continuums

We've had sex three times, but I managed to put a good three weeks between those. I told myself I had to, because you were so romantic and sensual in bed. The fourth time there'd be only 7 days since the last -- I softened my rules because my monogamous exboyfriend was newly single and had rented a hotel room for us in DTLA the previous night. We've had sex on and off (when he's single) over the last six years, but never once in LA. After a few rounds of sex, I'd taken him to a ramen shop I'd been to other times with other men I was dating. It was odd to see him there, this figment from my-life-in-San-Diego eating karaage and sipping Asahi across from me in this place I'd only been with men from my-life-now-in-LA.

I agreed to see you so soon after I'd last seen you because I was flattered that you wanted to see me, and I didn't have travel plans to blame like the last time, and I thought it'd keep me from forming any unhealthy attachments to my ex. I wanted to advance the plot. I wanted to be in my-life-now. I've only seen you a handful of times, but I know that being with you makes it impossible for me to be anywhere else. I am embodied when I am with you.

You make love to me in the fully present, sensual, romantic way that I want you to, that you have the other times. The way you whisper "oh my god" on a loop when you're inside me, like it's a prayer and like you're in awe of your luck. You behold me afterward, too, like I'm something worth treasuring, like the guy from last night should realize how lucky he is to get 6 years of this. You continue your vulnerable disclosures that I marvel at with my friends after every time I see you, the way you just say exactly how you feel standing in such stark contrast to how most men operate. This time, you tell me you were scrolling my Instagram feed and saw a photo where I looked especially pretty. Who admits to that? When I was at Yosemite and handed my phone to my friend to show her your Instagram feed, she said, "Don't worry, I'll be careful not to accidentally 'like' anything." That's what we all do.

But not you.

---

II.

I laughed with you a lot last night, naked and sweaty in your bed, the first day of the heat wave that has even West LA seeing temperatures in the upper 90s for 5 days straight. I told you that I felt self-conscious about how much sweatier I am than you, something I told you the first time we had sex at yours (we both had the West LA confidence to rent places without air conditioning and then had the audacity to be on dating apps in July). You told me not to be. It wasn't like S who told me he wanted to lick sweat off my body, and did, but it felt more honest. You feel more honest. You feel true blue.

There was a moth in my car when I drove home. It got caught in my hair somewhere south of yours on Sawtelle -- I rolled down the windows and coaxed it back to where it belongs. Moths can be symbolic of transformation, but moths can also be symbolic of disguise.

I parked in front of my apartment and watched my neighbors shuffle their two cars and motorcycle around in their tandem spot. I recorded a voice note for Rena about how happy I was, how part of me wants to believe you're different than the others, your openness and your tenderness. But I won't let myself do that. I'll just let myself love that I'm here right now.

---

III.

I saw you again six days later, and things shifted. The other times that I drove home I thought to myself, "I'm so glad to be having this experience of feeling this excited about someone again," and, this time I thought to myself, "I'm so glad to be feeling this with B." The feelings I feel for you now are you-specific -- they are not general feelings anymore.

You tell me that you feel comfortable around me but still get nervous but that your nerves melt away the second we start kissing. You tell me you've been feeling unattractive. You tell me that sexual fantasy you have that you've only told two other souls on this planet, one of whom is your therapist. You tell me that I am a member of that elite club not as some manipulating move to make me feel special, but just because you seem fine telling me anything so long as it's the truth. I wish on every stoplight on my drive home that it'll stay that way, for good.

The next morning all I can think of is us in bed cuddling and talking after sex. I rolled over onto my stomach and you groaned at the sight of my curves and told me I was so sexy. I laid my head on your chest for a while, but then you started talking about your family again and I wanted to see your face as you described the people who raised you, so I pulled myself up to look at you and rested my head in my right hand. You stopped mid-sentence and said, "you're so beautiful." And then stuttered to start a sentence again but couldn't. The way our eyes locked in that moment.

You told me you were self-conscious about your hair, and I couldn't even bring myself to tell you "you're my first redhead," because you don't feel like a category to me anymore. You feel like B.

---

I wrote this triptych in August and September, charting three weeks where I saw you every week. I started writing for the reasons outlined in the first paragraph of the first one: I wanted to be fully in the present. I so often only want to write when I'm heartbroken, when a dark pall has been cast over everything, when every detail seems significantly foreboding. I told myself, you ought to write in the present for once, as you're first beginning something with someone, specifically with someone you don't feel like you'll have a serious relationship with. It's an act of mindfulness. It will show you the joy that your life is saturated in that you sometimes do not see.

