What I Talk About When I Talk About Being Demisexual
Although she is no longer yours, the memories of her remain in your possession.
Months pass. The sound of her voice has faded to the point that it requires concentration for you can conjure it.
Where the missing stops and you begin is hard to decipher. You feel it in the heaviness of your body, a weight on your chest, the emptiness as you fill each day trying to weave together the fabric of a life well-lived.
You wonder what that means and if it means anything but to love and to be loved. To set a plate in front of the person you live for, to watch them lift the fork to their mouths, your hand on their knee, the evening set before you both, a perpetual circle of giving and receiving one another’s time. Giving and receiving bits and entire hunks of one another’s lives.
What is it to love somebody if not to give to them of your existence?
I talk to the dogs who respond only in the sense that they are present in all things, in most moments of the day. They check in on me. Sniff at my tears, nudge me awake most mornings, and wait in their spots in the evening, signaling to me when I’ve been alive long enough to call it a day. The one from Albania has taken to working himself in a frenzy each time he smells that I’m fresh out of the shower, rubbing his body on my back and his head in my wet hair like a cat purring as if he’s congratulating me for completing the minor task I’ve taken to forgetting.
When she left, she took my sexuality with her.
Wisps of my longing caught up in her dark hair. My sensuality puddled in the crevices of her dimples. My eroticism clung like dust to the fine peach fuzz along her jawline. The tiny age spots below her eyes, my devotion. Her newly-formed crow’s feet, my beginning, and, my end.
The memory of her gently nuzzling her mouth to my cheeks, my forehead, my temples in the afterglow of passion has become my most cherished haunting.
Her gleaming eyes looking at me through the camera are a fable I read over and over. Her love has become my folklore, something that might have happened but which must have been a dream inside a very deep sleep. I add my fictions to the story, what she might have done, what I might have said, necessities to rebuild the room in which I hide from reality each morning while I desperately grasp for her fading presence. Each time I build her again in my mind, close my eyes, and spoon-feed myself the fiction of what might be one day, a poor replacement for what once was.
I’m dry unless I lie to myself, spin the web of a story, convince myself it’s her form on the horizon. Porn does nothing. Movies do nothing. I replay tired memories, fading memories of our love to connect in order to feel that part of me alive again. I don’t let myself think about how pathetic it is, and when I do, that’s where the porn helps. My body is broken unless I make myself believe that she’s here again and that she loves me.
What is a body if not a remnant of that which was some greater thing, broken shards of a treasure the whole of which can now only be guessed at? What was it we were and how was it that we loved? I would give my life to live in those moments, to live inside of them like being inside of a snow globe, to repeat the same love over and over. It was that much enough.
When I told her I had never loved that hard before, she did not believe me. But when I came for her, it was like discovering my body for the first time.
When she left, she took my sexuality with her.
