The dichotomy of you and me

By Daniel Browning

There is a lyrical harmony in the way the numbers 6 and 9 align, prurient twittering and schoolboy humour aside.

They are teardrops, inverted commas in a sentence or a declaration of love not yet uttered, order and chaos, the yin and yang. Once offset, these two identical glyphs mirror each other perfectly - in reverse.

Just as the natural world is constituted of five non-living things bound by five cosmological elements and perceived humanly by five sensory organs, 69 is the dichotomy - dual forces at once complementary yet defined by binary opposition.

Black/white, male/female, left/right, straight/gay, trans/cis, you/me.

In the heat of the liminal space where two bodies interact, our hormones commingle like fluid on the surface of our skin. Yet we are locked in eternal struggle.

They say that if sex were a number it would be 69.