And then you were coming over to mine before a sex party and I was asking you which perfume you preferred; you were waking up in my bed and spilling coffee all over yourself from laughing too hard at me quoting the lyrics to Drake's "Child's Play"; you were making me cum with you, our eyes locked; you were introducing me to everyone at your Halloween party and whispering in my ear at 1am "I'm so glad you're still here"; you were telling me that I still make you nervous, but because you're afraid to lose me; then you were telling me that you think you're falling for me.

The second time I stayed over at yours, I tell you about writing this, about trying to map out initial desire and figure it out fully by dissecting it. I don't tell you that at some point it became less a study of desire and more a study of my desire for you, B. You you you.

Individuals should be held accountable for their actions, but I am also disturbed by the ways in which churches like that one and other high-control evangelical churches I attended in my early adulthood reinforce this behavior through their ideologies. They tell men that they have headship over their families. They elevate men in their early 30s to positions as "elders." They demonize homosexual attraction as "sin" one must "wrestle with" and "defeat." They demonize all sexual attraction outside of heterosexual marriage as "sin," and tell women to be "joyfully available" to their husbands sexually at all times. They give these men access to minors who view them as spiritual guides.

When I was twenty years old, I heard the head teaching pastor at this church tell a room of thousands of people that he thought God's desire was for a marriage to NEVER end, even if a woman was suffering physical abuse from her husband.

We make these men gods by believing this shit, putting it under fancy theological labels like "complementarian marriage" and "male headship." We buy their propaganda that our silence is obedience, all the creator of the universe wants from us lowly women and children.

I had a friend from growing up in Texas who moved to California immediately after undergrad. I'm not sure now which city it was that he moved to, but even if you told me now, it wouldn't be the city he moved to in 2013. Not in my mind, at least. I'd only been here once, so my understanding of California was completely shaped by what I'd heard, read, and seen in movies and on TV shows. He moved to a California that was completely of my imagination. To know where exactly he was now, when I have a real place to tie to that idea, would cheapen it.

That's what it feels like to try to learn to love you again after what you've done to me. It's trying to return to '13 California, a place that does not exist, but existed so vividly in my mind at one point in time.

I don’t believe we have to offer forgiveness to those who have deeply hurt us. I don’t think it’s a requirement for healing. What I do believe is that practicing forgiveness is less about being okay with everything and more about accepting everything. You can’t change what happened, but you can decide some of what happens next. That’s how forgiveness can help you show up from a new story.

-Lisa Olivera, Already Enough

I want my books back, but I don’t want to text you about it again. I deleted your number from my phone because that Feeld match I met up with a couple weeks after our terrible final date shares too many letters in common with yours (I put his full name in my phone the second I knew it to minimize the jump scares). The shape of your name still spells out pain, or whatever Swift said (I’ve listened to “closure” so many times). I know you’re waiting, convinced that you can just give them to me in-person when I change my mind and agree to be friends. I know that hypothetical conversation that you proposed would be about “closure” in our final phone call would actually be able me reassuring you that it is okay that you gaslit me for 5 months, manipulated me by promising me something you knew you could not deliver, and at best ignored my telling you how difficult it was for me to trust men and at worst exploited that. I have done so much emotional labor for you. I do not want to do any more. 

I want my copy of Maggie Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes back because it got me through a break-up with someone who I truly, deeply loved and was truly, deeply hurt by his leaving my life (he didn’t stay away long). I am not writing this to be hurtful or thinking it to self-soothe -- I am telling the truth when I say that none of the poems in it will be resonant here. Only the first 7 words of Phoebe Bridgers’ “Motion Sickness” apply, not the next 8. 

Accepting what happened means accepting that I was treated terribly by someone I had to talk myself into liking. I believed that you loved me and cared about me and wanted the best for me because you told me you did -- I do not bear any shame for that. The relationship felt so bad so much of the time, and I allowed myself to believe you when you said it was my own anxieties and neuroses and, sometimes, yours, too, which you were working so hard on addressing (while also complaining that each of your weeks was overstuffed and never going to therapy and getting high out of your ming any moment you weren’t working, which you did approximately 80 hours a week). I accept my own role in staying in this miserable relationship. I started to work out my own trauma within the relationship, convincing myself that if I could get you to give me the attention and care that I needed and that you said you wanted to give me (despite never making lasting changes toward that end), I would be worthy of those. I replayed past childhood and relationship trauma here instead of loving myself enough to say “I deserve better” and walking away. 

I accept what I have done. Do you?

(From my past entanglements with white men, I know the answer is often “no,” and so the more hopeful route for me is to not learn the answer. I don’t need your closure.) 

