The colloquial term for orgasm in French is ‘la petite mort.’ The little death. This fact seems ubiquitous, so commonly pointed to I can’t actually recall where I first heard it. Maybe in the movie Amalie? Whenever it was, I didn’t give much thought to it at the time, as sex and sexuality were such an uncomfortable subject for me then, that dwelling in those places, with those thoughts, caused a disjointed friction, a tension within myself, propelling me towards the closets of my mind which I preferred not to dwell on, or perhaps couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

This oft pointed to phasing, the little death of sex, seems paradoxical to me now. Death, for the dead, appears to be a tensionless, frictionless state. This could be debated, as we, the living, can only conjecture what the state of death might feel like, but I imagine it to be a feeling-less place. The electrical impulses that course through our bodies, the impulses that tell us we ‘felt’ something, winding to a stop. The interpretive organ of the brain losing its ability to make sense of our senses.

To me an orgasm seems the opposite, brought about through friction and marked by tension, a visceral example of being fully in the body. But there is a certain incoherence to the orgasm. An uncontrollable shaking perhaps. Or an inability to differentiate what feeling comes from where, what cause is generating which effect. There is a certain paradox to this state, of so fully inhabiting the body to the point of rendering it illegible to the self.