Loss

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.

I’ve traded my subway commute for an e-bike over the past two years, gaining a new intimacy with the city’s geography and weather, but losing the daily river of humanity that once inspired my peons. This morning gave me my first fleeting glimpse of that old muse — a stunning brunette on a bike, gone in a flash.

I had an epiphany about the shame I feel when relationships with women end — a deep sense that I am bad, unworthy, and that the loss is proof of it. It connected my pattern of abandonment to my mother, and felt like genuine news even though I’ve written about it many times before.

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.

I’ve been building a chatbot to give access to my writing — not to imitate my voice, but to preserve it. This project grew from grief over my mother’s lost writings and a resolve not to leave my child without my output.

I’ve known V since 2011. We aren’t in touch, and I haz a sad.

I struggle to accept the loss of women in my life, a pattern rooted in losing my mother repeatedly.