I accept, and I forgive myself for the role I played. I show up for a new story, one that says I deserve to be in relationships with people who fully understand, accept, and show up for me. 

5 days after the break-up, I took a wonderful woman who I’ve been seeing for a few months out for an early birthday dinner, where she gave me (who was not the birthday girl) the most thoughtful break-up care package. 

I thought about the evening after you made me cry in a bar on our last date, during one of the most emotionally trying times of my life, how I got home from a long walk and saw a flower arrangement on my doorstep and knew immediately it was not from you.

Almost 2 weeks after the break-up, I connected with someone on a dating app for a purely physical arrangement and remembered what it was like to have sex with someone who was fully present for the act and fully invested in my pleasure. 

I do not replay our sexual encounters ever because I can’t do so without having a bodily reaction remembering what I endured, remembering how I tried to fetishize it. I think about rewatching Girls to study Adam Driver’s character’s sexual proclivities to make myself feel less alone. 

He had to cancel a date a week later. I told him I’m not great at last-minute cancellations, and he sent me a long apology for not respecting my time in a difficult moment in my life. (Again, a casual dynamic)

I think of the time you cancelled a hook-up on me, and I got upset because I’d told you twice that I don’t like to be invited over and then have that invitation retracted. You called your ex to see if they agreed that my reaction was irrational. You told me that they thought it was an inappropriate reaction, that they would be fine with it. (This was a few weeks after you told me you loved me.)

I drink absinthe cocktails in a downtown basement of a speakeasy on a first date with a man who drove clear across LA to take me to the bar because he thought I’d love it. I do love it. I love the entire evening. I text my friends on the Uber home that I’d forgotten what it’s like to have a truly great first date with a man, that I usually consider them successes if he doesn’t talk the whole time and doesn’t seem like he would murder me. When I get home, he’s already planned a second date for us. 

we’re holding hands in the back of an LA movie theater that will turn 100 years old next year. you didn’t time this right, we got here too late, and we’re in the very last row (there can’t be more than 40 seats), me in that single movie theater seat meant for those accompanying viewers with disabilities, you in a folding chair you produced from behind a curtain at the back of the room (you’ve run into this issue before, you say. I nod thinking of all the times I’ve waited for you as you ran 5-10 minutes late for our agreed-upon meet-up time. california boys.). the poor planning has its benefits: I’m shorter than you for once and can lean my head on your shoulder, hold your hand, gingerly accepted popcorn you feed me, look up into your eyes instead of being even with them for once. 

i think of the month i spent away in the united kingdom, checking the time only to translate what time it was in LA and whether i could text you. i think of the boy i hooked up with at the end of grad school who loved movies and took me to the theater often (some awful megaplex chain that houston is known for, though, not the los feliz theater) but never once held my hand, though I’d drape it on my knee for the entire 90 minutes just in case he deemed me worthy. i think of you holding my hand through that chekhov play at the pasadena playhouse, me thinking that you were maybe the type to only hold hands in those moments have you’d cum and before you told me you needed to get some sleep or just started snoring. 

muriel rukeyser, 1947

I saw this tweet a couple days ago. I am now in Carey, Idaho, twenty minutes from Ernie’s residence in Ketchum, Idaho, where we will stay tomorrow. We’ll probably even see his home, because we are literary, after all.

The tweet is funny, but I do not know how to do this.

This two-week roadtrip through Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana was supposed to be my kick-off to my summer of fun. I spent the week leading up to it wracked with anxiety over leaving my apartment, the place where I have spent the vast majority of my time these last 14 months, and over my partner, the person with whom I have spent the vast majority of these last 14 months, dying. Surprisingly, the anxiety melted away rather quickly, but in its place, grief has emerged. And Americans are terrible at grief. 

It snuck up on me when I enter the visitor’s center at Craters of the Moon National Park today, passing the sign that all National Parks offices now display urging those who are unvaccinated to wear masks indoors. I stand next to an elderly couple who have their masks on as I learn about the lava flows that led to the unique rock formations in this park. I wonder why. I wonder if they are unvaccinated but compliant, a rare venn diagram indeed. I wonder if they knew people who died of COVID-19, if that motivates them to keep them on. 

Then I remember that 600,000 people have died in this country from this disease. I do not know how to mourn that number. 

Then I remember that so many friends and family members of mine did not take this pandemic seriously, adding to the death toll in their recklessness. I have told many people that this is the worst part: not the death numbers in their raw form, but the selfishness that made it so much worse. I do not know how to mourn yet another loss of innocence for what I thought humanity was. 

I am lucky. I did not get COVID-19, nor did anyone in my immediate family or even my closest group of friends. I do not know anyone personally who died of the disease. Nobody close to me lost anyone close to them from the disease. 

