An excerpt from Gaia’s Hands. Warning: Very indirect references to sex — less so than in a romance novel.
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Josh couldn’t sleep. Images of the last several hours swirled in his head: the fruit trees in the forest, Jeanne’s face at a particularly unguarded moment, the blues band at the café, Jeanne’s body, all curves and sags and comfort like a favorite easy chair. He could smell lovemaking, had never been aware before that it had a smell.
The vision — the garden; Jeanne standing in the garden, tending it. Jeanne — the garden and the gardener, the secret and yet not the whole of the secret. He chased the thoughts around until they became the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, the infinite. The lovemaking — she had been Eve to his Adam — did I just go there? he groaned. He would not put that phrase into his next poem. Something, everything — Josh did not act on impulse, yet he had.
Josh threw on dry jeans and shirt, and dragged his bike back down the stairs and out under a clearing sky. “Who am I?” he queried himself as he rode toward Eric’s apartment. An introvert, an observer of human nature, a practitioner of aikido, an aspiring writer, only son, half-Asian. He dug deeper: a dabbler in Shinto, a pacifist, a former problem child. He felt heart and gut, ai and ki. And now, something bigger than himself — not just a lover, but a holder of a vision, a mystery. He would not tell that last part to his best friend Eric.
Words Like Me 