Want the backstory? Here’s my tape of Love Songs.
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Once I ate some gentle mushrooms and saw the pine trees slap their knees. We heaved together, the trees and I bent in laughter, my body in a ripple effect from all previous cravings: the soft peppermint candy from the front-porch neighbor with a tin, the black-woods fear of bedtime stories, the sweet oily fingers from prying into hazelnuts, the experienced long gloves in Mama Lois’ back closet, the charm and moan of guitars, the aura of skin.

Years later, I again examine the senses, my body’s desires, to learn the capacity within a blood-filled temple. In holiness, I study all the scrawled-out God words I could set my ears on. I study throne-room, repetition, sex, and wine. I study Holy Spirit and the tongue, Jesus and the long drive home – again, the scream of guitars and this time the aura of invisible skin.

And from all this study came a physical craving for breathless laughter, for a broken heart and then the repair of laughter. 

As Seth finishes law school, I fail at right love, but we do begin to study bodies and try to make them something new. 

Seth comes home. We sit to watch The Simpsons. He asks, “Are you pregnant?” I shake my head yes without looking away from the television, and we know he’s a boy.

His name, Isaac, means laughter, and we aren’t laughing. No matter how much we crave it, we are still breaking and not yet to the punch-line. We are still listening to the joke.