Much of the time I feel dead. I’ve written about this lots over the years. Sometimes the deadness is concentrated in my cock. Other times it’s more global. In recent months and years, as my body has aged and has presented me with increasingly threatening reminders of mortality and the finitude of existence, the sense of deadness has grown.
I say often that I don’t fear death, and I don’t think I do, but I do fear the diminution of my sexual viability. I think of that SNL skit about the last fuckable day of women. And while I don’t think I have reached my last fuckable day, I do feel far less sexually viable than I once did, far less confident of my sexual viability than I once was.
This is exacerbated by the somewhat maddening news that at a relatively young age it seems likely that I need to replace not one but both of my knees. It’s hard to overstate how painful this is — not physically, or not only physically. I mean, yes, physically it is painful to need both knees replaced, and I’m sure my recovery will be difficult. But what I really mean is how painful it is to see myself not as a person navigating the world with agency and viability, but rather as a vulnerable person who needs care.
This has been coupled with a diminished volume and quality of sexual connection in my life outside of my marriage. It was a year and a half ago that I had my sapphic soiree, a sort of last hurrah. And while I’ve had flings of various sorts since then — with Saya, with Serena — there’s been nothing that begins to match some of the connections about which I wrote early on in this blog, or as recently as just a few years ago with Charlotte.
In the last couple of days, though, there’s been a confluence of reminders of the ways in which women and women’s interest can stimulate a sense of vitality in me. I hope to write more about that in coming days, but suffice it to say that Margot’s at least putative openness to allowing me to plan a gangbang for her, and Jade’s at least initial willingness to allow me to buy some lingerie for her, reactivated something in me.
And then, in some ways, a deeper and more exciting and less predictable thing happened: P — she of folly — emailed me out of the blue. I don’t dare hope for anything with her. She’s done this once or twice since we stopped interacting over a decade ago. But I had high hopes for P once upon a time, and today I don’t dare attach high hopes to her. All I attach to her is the excitement of being in touch once again with someone about whom I grew to care at least a little.
Header image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, interior, late afternoon: a kitchen or dining table scarred with age, its surface holding a single open laptop, screen glowing a cold bluish-white against the warm amber of a low winter sun cutting hard through a window just out of frame. On the table beside the laptop, a half-drunk glass of water and two white prescription pill bottles, their labels turned away. In the far background, slightly out of focus, a woman in dark trousers and a grey knit top stands at the window with her back to the camera, one hand resting on the glass, already half-turned as if deciding whether to leave.