Camila + Haruki

I walked from the kitchen of my flat to the living room on my tippy-toes naked as a baby Jesus, my tense body trembling with cosmic desperation.  As I approached Camila, who was sprawled on my couch naked and spry, her eyes closed like a Buddhist acolyte at a Vipassana retreat.  She looked so serene and so beautiful to me.  I couldn’t decide though whether she was asleep or dead, whether she was sexually clairvoyant and knew that I'm come running to her, whether she'd been unfaithful since she muted me, or whether she was in the early stages of rigor mortis.  My distance and confusion made this moment one of the biggest existential crises of my life, the very stuff of Sartre novels and Danish philosophers, but when I got to the threshold of the living room, I finally understood where her silence came from.  There was a small group of naked college students (some of them former students of mine, some of them former students of hers), all sprawled out on my floor and jacked up on SX-3 and cheap street simulators, their bodies intersecting and penetrating each other, cavorting and grunting, shagging on the staircase and against the wall and out in the balcony, their glistening bodies moving in repetitive motion like a pornographic pilates.  And it was only then, after my triumphant return back to Hong Kong (a city I'd missed with all my heart, weakness, and nostalgia), it was only then, during my greatest leap of faith, during my one and only romantic gambit, that I realized the true source of Cam’s silence, and it stoned me.