Any telling seems sure to diminish, to transpose what was so overwhelming and painful into something absurd. And perhaps it was absurd, in its keening emotions and weakness for froth. At the time, I believed the least relevant factor of all was that we were both women. Of course this was the first fact that anyone saw, but for us it felt last. It failed to register, at least with me. My adoration of her was so unto itself it could not refer outward, to other affairs between women or even between human beings. It was its own totality, bottomless and consuming, a font of impossible pleasure that from the start also bore down on me like a drill until at last it accomplished a permanent perforation. And yet, irrelevant as I thought gender was to our sex, and to all the disasters it wrought, I now see that the form our love took was fundamentally girlish. The gender-blindness I sensed did apply to the content: I didn’t love Martha for being a woman, and would have loved her no less had Shakespearean whim turned her into a man.
