Loss

Three small scotches in, sad and tipsy at the bar, cataloguing the women on either side of me.

P emailed again, and my heart leapt again – like it always does, like an idiot.

I used to check my answering machine ten times a day. It was never about being important.

I experience connections as deep and real, but they end not in intentional closure but in disappearance. This is my compulsive repetition of courting and failing to avoid abandonment.

I’m writing about Isabella, one of two women who taught me the most about my sexuality. She showed me my cock could be an object of desire, while the Secretary taught me my desire itself could be desired. I miss them both — not just for sex, but for the intimacy we shared.

Two years of biking to work instead of riding the subway, and this morning I finally saw an ass worth writing about.

I’ve written a hundred times about being abandoned. Turns out I missed the part where I’m ashamed.

Death has been a constant presence throughout my life — from losing grandparents as a young child to my mother at nineteen. My own 21-year-old child, though, has been largely sheltered from it, and losses are now drawing closer.

What being sad, being a little depressed, looks like in me.

I’m depressed. Not TERRIBLY depressed. But depressed.