What I love about your story, lil, is the whole idea of care-taking, in both physical/emotional/spiritual/sexual life as well as in the words we choose. It just works on so many levels, and I was so delighted to catch what you did there.

I live in New Mexico, and for most of my time here I lived in a tiny town where 90 percent of the population was of Spanish descent. The Spanish spoken in town is ancient, in fact the only place on the entire planet where the original Castilian is still used. This is the Spanish I learned and love. Now that I live in the Big City, I'm around folks who speak Latin American Spanish. It's a little different. The same words carry different connotations, different imagery. I can say something up in Northeastern NM and get a good belly laugh from my audience, but the same, very same, words here would get me a shocked silence.

In relationships, there is a dance that must be undertaken. A difficult dance, a tango, perhaps, with dips and twirls, and if you don't feel the pulse of your partner's intention, you will step on his feet and hurt him, or you will fall to the ground when he fails to catch you, hurting yourself. The language is never truly the language. It is always a sheet being folded between two people.