#eng213

But never did I reach the center of her being. Never did I touch the nakedness of pain and of death. Perhaps it does not exist in waves, that secret site that renders a woman vulnerable and mortal, that electric button where all interlocks, twitches, and straightens out to then swoon. Her sensibility, like that of women, spread in ripples, only they weren’t concentric ripples, but rather eccentric, spreading each time farther, until they touched other galaxies. To love her was to extend to remote contacts, to vibrate with far-off stars we never suspected. But her center . . . no, she had no center, just emptiness as in a whirlwind, that sucked me in and smothered me.

This story reads like a man falling out of love, to me. It's the story of two people inevitably at odds; both unable to accept either themselves or their partner for who they are, and then, after finding themselves, realizing their incompatibility. From the beginning, the woman-as-a-wave is a force of nature, yes, and poison. She is full and enveloping and yet unreachable, untouchable. And yet, despite all this, in the beginning, he loves her. The very sun comes in to cover them in light; to them "Love was a game, a perpetual creation."

And yet, he becomes jealous of the parts of her he can't find, the ones he can't touch, the ones separate from him. "She began to miss solitude," he says, and as she turns to herself and her fish he becomes bitter and jealous, raging at the fishes he can't be. He begins to resent her for not being human the same way she surrounds herself with the things that remind her of who she is and where she comes from. Then, as he pulls away, visiting friends and girlfriends long abandoned, she begins to cling to him, 'cursing and laughing,' as though that could call him back like one of her monsters, like one of her fish. 

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."- J. Robert Oppenheimer