I wonder if those milling about, smiling in downtown Jackson Hole, Wyoming are in the same boat as me, if they find it easy to ignore the death and the selfishness because they did not feel it personally. 

In a perverse way, I wonder if I had, if mourning someone I’d known or mourning alongside a friend for someone they’d known would’ve given me a release valve, something to point at and say, “see what I have lost? see how tragic this all really was? see how you have hurt me by continuing to travel, refusing to wear masks, having weddings, gathering for the holidays?”

That is what I really want: a release valve. I do not know how to find it. I thought this trip, all those hours gliding over highways, all the time spent climbing and staring at mountains, would bring me some release. But it is separate. The Grand Tetons know nothing of a pandemic. They seem to make my pain smaller, rolling their eyes at it, lumbering over me. People are the only ones who understand, but at these tourist destinations, everyone ignores it. In this red state, everyone acts like it was a hoax, a prank, a way to keep us at home for 14 months for no good reason (I saw a truck with “THANKS OBAMA” etched into its tailgate today -- in 2021). 

Driving back from getting breakfast tacos in Highland Park today, I played “Hannah Hunt” for Rafik, telling him I thought it was one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. 

When I got home, I looked it up on YouTube to see if they’d made a video for it. The comments section was full of folks saying that Replika sent them there, that Replika said the song was “dazzlingly beautiful.” I googled Replika and found out it was a personal AI program you could chat with. 

The lyrics to “Hannah Hunt” link this passage from The Great Gatsby to the line “In Santa Barbara Hannah cried ‘I miss those freezing beaches’”:

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back, and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily, and say: “Where’s Tom gone?” and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together — it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken — she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

Like most things the fundamentalist evangelical church warned me against participating in for fear it would rob me of my soul, it was a deeply soul-affirming and enlightening experience. 

Despite Protestantism being largely born in protest of the idea that you could only access God through one being, many versions of it have replicated that very ideology. Sure, it’s not through a priest, but it is through a very narrow “literal” interpretation of scripture, it is through teachings that happen in a church, it is through head knowledge rather than heart knowledge. 

At the beginning of this year, I signed up for ClassPass and started going to in-person yoga for the first time. I first gravitated toward the sweaty vinyasa classes, OrangeTheory having beat into my head that if my heart rate wasn’t elevated, then what I was doing was not improving my physical fitness. But I eventually settled into yin yoga classes, especially at this one studio in Hillcrest. The room would be darkened before I went in, fake stars illuminated on the ceiling and across the exposed book in a way that was somehow wasn’t cheesy. 

We’d move slowly through the poses. I dreaded pigeon. My hips were too tight and opening them always twinged that point of me that still held on to my evangelical sexual repression. But I kept signing up for them, weekly, on nights I didn’t have my church LifeGroup or first dates off of Tinder. I felt trancelike after I finished, warm all over. Once, someone I was seeing came over to my house afterward, and the sex we had felt like melted butter. Salted melted butter -- slow and indulgent and flavorful and warm.

I dreamed that one day I would be so experienced at yoga that these poses would be easy. It wouldn’t even be uncomfortable. I kept signing up for those classes for those two reasons: melted butter feeling, and determination to prove to myself the discomfort would go away.

--

This morning on our coaching call, my life coach (do I really have a life coach? yes, yes I do) tells someone who is struggling with negative reactions her cousin is having to her erecting boundaries, “you have to increase your capacity for discomfort.”

I am jolted out of my note-taking.

This was not what I signed up for.

I, too, am a people-pleaser, like the woman being coached. I, too, see that this is fundamentally a strength -- that I care about people, and this is a good thing. I see that it only becomes a problem when I exploit that, when I prove my worth via care, when I diminish myself to care for others. 

I signed up for a program that would lead me to be so comfortable with myself, so embodied in my feminine wholeness, that I would never be uncomfortable. I would waltz through life uncaring, so secure in my own worth and the value of my own dreams for my life that I would not give a single fuck what others thought of me. 

Apparently, that does not exist. 

The rest of the day is exhausting.

--

That night, I attempt yin yoga at home for the first time since the pandemic. That is to say, I attempt yin yoga for the first time in 8 months.

I do not have the exposed brick or the decades-old building or the strangers on mats beside me or the fake starlight. I had two yoga mats stacked on the faux hardwood floors of my first-story LA apartment. I had a sage candle. I had a “Yin Yoga” playlist on Spotify. 

The stretching warmed me. It left me pliable, warm taffy feeling. 

