So Sad Today (3 page)

I
TELL MYSELF
I
KNOW
nothing about love so I can recover. I am recovering from a fantasy that I projected on a young man’s body. He provided music and language and fingers and a face that moaned into my pussy. I am never going to recover from being that alive.

I was in love with him. I don’t care that well-meaning people tell me it was lust or infatuation, though I have started saying it was lust or infatuation so as not to be called out first by well-meaning people. Well-meaning people can save me from myself, but they cannot save me from being alive. Only my god can do that. Sometimes my god speaks through well-meaning people. Sometimes I am so lonely.

Was it love when we met on the Internet? Was it love when he pursued me with silly messages and praise for my writing and a picture drawn in my favorite candy? When an attractive person pursues you, there is the luxury of not having to worry about whether it is love, because you are not the one doing the pursuing. At least, not at first. My usual habit of falling for people, when I think I am not falling, seemed irrelevant. He poked and messaged and “liked” and faved my every Internet itch. I had my feelings, any feelings, under control.

I was the one who escalated it. I was the one who made it overtly sexual, as I get nervous in undefined spaces and feel compelled to sexualize things. One day we were messaging about my favorite cereals (Kashi GoLean, Cocoa Krispies post-milk). Then
we were messaging about his stomach issues, which I called his “poop game,” as in “how is your poop game?” He said it was hard to talk about his poop game with anyone he hadn’t been inside. But once he was inside a person, the poop memoirs could just flow. I asked him if he wanted to be inside me. He said
yeah!!!!
Then he asked if I was being for real. I messaged him my number. I said we could play the sext game. We sexted all afternoon.

We continued like this for a year, never meeting IRL for the first six months. He lived in DC and I was in New York, then Los Angeles. We explored various tropes along the way, from the crucifixion (
Me:
can u tease my pussy over my undies in an amphitheater from like 31–33 AD then finger me in a dark alley while jesus is crucified and like not know he is getting crucified bc i am dryhumping u against a wall
/
Him:
Can you suck your pussy juice off my fingers at the exact moment our Lord and Savior rises, and he sees you sucking my fingers and goes “hold on” and stops rising, but then goes “jk” and rises again, and everyone laughs
) to the Arctic (
Him:
Touching my cock, thinking about you kneeling over it, dropping yourself slowly onto me, on a beautiful glacier
/
Me:
there is a sephora on the glacier and my lips are unnaturally red
/
Me:
i lick the head of yr cock through the galactic gloryhole, french kiss it slowly outside the timespace continuum
/
Him:
My cock glows an incredible iridescence as I enter you. The warmth of your pussy against the cold night creates a clap of thunder between us, somehow
/
Him:
We set off a nuclear reaction in your pussy, each of us coming to the other’s throbbing orgasm
).

We also texted about other things: depression and anxiety, therapy sessions, the hamster wheel of the mind, our secret childhood pains, what it might mean to have a second childhood, different types of voids, a bad acid trip involving the moon. We sent pictures of
our naked bodies. He told me that a poem he’d written, which I’d admired, he’d written for me. No one had ever made me the muse before. Something inside me shifted. The little kid in me erupted. She said,
You see me. I am finally seen.

It takes so little, really. How well do we see someone who we know only for a brief while? How well do we ever see anyone at all? I know too much and I know nothing at all.

The first time we met was at a hotel in the financial district in Manhattan, just before Thanksgiving. I remember sitting on the hotel toilet, trying to make myself shit before he got there. He seemed to have had a lot of anal. I, nine years older than him, had never had anal. I enjoyed cleaning myself, making myself look beautiful, dressing for him.

When he arrived in the hotel room, I thought
Jesus
. He had the black hair of a pixie, the face and body of a gazelle. I was relieved that he passed for normal. Hot-normal. People on the Internet often get weirder and less attractive when you get off-line. I remember we hugged for a long time, as if to say,
I know you
. We sort
of did know each other. Also, not at all. Then we started kissing. I remember his lips were chapped. I remember feeling like the kisses were too hard. It felt like a forced urgency, and despite his assurances that he would eat my pussy infinitely, I didn’t think there was any way my body could catch up. It felt cinematic in a bad way. After all the sexting we both had too much to live up to.

Next we were in our underwear, rolling around on the hotel bed. I wanted to rewind and start again, to move in slow motion. He licked my pussy and I found myself faking or at least moaning in a dramatic way—something I had done with other lovers in the past, when my brain and body were nowhere near the pace but I wanted to seem present. I think I tried to suck his dick to space things out. I think I tried to get him hard. He must have felt the way I did, because he stayed soft.

Then I think we were making out again on the bed. Suddenly, I felt a wave of all of the sadness and all of the fear that I usually keep dammed up. I drowned for a minute. I felt like he could feel it. What I didn’t consider at the time was that the sadness could have been coming from him. Later he apologized for what he called a dark energy that he had brought with him—a depressive state that he couldn’t shake that night. But I thought it was my own. Maybe it was both of ours, and maybe it was what bonded us to each other underneath all of the
sexting. I think we were both looking for light, maybe a fake light, maybe a real one.

I said,
You have experienced a lot of pain in your life. You are so intuitive.
I didn’t tell him that I felt like he could intuit my own historic pain in that moment.

He told me he was getting tired. Would I mind if he slept some? I told him,
Of course not
, but felt rejected. I realized I hadn’t eaten in many hours. I told him I was going to go out for food and asked if he wanted anything. He said no. I wondered if he was hesitant to eat at sleepover situations because of his digestive issues.

I went to 7-Eleven and bought a thousand calories worth of food: a Golden Grahams bar, a pack of M&M’s, some weird Japanese-looking peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Back at the hotel room, I sat on the bed feeling really cute and pretty. I ate, mindful of him, like I was putting on a show. I told him that he should sleep and that I was going to take the second big bed (there were two).

I don’t remember drifting off but I remember waking up at dawn the next morning and brushing my teeth, then getting back into bed, pretending to be asleep. I heard him get up to brush his teeth. I heard him piss. I opened my eyes and watched his gazelle body languidly milling around the room. He had a hard-on in his gray boxer briefs. He asked if he could get in bed with me. I said yes, and then we kissed softly—so much more natural than the night before. Then he kissed down my body. Then he ate my pussy for infinity.