"Do you want to know something weird?" Tugging his earlobe, he said, "I can pop my ears any time I want." He had been in the bathroom, reading a pop-science article about inherited traits, like sneezing at the sun or chronic empathy. His Eustachian tube, opening and closing upon his command. "What, just standing there?" I frowned. He, ever placid, said, "Yup. I just did it again." "Stop!" I gasped, fretting for the tiny cavern between his ears. His tympanic cavity, an anatomical black hole. The three little bones of his ear's attic pinging like miniature tuning forks, shivering according to his whim. Worse since he was showing off now: pop, pop, pop. Ping, ping, ping. Openings I could only achieve myself with intervention, yawning wide and chewing gum. If I felt a thrill, discovering something new about his body after all these years, still I was afraid of what he could do. What if his head burst like a melon, or deflated like a balloon, sucking us both in as it collapsed? I swallowed hard. The atmospheric pressure dropped, the air thinned. We were soaring in the jet stream, suspended off a cliff's edge, our legs dangling into nothing. A vacuum between he and I where the history of our eardrums had been. "I thought everyone could do it," his gaze turning wistful. And I realized that he, too, was assessing this ear barotrauma: our love story and its two versions. His and mine, inside and out. He: lying in bed beside me, his tensor tympani catching my snores in its hollow canal. Or that bony hook, his styloid process reaching down behind his tongue as it scraped mine, sending countless coded pulses from his skull to my mouth. How he had timed the tempo of his fingers inside me to every thrum of his auditory tube—incus to meatus to me. He: believing that we were in a conversation of shared vibrations. And I: convinced that a barometric change meant I must swell up with hot breath, pinch my nose closed and blow as hard as I could. So if we only just now equalized the pressure between us, well, we had our assumptions to blame.

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My partner surprised me with this fact. But then, I'd already been preoccupied with how much we assume about sensation: surely not everyone feels like this? Anatomical diagram became an archaeological dig: point and tell me what's happening there. What has happened. What might happen. Our bodies hold so many secrets, and we already have roadmaps back to each other.