Love

It was freezing, and we spoke in a coffee shop. I had my legs crossed and I stared with longing into the distance as a matter of effect. I said: “Doesn't he understand? People like me, geniuses—great, mad geniuses—are prone to failures because we do not accept the common notions of society? Doesn't he understand? I'm not like the others.”

S. was laughing, choking on his Arabica brew, slapping his leg. “If your neck were long enough you'd suck your own cock!” He continued laughing and spilled some coffee on his shirt. “You'd walk around with pubic hair between your teeth!”

"You idiot!" I said. "Can't you see I'm in love? The supreme human condition."

"With yourself? Ha, ha."

"With him! With Cloudhead!" I reached over and pushing his shoulder. "We were at an art gallery, and someone had an installation where we had to push a trolley and collect dildos in it, and you had to pass through a room decorated as a forest of dildos, and I said: Well! If only you were this endowed! And he left me there, with a trolley full of dildos. Do you know how humiliating that was? To endure that alone?"

"Pushing a trolley of dildos seems normal with a companion?"

"You idiot!" I said. "You don't understand! Can't you see I'm in love?"

"Use a dildo, then!"

"It's no use," I said. I stared back into the distance. "It's no use. It is not the genital but the person it is attached to. A genital alone is no use. Will you sign a mortgage with just a vulva, I ask you? No, of course not."

"Vulvas can't sign their names," S. said, feigning sadness by shaking his head and making the sign of the cross. "But I know for a fact they can hold pens."S. started laughing again, waving his cup of coffee precariously.

"You're a pervert," I said. "Minds such as yours cannot comprehend complex motivations. Love for you is poking at a hole. It is a meeting of the minds, you ape."

"Just say you're sorry," he said.

"No, no, that won't work," I said. "That involves me saying I'm wrong and I'm not wrong. I was telling the truth."

S. began to pretend he was jacking off with an invisible cock between his legs.

"Whatever," I said. "Barbarian."

S. pretended to come. He shook violently and moaned. Then, he pretended to fall gently asleep.