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Somehow, this small moment felt more intimate than anything I had done with Garrett. I kissed his doggy cheek and he yawned in my face, a long, pronounced yawn showing all of his teeth and the speckled roof of his mouth. He was so completely himself, could not be anything other than himself, and would never understand why I might want to be anything other than me. It would be silly to him, crazy even. We were as we were and that was it. At
I had given my power away to Garrett and I didn’t like the feeling.
I heard myself talking to the dog, and it reminded me that I existed. Existence always looked like something other than I thought it would.
She had a nice engagement ring—not gigantic—but big enough that she could flash it and make other women feel shitty. She was a left-hand gesturer. I bet she used the word fiancée.
I felt hatred for them and shame about myself. But the brunchers didn’t notice me at all, or the orange pee stain. It made me want to disrupt their eating, their stupid conversations, and sit in the middle of their tables. I wanted them to be forced to deal with me.
I wanted to be like, Look, this is what you get when you fuck a guy with a wife. This is what the polyamory people are like. You are never going to get to have the whole person.
When I looked at Claire I saw that there was no human who could do that for us. Fill the hole. That was the sad part of Sappho’s spaces. Where there had been something beautiful there before, now they were blank. Time erased all. That was the part nobody could handle. Some people tried to shove things in them: their own narratives, biographical crap. I was pretending that nothing had ever been there in the first place, so that I wouldn’t feel the hurt of its absence. I wanted to be immune to time, the pain of it. But pretending didn’t make it so. Everything dissolved. No one really wanted
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I loved watching him eat, how absorbed in it and unselfconscious he was, gobbling quickly and getting right to the point. I loved the sounds he made with his black lips and pink tongue, all sloppy and smacking, totally engrossed in his meal. Occasionally he would stop midbowl, still chewing, and glance at me sideways for a moment as if to say, What are you looking at? I’m just eating. We all do it, you know.
“Each its own little death.” “Funny,” he said. “You’re like a little death.”
Just that lack of willingness to disclose—that’s all it took for me to perceive rejection.
“I had that feeling about you. That you would be happy to just go to sleep.” “Why? Because I’m so boring?” “Not at all,” he said. “The opposite. But I can feel you’ve suffered.”
“We all do it, you know.”
The point is—I don’t feel crazy around this one.”
Chickenhorse had been forced to move back in with her parents, which was traumatizing for her. Actually, she said it was “retraumatizing” and calling up trauma from earlier in life.
But this time something truly seems different. He still isn’t ready for marriage or an engagement or even to call me his girlfriend or commit to monogamy, but he’s showing up for me in a way that he never has before. He’s truly present.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But your secret is safe with me. Do you feel any better now even just telling me?” “Not really,” she said.
I felt proud of him, not eclipsed by him, as though being with him somehow made me better. He
someone with whom to weather life, like Annika and Steve. How did they stay so into each other living side by side, everything out in the open? How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe.
I couldn’t believe that his love for me was still so pure and unwavering, and I didn’t even have to work for it.
Why didn’t I do things more often that excited me? Why did it take some strange swimmer boy to get me out here? Couldn’t the ocean itself be enough, the lure and adventure of its wild, salty licks?
I had been so afraid of dying, but suddenly I knew that death would be okay and beautiful—and even dying would be okay, because there was a heaven, sort of. Maybe it was not the way religious people imagined it, but I saw it as some kind of luminous womb to which we would all return. And because we would return there, in a way we were already there. I started to cry. All the pain and fear of the past nine months poured out of me.
Had it ever been solely about pleasure for me? Maybe I had missed the point of what having a pussy was for entirely. It was not for having babies or pissing, but simply a locus of pleasure—its own purpose.
Right above my pussy, my whole pelvis felt full—not of piss or pain—but self-sustaining, pulsing. I felt glad to be alive. Or not even glad, just alive. I was in my is-ness and was not going to fight it. So this was joy.
I thought about dominance and submission—how in some ways he had been the submissive one in eating my pussy. Yet in other ways I was dependent on him emotionally now that I had let him see me like that: splayed, surrendered, thrusting in his face.
“Yes. At least forty-five. What does it mean when a boy goes down on you for forty-five minutes? I feel like it has to be love. Like, I feel like he loves me.” “Either he loves you or he loves pussy. One of the two.”
But the group was right—it was me who was really the unavailable one. I was picking people with whom I couldn’t have that ultimate intimacy:
But it hurt, nonetheless. So instead I judged myself. I made myself wrong for needing someone, for revealing that need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting. I would not put them out there like that again. I didn’t even want to have to feel them myself.
It was a feminine taste. It tasted like the smell of his tail, oceanic, a little fishy. I felt as though I had eaten his pussy, that I was yang or yin, or whichever the male was, and he was female for a moment.
“I think I brought some darkness in here with me. The sadness, moving from sea to land, sometimes I can’t shake it. I thought if anything I would feel scared, but coming here I couldn’t help but think, What’s the point? I mean, I guess the point is that we have an experience. I guess that is the point. I just, well, I am going to live a long time. And have lived a long time. I have seen a lot of people come and go.” I
I was terrified. For a moment, I couldn’t see Theo clearly. It was as though he were vanishing, or I couldn’t hold my fear and vision at the same time. He flashed in and out of focus, then I saw him again, first his dark head and torso, then his tail, all the way to the translucent fin at the bottom. He looked fragile.
It doesn’t matter whether we know what’s good or bad for us, I thought. It doesn’t fucking matter one bit.
“I just—I’m afraid it might kill me. I can’t tell if it’s a sickness or the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Yes, I suppose it was the men,” she said. “But really it was me.”
“Nothing is beautiful and everything is nothing,” I said to him. “Everything is nothing and everything is beautiful.” I had no idea what I was talking about but I felt hypnotized with joy and potentiality.
This is how we get injured for love, I thought. This is how love can hurt us.
“I know,” he said. “I saw. I tried to climb up onto the rock and then drag myself to help you. I wanted to call your name but a jeep came onto the beach and I had to drag myself back into the water.”
He looked intoxicated, and I felt so proud to be the one intoxicating him. Or was it simply being in a pussy, a wet pussy—not dry-wet from seawater, but wet with secretions—that made him look so drunk? Could it be anyone’s pussy? I wanted to believe it was me and that he felt about my pussy like I felt about his cock: amazed, because of who it belonged to. It was me alone: my body and my spirit that made this beautiful creature look so high. In that way I felt that I was beautiful now too. And
I never imagined that anal sex could be loving. I never thought of it as an intimate act, one of trust, only a pornographic and brutal one. So I cried a lot, but not because it hurt.
He told me about a woman named Alexis with long black hair who was a heroin addict.
I didn’t know exactly what “under the water” meant. Was he more delusional than I was? Did he know I couldn’t live under there?
“Play with my hair,” I would say to my teenage friends, but when they played with my hair it was never enough. I needed more than the friends were able to give. I envied my friends who could have their hair played with for a few minutes and then simply be done with it. They could take it or leave it. They knew that their mothers could come in later to finish the job, without them even having to ask. So they took it all lightly. They did this with their lovers too.
“Well,” he said, thinking, “I guess because the choice is always there.”
I had been given pure love in the form of this dog and I had destroyed him. I sat there and waited. I waited as I had waited
He was hers, the creature she loved most, and I had taken him from her. I
