Loss

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.

I reflect on my lack of passionate, spontaneous sex and the losses inherent in any particular sexual configuration.

I keep telling myself a story, using various women, in which I do everything right but am still left, feeling somehow at fault and unable to prevent or repair the loss.