Grabbing clips

DONNA: You came across as very grown up, confident, turned out dialecting past, complicated relationships with a gender-churning circus of lovers, hanging your hair here, then there, spreading your fingers into an explanatory fan. Grain liquor handles ice the way your turtleneck, by itself an overstatement, absorbed confessional narrative resonance into a plausible argument for beat realism.

PEG [blurry memory tape of]: I had to ask myself do I want this feeling, is this what I'm going for, over and over again. Do I want to repeat this, is it good enough or does it cross the line into... yuck. There must be a whole chapter in the Physician's Desk Reference describing that gastro-amygdular impulse after an intimate and not entirely welcome event. How many social norms are you violating is one thing but the sickening one is how many personally held assumptions have you challenged or oaths broken or whizzed past on a highway where speed limits never got posted.

DONNA: Even to a child it was sordid what you described, but you rose balloon-like above the details as you flexed your ability to articulate, to construct, to train a wild pack of memory keratoses to interact and create a home for themselves, validating your own existence as essentially reproductive.

PEG [pixellated memory tape of]: I was humoring him, I thought; that I was letting everything left unsaid between us populate a whole busy little love town in his head and if I just split one day, he should be the one to examine himself. Then I considered wait, who's doing what they want to be doing with who they want to be with here even in my own paradigm? Him, not me. He's taking the risk, he's pushing his skills, he's bettering himself to keep up and I? Can only grow lazy and uninspired. Yet I feel guilty that I'm "leading him on."

DONNA: Or you would toss your hair, toss back a drink, toss aside a magazine. In a bell-sleeved madras cotton. Without hair and hands, you are truly hideous to envision. These are God's gifts to everyone, a covering. Grabbing clips. Of course without hands no one would live long. You said you felt like a woman with no hands in this or that marriage. Selfish, passive dominatrix? Or slave.

These were very adult questions that we'd so far blissfully been as able as babies rolling on breasts to ignore. You'd been there and back, and you were still pretty. Ready for a serious and full connection with someone you could meet at the airport and stare into their eyes for up to 90 seconds. What passes between two minds during such encounters? Is all of that forgotten once love again self-consummates?