La Baisse

Lyrics

The event concludes. Dopamine cascade subsides. The reward system, resetting. Subject A, Subject B. Respiration normalizing. The sheets are a topographical map of a brief, forgotten country. Warm in patches, but cooling now. The air in the room thins. Becomes… clinical. Oxytocin, prolactin: a rapid, scheduled descent. Like a stock market crash measured in picograms per milliliter. The body, a meticulous accountant, closes its books on the transaction. There is no deficit, no profit. Just the ledger, wiped clean. And the sadness arrives. Not a feeling, precisely. More a change in atmospheric pressure. An ancient weather pattern. Juvenal noted it in his Satires, between complaints about the city. *Omne animal post coitum triste.* After the act, every animal is sad. A biological footnote. A design flaw. Your breathing is a slow, steady tide beside me. You are asleep, or pretending well. The space between us is no longer measured in millimeters. It is an ocean. Dr. Schweitzer's 2015 paper puts the prevalence at forty-six percent. A silent, significant minority. You are in the fifty-four. And I am here, on this cold shore, cataloging the tide going out. I imagine a Roman villa. Cool marble floors. An oil lamp sputtering. Two figures, tangled in linen, just like this. One of them feels the same sudden chill. The same inexplicable hollowness. Two thousand years, and the hormones haven't read the literature. They still plunge. The clock on the bedside table reads 3:17 AM. It could be any century. And the sadness is here. Not a story, not a regret. Just a change in atmospheric pressure. The old weather pattern. Juvenal was right. The animal is sad. A biological axiom, indifferent to the participants. *Omne animal triste.* The system resets. The ledger is blank. The room is cold. Analysis complete.