It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, and end. It’s not a throughline to a destination. It is, instead, a series of tangents, explorations, questions, mistakes, overlaps — and moments of sudden and glimmering insight.
Sensuality, Baldwin wrote, requires presence. When you distrust your own desires, when your body is unfamiliar to you, how can you ever hope to be present with, to connect with someone else?