Going deep.

I once had a friend with whom I had an on again, off again* intimate relationship. By which I mean that several times over the course of a year and a half I wound up at his apartment, drinking wine, and after a sufficient number of glasses had been drunk I would stick my fingers up his ass.

The thing I liked about this arrangement — the reason I kept coming back even though it was abundantly clear that it was emotionally unhealthy for me — was the person he became when he was, literally, wrapped around my fingers. Impaled thusly, he was a man transformed, vulnerably confessing a host of taboo desires, telling me secrets in an urgent, impassioned voice.

Impaled thusly, he may have even told me he loved me.

When he broke my heart — because he was always breaking my heart, of course he was — he said to me that we weren’t that close, that we didn’t really know each other all that well. It was difficult for me to swallow because, while I would openly admit that I didn’t know his favorite band or most beloved color or what he’d been like in college, I couldn’t really see how any of that truly mattered in the face of this.

Yes, all told we’d probably spent less than a week’s time in each other’s company, yet I still felt that we had achieved a deep and lasting intimacy, that there were things I alone knew, that I alone had seen. I felt, in my heart, that the person who emerged when I deftly penetrated was the distilled, most unvarnished version of him; being told that my acquaintance with that person was irrelevant is what truly cut me deep.

I know, rationally, that to fuck a person is not really to know them; there are plenty of people who have been inside me who retain little but the most superficial understanding of who I am as a person.

And yet, even so, I still find myself wondering, years after the fact: What deeper truth could I have learned than that which lay within the depths of his asshole?

* Mostly off again