So Sad Today (4 page)

I went to space. I came on his tongue. I said,
Want to fuck a little?
and we fucked. I said,
Kill me with your arrow cock
. Then I gave him a very long, slow blow job until he got harder than he had been. He came in my mouth. I swallowed his cum.

We had until noon. We kissed, rubbed against each other. He talked to my pussy. He made out with it. We talked about concerts. That was disappointing. I didn’t want to talk about anything cultural, anything tethered to society. I only wanted to talk about feelings, life in its most primal and essential form. There is something about the blankness of a hotel room that makes you feel like you can do that—that such a thing as primal, essential life exists. There is something about occupying that neutral space with someone you really know nothing about—except the very essential, or the essential as they
have painted it, or the essential as you have chosen to perceive it—that makes this seem possible.

When we said goodbye in the hotel lobby, I was aloof behind my sunglasses and under my fur hood (later he would text me a picture of himself in a jacket with a fur hood and sunglasses and say
look
). From behind my sunglasses and fur hood, I said,
We did good
. I said it like a pro, like a champ. I was very boys club, very
not attached
. I guess he liked that, because later he told me that he had to look at a Google map to figure out where he was going next, but he’d hid in a deli next door to the hotel to do it, because he didn’t want to mess up the good ending.

The second time was at the empty house of a friend in Brooklyn, two months later. I texted him all afternoon from the bathtub, soaking in oils. I said that it felt like a holiday. We texted back and forth screenshots of our favorite sexts from the past seven months, celebrating ourselves. I liked that he was traveling for hours by bus to see me. It felt romantic. I didn’t think about the fact that I’d flown four thousand miles from
Los Angeles to New York. I believed it was for work, and it sort of was—but if he wasn’t going to be there I probably wouldn’t have made the trip.

I remember when he arrived at the door in the night snow. I couldn’t believe he was real again. Or maybe he was not fully real—not as I envisioned him—but his face and body and hair were real. I said,
Let me take off your fucking coat. I just want to take off your fucking coat.

I remember walking up the stairs to the bedroom and asking if he had brought music. He said that he would eat my pussy to infinity again, this time while listening to Teen Daze. He licked me for an entire album. After it ended I came. I remember then having some kind of sex, maybe doggy style.

I was fascinated by his uncircumcised dick. He was my first uncircumcised one. I felt like a virgin again. I wanted his dick to be dirty so I could taste what was under his foreskin and really know him. But it was clean.

I remember being very hungry and going down into the kitchen with him to look for food. I remember eating an apple and talking to him about being alive. I don’t remember what we decided being alive was or if we even attempted to make a consensus. Maybe we didn’t even talk. He looked very alive. I felt it.

Here is what he later said of that time:

I remember getting on the subway together and asking him what street he grew up on in Somerville, Massachusetts. I had gone to college in that town, and we’d both been there at the same time when I was between eighteen and twenty-one and he was between nine and twelve. He said he grew up on Morrison Avenue. I had a therapist who lived on Morrison Ave. He laughed and said,
My mom is a therapist
. I asked for her name and when he told me, I said,
Oh god. Your mom was my therapist.
He said,
Oh god. We could have met. I remember being in her house
that summer and seeing all the college girls going in and out and thinking they were hot.

I got off the subway then and went to go meet up with my parents. I asked my mother if she remembered paying a large, unpaid therapy bill, when his mom had to call her, because I had not paid. She remembered. I think this is when I started feeling like something magic was going on. I cried in the bathroom.

I began sneaking hints to him about my real feelings. I wondered if he could actually see us being together. I would allude to this in roundabout ways, until finally, I texted him about it.

To me this read like a love letter—some sort of affirmation, or that is how I wanted to see it. And of course, what I have not said up until now is that I was married. I was married to someone else—nonmonogamous at that time, but married—and so, perhaps, my own unavailability made it safe for me to imagine myself with this person and for him to play the game with me. The fantasy was inherently sustainable as a fantasy. It could stay a fantasy forever, if we wanted.

There was an odd, psychic quality to our relationship too. Every time we met I had my period. Somehow, he always knew that I would have my period. He said this was because he was in tune with what my pussy was doing. When he licked my pussy and got blood on his face, I thought he must really love me to lick my blood. But maybe that was more about him loving pussy—any pussy—than him loving me. Like, maybe there are just some men who love pussy so much that they will lick anyone’s blood. Maybe it didn’t matter that it was my blood. The sheets were always bloody.

One time, when we were apart, I wrote his name on
a piece of paper in my menstrual blood and texted it to him. The paper is still in my journal and the blood is very faint brown-pink now. It looks prettier today than on the day I wrote it.

Our final meeting lasted for an entire weekend. It was in a hotel all the way on the bottom tip of Manhattan. He texted me from the bus and I told him I would be taking a nap until he got there.
Sleep, sleep in my heroin
, he said, meaning sleep in the anticipation. I said that I was having a stomachache and could he bring me some Pepto. I think it was the only thing he ever bought for me. I still have the Pepto tablets. To me, they still seem romantic: pink, cherry flavor. To me they look like tiny valentines.

That night I had my first anal sex. It was tender, nothing like I had seen in porn. I felt like we were a pair of twins sharing a womb, two DNA strands, two genderless humans. I felt that I was a virgin again. He ate my pussy as he always did, as it was our foundation of sorts. He licked my ass too. He put one finger in my ass, then two, then three. He really knew what to do. I really wanted it. We Frenched each other with his dick going in and out of my ass.

Afterward, I cried—not because it hurt but because of something else. I had the feeling that a darkness was lifting. I forgot about death.

The next day we went to go get lunch together and for the first time, we held each other’s hands outside in public. I felt so proud to be holding his hand, not only because he was physically beautiful, but because he was keeping death away. We talked about bonobos, how they are nonmonogamous and use sex to pacify all kinds of situations. Verbally I agreed that more humans should be like bonobos. But inside, I thought,
I would be monogamous with you
.

Or maybe I did not let myself think that. Maybe I wanted him to be mine, but also wanted to continue to be married and also to fuck other men. I brought him to an event that night where I read poetry. Other men I had fucked were there. And the first time he had ever seen me, a year before, before the Internet flirtation and sexting began, it was at a poetry event like that. Both
times I wore black. Both times there were other men I had fucked in the room.

On the cab ride back to the hotel, the driver put on “Stairway to Heaven.” This would have been corny except that we were able to be corny together, as that is what children do together, and so it was not corny. We made out in the cab as the cab crossed over the Williamsburg Bridge. I cried in his mouth.

When we got back to the hotel we made love again. This time he came inside me. I said
I’m in love with you
or
I love you
. I don’t remember which. He said it back. I don’t remember which.

I felt that we were moving past only fucking, into something else. Over text, I told him that sometimes the harshness of our sexts didn’t fit how I felt anymore exactly. I asked if I could tell him the truth.

That was as far as he would meet me. It was a beautiful place to meet me, but it wasn’t the impossible, which was what I needed. I wanted to see what was possible. I wanted to see if the impossible could somehow be
possible. But when I asked for the impossible, the DNA dissolved. He became twenty-five again and I became—old. I became a woman again and he became a man again. I became the pursuer and he became the pursued, which for me was the worst of all.