That day at the cabin, the embers of us still sparking in the skin across my lover’s veins, he’d exhaled smoke and said, “I really shouldn’t be doing this,” and we laughed because few things feel so good as to be beyond one’s control—because I’d spent my entire life believing that with pain came darkness, that with unconventional desires came shame, but between us there was none of that nonsense, no role-playing or repetitive compulsion of old wounds; no embarrassment or hackneyed artifice. Only this bottomless sense of adventure, the body our Mount Everest to climb while learning to breathe a different air, our intimacy a place of joyful safety and trust that made me question everything I ever understood regarding how to be Normal, how to be Good.