sex

Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing as well as possible.

I have one eye right now. There’s a cut on my cornea, so I can’t wear my left contact lens. I am almost completely blind in my left eye without it. The wound will heal soon and I will be back on my bike risking my life in Montreal traffic.

A few days ago I was back in Atlanta visiting my parents. Mom has been cleaning the house, hoping to sell what is left of it. Dad has been counting calories. There’s this guy I used to write songs about. We have been close for years now. We always loved in slow motion. Moments of intimacy, nights spent driving around. I never understood my place in his world. When I was home we would hold our bodies for hours. There was little to say. Eventually we kissed and it was electric. I spent my teenage years dreaming about this moment. Something was certainly wrong. The currents ran dry. He said he didn’t like kissing on the mouth. He didn’t want to take his shirt off, his perfectly sculpted body hidden underneath a layer of polyester. This is not sex. This is not romance. He asked me if I had ever heard of asexuality. I told him of course. We held each other for a few more hours. I cried in the shower hoping the stream was loud enough that my parents couldn’t hear me. He said he loved me and I loved him, but I cried because I could only love him in words. Our bodies speak different languages. There is no translation. 

I cried in the car the next day and one more time in the shower. I couldn’t pin down why. I called my brother and he told me that I need to put myself out there and meet more guys and I love him but he has no idea what he is saying.

The Monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kharkiv During the War by Egle Karpaviciute

I met a guy from Australia. We were crammed into the fluorescent Thursday night Arts Bar at our university and he put down five warm beers easy. Aussies. I drank until I found my arm around his shoulder and then his waist. My friends silently cheered me on and Aussie boy and I went out to dinner. He told me about these flowers you can eat and handed me one and it tasted like nothing I had ever tasted before and I wanted so badly to kiss him. We made our way across town to my apartment. I gave him a tour of my ensemble of random objects I have collected over the years. He said he’s never met anyone like me and he kissed me like he meant it. Immediately it was right. I wanted to love his whole body. I wanted to show him what is under my skin. We made love for no reason. He held me and I felt held.

I remember after one of my eye surgeries, the pain became so unbearable I found myself in the fetal position on the floor of Mom’s closet. She found me laying there and asked me if I was okay and I was too high on painkillers and in pain so glacial I remember wanting to vomit. She kissed me on my forehead and our dead dog nestled up next to me. She was so warm and so small. She had already been dying for years, her spine sloping parabolic towards heaven, skin showing more than hair, bumps on bumps on bumps. Tumors. She always knew when she was needed. Tucked in my arms, I cried into what was left of her. Mom rubbed my back and the glacier melted slowly into stalactite pain, eroding cliffs, long smooth rocks and eventually became the beach. I was the kind of neither asleep nor awake morphine makes you wish you would never escape. Mom’s caress became the sea and the radiating pain in my skull became birds.

Dad told me a story. We sat at the kitchen table, his calf resting on the corner furthest from the television, of course showing golf. He told me about a time he ran into one of his old fraternity brothers outside a bakery nearby. They were never all that close in college, but the man needed Dad’s help. His wife, Diane, was in the hospital. Breast cancer. She needed somewhere to rest between treatments. Our house is a mile away from the hospital. She would come over in her scrubs and sleep on our couch in the middle of the day, not saying a word. Chemo took everything. The dead dog would tuck herself into Diane’s arms like a baby. Chemo made her so sick, so cold. The dog knew she needed warmth and gave her all she had left. Dad said the next time he saw Diane was at her funeral. The dog died soon after. She could no longer move. Her work was done. Mom turned her into a stone and she sits forever on her bedside. Where do moms go when they die? I hope it's wherever the dogs are.

Uferweg I by Katja Lang

The person who I have had sex with the most in the world, Amélie. We have never shared a meal. We met at a party and made out on our friend’s bed. She rubbed against me like she wanted to absorb me. We fell in love for three hours a week. I told all of my friends about her. I even found myself drawing her. My lines are shaky, hands always trembling from caffeine or exhaustion. My drawings of her made her look like a shadow. I knew her better than anyone in the world. I couldn’t tell you the town she is from. There is something to be said about the body. There is something to be said about love and then nothing. There is something to be said about being naked. There is something to be said about covering someone in yourself, being covered in another. I miss the taste of it all, I really do. She has a boyfriend now. The ephemerality of our existence together had to come to an end. Something so beautiful has to wither. Maybe that is what makes it so beautiful. Who am I to say? 

She invited me to a picnic with her and only her. I am worried that if I go I will tell her that I love her when what I really mean is I loved her or I loved our friction, fire, embers. She deserves someone who loves her as she is. She deserves someone who takes her out to dinner, goes on walks with her, tells her she is beautiful every day. She deserves someone who can remind her of herself. I was always too jaded. She made me smile, it’s true, but at the end of the night I was always alone. No one like her has ever existed. I love her in that I cannot describe her. She deserves someone who can draw her from memory. Someone with a steady hand.

The Aussie boy will move back to Australia in a few months. I want to tell him that I will go with him. I want to tell him that we will make it work. I want to tell him that I have never felt so good. I want to tell him that I lay awake at night wondering if a house fire will warm my bones. I want to tell him I run as fast as I can every night, only inches from the Saint Laurent. I want to tell him I was born to destroy myself. There’s nothing any doctor can do, but I will love you. I will love you.

The first time you met me you knew I was looking for something, my eyes darting around the room like the walls had something to say. I can only hope I am not hollow. I can only hope I have something, that there is something in me that I can give you. You don’t need to need it. I swear.

I remember laying on my back in the forest. Against the overcast sky, tree branches become one dimensional, projected over the clouds. My ex-girlfriend had just told me she thought she was pregnant. I was sixteen and the rain felt like nothing on my face. Moments like these are discontinuous. Time surely beats like a heart. Lay on my chest. How are you real?