen. For him, the surgery is a desire for change; for me, his cuts are about love, loving his scars as marks of his own desire. As it is for the patrons of Venus Castina, so too is it for my husband: Changing sex is a desire to love.
...oo00O00oo...
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