Qi-Quickie and Mythical Intimacy

This was no ordinary desire. It was an echo from a past life—or a promise the future held. A cosmic current of lust threatened to tear me apart… I’ll tell you the story as a dark, modern fairy tale, where myth, desire, and intellectual obsession intertwine.

“Take off your bra and give it to me,” Anson demands. Nana looks around. The audience focuses her attention on the author. Nana frees her breasts from the half-cups. It’s a feat, learned and perfected in swimming pools and gyms. Anson takes the bra from her and holds it reverently under his nose. Of course, this doesn’t go unnoticed, but Anson doesn’t seem to care. His right hand traces the contours of Nana’s shoulders. His hand glides over her collarbones, accentuating her chin.

“Tell me you love me. That you want to stay with me and start a family. That you will lie with me every night until death do us part.”

Nana doesn’t stop Anson, yet she refrains from giving any consent. Anson is a possibility, like anyone else. Nothing more can be said at the moment: that is Nana’s position. She blocks out her surroundings. Anson’s hands visit her breasts, uncovering the nipples and stimulating the tips. Nana moans. At that moment, she awakens. She had fallen asleep alone at home on the sofa and had only dreamed it all. Disappointment creeps over her. Nevertheless, her nipples are rock hard, and she feels the pulling in her lower abdomen. Involuntarily, she touches herself. In her fantasy…

She casts a fleeting glance in the mirror and then flies off. She rides her bicycle to the university.

“Ah, ... I love this scene with the sensual kiss in the lucid moment between the two of them...!” M.

“That’s a fairy-tale beautiful scene, dear... ‘Qi is love in motion.’” M.

As the first light of day seeped hostilely through cracks and forced its way upon the weary group, Nana remained in an almost transcendental trance. She wavered between ecstasy and redemption—still guided by the agenda of a techno-dictatorship that exerted its domineering influence on the bodies and souls of the jaded pilgrims. Finally, she retreated to a lounge corner. She sank into a colossal armchair, built a hundred years ago to last forever. The secretions of sweat-drenched skin and stale perfume aromas underscored Nana’s reflections on the preceding hours. She heard his voice; Anson had found her. The timbre was enough to make Nana realize that she was still burning with desire.

The club had emptied out; only a few absurdly over-the-top Mad Max knock-offs still flickered about on the dance floor. Anson helped Nana to her feet and led her into a sacred silence. Only then did she notice how long she had been deprived of a moment of calm. Their bodies found each other in an eternal dialogue.

Seed Cell of Coziness

Through incomprehensible processes of swarm-intelligent attentiveness, the Mosquito Castle and its backyard had become the most beloved seed cell of coziness far and wide. Years ago, someone had placed a pergola, a rose arch, and a fence into the space, greened the latticework at its base with climbing hydrangea and pimped it with a climbing rose. By now, blue morning glories, black-eyed Susans, and nasturtiums dramatized the arrangement. The scenery served as a backdrop for provisionally settled domestic arrangements with sandbox, bouncy castle, swing, changing table, and stroller parking.

In the evenings, strings of lights hummed to life. Nana associated electric insects and fireflies with Wi-Fi. She stepped beneath the vines, smartphone in hand. The display shimmered. She observed the field of temptation. In one moment, the actors blurred into a teeming-picture panorama. Nana hallucinated spirals, iridescent patterns. She evoked rotations of desire, the constant play of imitation, deception, and triumph.

In the communal kitchen, Diana and Malia rivaled each other. They wore hardly more than the bare minimum in the eternal summer. The master of the house sat as if uninvited on the windowsill. Nevertheless, he kept the overview. The best of the generation have long had their two children and still the first husband. Physical decline disguised itself as nonchalance; skirts grew shorter with every year past thirty. Thirty-two-year-olds tightened the mesh of their nets and no longer threw every growling dwarf gourami or pea puffer or blood tetra straight back into the gutter puddle.

They explored the hierarchies in the administrative districts of their regular Italian restaurants and favorite Greek places. They flirted with the staff, diligently playing along in waiter comedies. They were ready for bit parts and ham acting. Their men came late; families and friends bustled about on glowing streets in the evenings. People toasted each other in front of Jonna’s child-friendly pub or met for a glass of wine in the child-friendly beer garden of the esotericist Halif. Or they ran into each other in front of the picturesque piss gutter of Grete’s Schwarzburg Eighty-Two.

The Lords of Loss represented Waldeck interests up to the point of feud, yet they were not prepared to rise up against a Landgrave of Hesse. In 1408, Johann von Loss opened Lower Loss Castle to Hermann II of Hesse as a refuge in dire distress. In gratitude, he received Ederthal as a fief and, in addition, Neukirchen Castle, where it has been haunted ever since. Gerda von Loss was the last prioress of the Augustinian nunnery in Fritzlar, which was closed in 1530 because of the Reformation.

Nana meditated in the dōjō, where the echoes of commands, admonitions, and encouragements lingered in the air for her. Another person would surely have heard nothing in the silence with its dust spirals in rainbow colors, but for Nana the room itself was an experience. Here she had learned discipline and understood that her grasp of comprehensive development was insufficient. All her life she had searched for a path, and now she had arrived on her path, the one Anson had mapped out. The combination of pleasure and learning worked like a driving force.