I don't understand the effect weather has on the backs of my knees -- which is to say, the effect it has on my heart, or the more erotic slices of my soul. When I was fifteen I took weight training for gym, dreaming I would end up with a set of arms like Michelle Pfeiffer's. That didn't happen, but what did happen was I met up with a machine where you lay on your back and lifted a weight of some kind with your ankles, bending your calves towards your back. When I would go to lunch afterwards I would feel a strange, swelling weakness in the back of my knees, and it would spread somehow to my shoulders and the cradles of my heart and press sweetly upon my lungs so that breath was loving and shallow. It was exactly the way you feel on a cold sunny day, spring or autumn, especially when you were young and you felt your body young and pink and breathless in the face of the fallen leaves, the cold clean world circling your bare throat like a universe-sized torque, and it mystified me that it could be created artificially, that you could make ecstasy by flexing the muscles that registered ecstasy. Oh, shut up about the clitoris, that's not what I mean. When I used to feel love in my knees, and weaken when I saw boys in the hallway, or my shadow on the sand, or leaves in heaven, it was never about real sex but a secret sublime victorian version of sex -- glass and petals and careful helplessness. It's strange to feel it again. O well. O well.