by Jeremy Edwards
(03/04/09)

It was never Theresa's goal to convert me by fucking me, to hump my dry-bone atheism into a more lubricious, spiritual form of atheism. No, it was never her intention or desire to change the way I was. She was genuinely surprised that I felt nothing, that's all.

Over the years, she'd spent plenty of time explaining her pantheism from the other direction. She was very familiar with the challenge of teaching believers that a person could have spiritual feelings about the universe without investing in a supernatural presence. What she wasn't used to was encountering someone like me, someone who shared her nonbelief but was not fundamentally awed by the wonders of nature. I think Theresa's sensitivity to the sublime was so wrapped up in her consciousness that for her to contemplate being without that was akin to contemplating her own nonexistence.

Mind you, I wasn't insensitive. Sure, I loved nature. Fine stuff. Sunsets, predictably, pleased me; mountains duly impressed me. I'd been known to say "Wow" to an ocean. Bunnies were cute and giraffes were, indeed, majestic. And, politically, I was a staunch environmentalist -- nature was something we didn't want to fuck with too much.

But I had never felt connected to the natural universe the way Theresa did. Looking at a sky deep with wanton stars, I didn't get tears in my eyes. I didn't get a pang in my heart from glimpsing something larger than myself and sensing that it was, paradoxically, implanted within me. I merely got chilly in the night air.

And she couldn't imagine what that was like.

Yet she acknowledged it, an enigmatic but unavoidable piece of topography on her map of Eric. Even when we were only friends, we had the kind of relationship in which we went the extra mile to communicate, to understand each other as best we could and let trust and acceptance fill in the gaps.

"Nothing?" she queried one day when we'd pulled off at a scenic overlook on a friendly road trip.

As it happened, I had to force myself to take in the advertised view, because I'd just noticed how delicious Theresa looked in her road-trip shorts, with her black hair fluttering around her shoulders.

"It's gorgeous. Amazing, even," I proclaimed. "But that's it."

"No feeling of being transported someplace sacred, as if you were in harmony with eternity and the energy of a trillion photons were pulsing through you?"

I swept my eyes along the vista again. "No, no feelings of being transported to -- uh, what you said." I had to admit the idea sounded nice, though, as I watched the late light play across Theresa's ecstatic face. I watched her knowing she was a part of something, something I could only observe through a window. It brought her radiant beauty to the forefront -- a beauty I'd become increasingly aware of. Her link to this landscape gave intensity to the lustful attraction I'd begun feeling.

I waited until her sacred moment had passed before desanctifying things by teasing. "As for that feeling of the 'energy of a trillion photons'...are you sure that's not just the double espresso you had?"

"I guess I was asking for that," she said. She stuck her tongue out at me. This was the best day we'd had together yet. If I played my cards right, maybe I could provoke her into swatting me on the ass next time.

Our transition from friends to lovers followed a slow path; by the time we spent our first nonplatonic night together, our discussions of spirituality were already ancient history. Those conversations were far from my mind when I crossed the threshold of Theresa's house that night -- the night we'd earmarked for our inaugural "date." Or maybe they were just far from my conscious mind.

I can see why wine is a sacrament in some religions. Because everything seemed to start with the wine that evening. Granted, as far as sex was concerned, we were so primed that we needed no alcohol to make the leap. I think we would have screwed our asses off over ginger ale in a cafeteria, if we'd had to. But the wine established a definite mood for me -- one not only of celebration and sensuality, but also of possibility and epiphany.

You see, when Theresa poured me that big glass of Cabernet in her kitchen, I expected it would go to my head, as drinks usually do. What happened instead was that my head went to the wine -- to a place of subjective, indulgent magic, a place I'd never been. A place where Theresa, her dials always tuned to the divinity of nature, was right at home. And though the wine was acting as the medium, it was Theresa who embodied the magic. I stood ready to let her envelop my reality in even more ways than I'd planned.

As I sipped on, the tangible imminence of connecting with her flesh and the previously elusive flavor of her relationship to the universe intertwined around me, blending into something all-consuming and magnificent amid the buoyant Cabernet mist. Her shades were drawn; there was no world to be observed beyond this kitchen. Yet I felt closer than I ever had to communing with every molecule and organism and galaxy, past, present, and future. Theresa was my gateway.

Although we burned for each other, we talked for two hours, old pals speaking a new language of lovers, each tremblingly but passionately committed to the step we'd decided to take. I remember moments rather than continuity, pinpoints like fireflies. Each instant was a tableau, with Theresa at the vanishing point. Electric fingers of joy emanated from her, emphasizing her centrality as they shifted and shimmered. Before I'd even kissed her that night, Theresa became the hub of a thousand miracles.

Between kisses, we chanted our "I love you's" like fervent prayers. Looking into the sustaining mystery of her eyes, I had to remind myself that I believed in nothing beyond or apart from our physical world.

When she broke a kiss to claim my cock, her desire promised infinity, imbuing me, it seemed, with purpose and immortality. I burgeoned in her hand, and my spirit seemed to mimic the corporeal engorgement. As I caressed the fullness of her breast, I felt lifted -- my erection, yes, but also my soul -- by something I could neither comprehend nor conceptualize. All I could do was breathe her in. Breathe her in, and float like a balloon.

I was an atheist. But I believed in Theresa with a fervor at once sacred and profane. I believed in the mystic lewdness of her cunt -- made manifest when I worshipped her panties, inch by descending inch, until the animal-flower that nature created had appeared. I believed in the timeless wisdom and compassion of her smile, in a communion of laughter between us, joy without end. My belief in her seemed bigger than my skull, bigger than everything.

In a delirium, I knelt. I clutched her private cheeks, letting my hands cushion her from the corner of her kitchen table while I licked her and drank her juice. I felt that I was partaking, sanctifying myself with her essence. Partaking yet offering -- pushing her pantheism into rapture with my tongue, giving her the Milky Way inside her eyelids. She cried out, as the vitality of her pleasure reaffirmed her participation in the space-time continuum.

And when I penetrated her, I could swear I was tapping into something. Oh, I knew it was merely human tissue, human hormones, and the neurological adventures of that absurd organ, the Homo sapiens brain. I knew all that, and yet I was transported. It was an illusion of transcendence that I knew I'd ride for all it was worth, every time, until my flesh should finally recede into nothingness.

I'd had sex before, but never this sensation of holiness. And I knew that the spiritual component of what I was feeling now with Theresa was really my sense of connection to her sense of connection. From the infinite, to Theresa, to me: the transitive principle. Maybe that was why people held hands at séances. Of course, the program of a séance was pretty different from what Theresa and I were doing -- except insofar as we were banging on her table.

I wanted her to know. "I feel something," I told her, breathing hard.

"I should fucking hope so!" she replied from the edge of her bliss, breakbeating our rhythm with laughter.

"No, I mean...I feel something...spiritual."

"Oh!" She gasped with comprehension, as if my revelation had found her G-spot.

Yes, during those swirling, pounding, screaming, grinding moments when my cock was nesting in the fractal eternity of her cunt and everything else about the material world dissolved into disorientation...I felt myself a spiritual being. A carnal ghost in a well-oiled machine.

As for Theresa, she soon became an orgasm within an orgasm within an orgasm, ad infinitum.

To this day, when Theresa claims me, we are the universe. She drizzles a rivulet of ecstasy onto my face, and the great river of time stops to await our confluence. When her pussy locks itself around me, all matter intersects there.

This I know: For two spiritual nonbelievers, the only afterlife occurs in the here and now. In the sacred juncture of Theresa's meaty thighs, where the instant and the infinite converge.

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