You can’t remedy the inescapable separateness of being, but you can get off trying.

• Squeeze your partner so tightly that their bones shatter and their organs come shooting from every orifice; fold up the floppy, fractured shell of skin and hair that remains and put it in a backpack; carry it around so they are never alone.

• If sexing near a window, blindfold them so they can’t see the sky and thus have to contemplate the relative insignificance of everything that seems important to them.

• When you’re on top, put your weight on their face in an upward motion with your hands. Tell them that you will save them from gravity.

• When fucking them from behind, scratch their back in the shape of constellations. Do it hard enough that the marks leave a physical impression on their body for days.

• Lay your entire body on top of theirs, with your arms at your side and your face next to their ear, until all the breath leaves their lungs. When they’ve not breathed for long enough to wonder if this is how they’re going to die, whisper in their ear “hopelessly apart but never alone” several times before quickly moving to let them refill their desperate lungs.

• Use Super Glue as lube. Ask them to marry you.

• Throughout the course of lovemaking, collect as much of both of your bodily fluids as possible into a large pot. Simmer with ginger and coriander on low heat for 12 hours. Mix with bourbon. Pour into two cups and drink as you talk about the limitations of true interpersonal understanding. Go to sleep more apart of one another.

• Bring them to the brink of orgasm over a period of several days without allowing food or water. Exercise every bit of knowledge of what triggers their body. Give them everything they want – but never enough of it. When they are delirious from an overabundance of dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins, sleep deprivation and exhaustion – when they can no longer cognitively function and are a feral shadow of their former selves, stand up – tell them you are leaving but will return and give them an orgasm, a sandwich, and your undying love. Leave. Leave town. Resume living normal life. Meet someone and marry. Have kids and grow old. Return to the bedroom in the twilight of your life. Bring sandwiches, which they will be entirely too weak to eat but you did promise. Deliver the sexual satisfaction you also promised. Watch their empty eyes awaken from decades of de-socialization and malnutrition and carnal longing. Hold them afterward, as their impossibly depleted body shakes out its last, satisfied moment of life. As they slip quietly away, kiss their forehead and whisper, “You always had free will. You always belonged only to yourself.”