When she was younger, she loved him for his body, and for her body. In a cloud of hormones lit by bolts of giddy neurons, in the freshness and chaos and newness of everything, everywhere, inside and out, she saw him glowing, gilded, in gauzed light. She saw depths of soul and boundless strengths, in him and in herself. When she took him inside herself, she knew a kind of melting and merging with the universe; in this most earthy act, she felt otherworldly. And if he made some unworthy remark afterward – something crass, prosaic, juvenile – she would hear but not register it, letting her comprehension glance away, to keep the myth intact. He didn’t always do this, of course; sometimes as she lay with her head on his chest, he’d struggle to find words to express the higher feelings coursing through him, something far beyond his eloquence, perhaps beyond the reach of any language. That these too were banalities, stitched together from threadbare clichés, didn’t matter to her. She translated his words into the unutterable flow of feeling around them in the moment, their spent bodies pressed together, his hand brushing back her hair.