Death Diary: Once in Reverence and Once in Despair
(Previously: Spite dancing and getting dumped on my birthday)
September 24
A man’s desire is palpable. It devours.
A woman’s desire is an onion. It reveals itself slowly. You never know if it will satiate or bring tears. (Or both at once.)
Each consumes you, in its way. A woman’s desire is what I want, but it’s men who chase me.
The day before I fucked the Man I Should Not Have Had Sex With, I pictured him in a high-backed, armless chair. Naked. I straddled the chair, my hips grinding him to dust.
I saw my feet flexed, toes touching the floor. The creak of the wood crying to the rhythm of our groans, his hands on my ass, pulling our bodies deeper inside one another.
I came this way, thinking of the physics of our sighs, the pull of gravity, the high-backed chair scraping the floor—two hard woods meeting two soft skins.
What I most appreciate about male desire is that it does not apologize. It treads unlightly, stomps like a child does to a puddle in the rain, unconcerned for the reach of the splash, its consequences, who might get drenched.
My desire is more like a man’s, but I get in my own way.
When I was fucking the Man I Should Not Have Had Sex With, he kept reaching both of his hands up and sweeping my hair out of my face.
I wondered about this gesture endlessly. Was it annoyance? A tickling? A tenderness? Did he just want to see my face? Did he—like we all do—want something to hold onto when confronted with the towering wave that is desire?
I wondered all these things and forgot my own pleasure. In the awareness of my hair being moved out of my face, I memorized the moment instead of enjoying it.
But I want my hair in my face. I want it to snarl—to matte and tangle. I want to look at myself in the mirror after and see the animal that I became.
Another moment: His hands on my back as I straddled him on the couch. My back a river of sweat and his hands gliding through me as if through water.
It seemed childlike and wondrous—this touching. The way we touch the surface skin of a lake or a bath, testing its permeability, seeing what it will hold.
(Very little.)
After you made me come, you would suck each finger into your mouth as if I were candy, one by one by one, appropriating every last trace of desire, filling yourself with me.
Then you would kiss me urgently, your tongue a secular prayer in my mouth, as if you could breathe water, as if such a thing was not only possible, but preferable.
What do you call this kind of desire? How could I ever have stood a chance against it?
“I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live” (Maggie Nelson, Bluets)
I am so sore I can barely cross my legs. My neck and shoulders are laced with pebbles. My body its own vocabulary of pain.
How quickly it forgets.
September 26
“What do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me?” (Franz Kafka)
Last night I met the Domme, the woman who said she was not ready to date.
We shared a scorpion bowl at a tiki bar. She was a little slow to warm, her face decidedly neutral, which only made me more animated and chatty.
But after one drink, she loosened and I did, too. I put my foot on the rung of her stool. She rested her chin on her fist, eyebrow arched as if sharpening a weapon. She looked at me like I was a meal.
I was shocked to notice this looking. What an intimacy it is, to be gazed upon.
“The gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.” (Ocean Vuong)
After the bar closed, I drove us to In N Out burger. I put on my seatbelt and then kissed her, the fabric a welcome restraint. The fabric ensuring I would not float to the ceiling.
A line from Sarah Manguso washed over me when we kissed: “As soon as that happened, I knew the future and it felt like relief.”
I don’t know the future but I do know that the memory of our lips touching is causing my insides to contract and expand, still, hours later, that my thighs are hunting for the places her nails dug into them.
And that was only one kiss.
There was so much more.
September 27
I sent the Domme a poem and she told me again that she does not want to date me.
I have nothing to blunt the rawness of my grief except with the warm bodies of those who don’t want me.
I see it so clearly—every time it happens. I see the unavailable person and don’t run from them. My knees stay true to the floor.
My father is dead but I will always be a child. Begging to be picked up and held. God, this is embarrassing.
Sometimes you are disappeared before you have a chance to learn your name. So you say the names of others.
I say your name over and over, forehead to the floor, whispering to the wood, trying to unerase myself. I write 80 billion words and it’s not enough.
Because the only reliable one is me and I don’t quite believe I have a right to be here.
“The reality is that you will grieve forever.”—Elisabeth Kubler Ross
The reality is that I’m an idiot.
The reality is that I saw you coming and threw my arms wide to the sky in offering.
—
If there’s one thing rejection teaches you, it’s that you have to keep going.
(But, god. The sound of my name in her mouth was hot as a color.)
—
“I dare you to be human with me,” you said, when we first fell in love. “I dare you to be vulnerable and mortal and everything you already are. Do we want to be of the gods, my love, or do we want the wild longing of this adolescence?”
After you kissed me on that fall day in the nameless park in Fremont, I knew my life was about to change, but I did not know how utterly. I did not know that you would be the wet wick on which my entire world would ignite.
I wrote in my journal: I don’t have enough hands for this happiness.
As if the problem was that I was too mortal. The problem was that I wasn’t Hydra or Shiva or Durga or any other number of many-limbed, deathless gods.
And now?
Now the future is behind us. We no longer exist in its brightness.
But what good are hands if not for holding on?
October 1
I asked the Domme to watch a movie with me and she said yes. My heart pounded sending that text.
It’s hard to act as if there’s more than one star in the sky when I feel this way.
October 3
I realized yesterday that all of the sex I’ve had since my father died has been amazing in some way. With K, with S, with the Man I Should Not Have Had Sex With, and now the Domme.
It must be grief, making the pleasure more acute, intense, bringing me back into my body, its simple pleasures.
Three weeks before my dad died, my grandmother passed away.
The news came in when S and I were on the couch, her legs tucked under her, her hair up and then down and then up again as we talked, the arches of her feet softly curling like wood shavings in the waning light.
I took her hand and led her to the bed, a line from Jack Gilbert sifting its way through me like light through a keyhole in a door no one has opened in years.
“We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”
S touched me and grief fell to its knees. She touched me and grief no longer had a season. Because the reverence in her eyes obliterated everything but delight, as she looked into my dark, ancient soul and pronounced it beautiful.
How strange and lovely to get so near to the music of her body in that moment, the birdsong furrow, the staccato of her ribs, the catch of her breath, and her heartbeat hammering against my tongue, swiftly sighing we’re alive we’re alive we’re alive.