At one point, the yoga teacher on the video said that a hip-opening pose (not pigeon, thank god) created some tension for everyone, and that this gave us the opportunity to see our breath as our greatest asset in making it through the discomfort. I opened my eyes to glance at the video and saw her really breathing, really uncomfortable but really breathing.

Breath will increase our capacity for discomfort.

---

My church in San Diego was really into breath prayer. My life coach is into meditation focusing on the breath. Countless yoga teachers have told me to focus on my breath, to return to my breath. 

When God made man in Genesis, that was what gave him life: not a heart and blood vessels, not arms and legs that move through a complicated system of muscles and ligaments. Breath. 

Breath is the simplest thing. It is the thing we do without thinking. It is the absolute essential action for us to keep existing.

Breath is the most divine thing. It gives us life. The divine breathed into us, and we were.

I wake up on November 4th to find that, in her romping under the bed in the middle of the night, my cat has unearthed this mass of hair and dirt, this dark grossness.

Just like election night 2016. Just like last night. 

---

We rage at polling. We rage at Southerners. We rage at Boomers. We rage at Fox News. We rage at Ivanka’s dad himself. We rage at white people. We rage ourselves into numbness and then take more antacids. 

---

I know that I am safe, based on my status as an upper-middle class white woman. I am ashamed of how people who look like me voted. “Whiteness is a scourge” echoes in my head. I think of the relatives in my immediate and extended family who voted for Trump. I think of all those white people in those evangelical churches I went to. I don’t know how to communicate to them that they should care about people who don’t look like them.

---

I don’t know how to explain my anxiety to my parents. I guess when I was 11 I saw people dying in New York on television and then we fought pointless wars that irreparably damaged countries far away from us and then when I started college the economy collapsed and nobody took care of anyone who was hurting or punished those who caused the bad things and then four years ago we elected a racist, misogynist with no qualifications over the most qualified woman who ever ran. I don’t know if good things can happen in this country to anyone who isn’t rich and white, and that hurts my heart. 

---

Millennials own 5% of the wealth in this country. Boomers owned 21% when they were our age. Well, fuck.

---

The green wave did not materialize. We have ten years to do something meaningful about the climate, and I thought this would be the year we finally, finally did something. But we didn’t.

I have a crescent moon tattooed on my left arm, just south of my elbow, inside, off-center. I got it done in Montana at the end of a two-week hiking trip with one of my favorite friends, a time when I felt perhaps most okay just being on my own. I told people I wanted something as simple as a crescent moon because we were at the mercy of these tattoo artists who were mostly unknown to us. I wanted something simple. I wanted the moon, and the crescent shape is the most recognizable version of it. It is waning or waxing, depending on how you look at it.

The crescent moon is mostly shadows. It is moon covered mostly in darkness. The way the earth blocks its lightsource creates this uniquely sensual shape, like fingernail clippings or the last bit of melting ice from a drink. It doesn’t occur naturally. It is a slick, slippery shape, pointed. It is beautiful. Its darkness makes its beautiful.

I can remember the exact moment I came across you on Bumble, my very first night on a dating app, how I hesitated on swiping right because you were 24 and because you were a med student at the school where I was a professor. I’ve often thought about it, because I like to think about how I could’ve swiped left and avoided you altogether. It’s always hard for me to believe that I would’ve been able to avoid you on our campus, given the intensity of our physical connection. I’m convinced my body would’ve prickled as even the stranger-version of you got coffee at the cart visible from my first-floor office window, how I’d slip my feet out of my flats and run them across the cheap low-pile carpet in my office before slipping them back on and rushing to the coffee cart to find the source of that heat. Not that either of us are the type to strike up a conversation with a stranger on campus, but something about our physical magnetism and our close proximity on campus made it seem inevitable, Bumble be damned. 

In my thoughts last night, the decision point shifts. I consider how if I’d decided to cut it off with you early, after that night you picked me up from the airport from Munich and were too pushy despite my saying I was not interested in anything physical at the moment. What if I’d chosen to block your number after that? What if I never met your parents, and you never told me you loved me? What if I’d curtailed the highs and the lows, the low-lows, the even lower lows? 

I believe in my bones now that I would’ve had the same experiences. The universe ordained me to have them. 

I would’ve leaned into the unhealthy codependency that the musician I dated wanted, the one who I met by putting my number in his tip jar the night before your birthday when you were drinking with your extended family and sending me joking text messages about how it was good I wasn’t there because your parents hated me. If I’d let him be the only one I was seeing that summer, he would’ve told me that he loved me after only 6 weeks, too. 

I would’ve been heartbroken over the 24-year-old Navy boy who was constantly looking to date someone younger, hotter, and more Instagram model and less professor, but would text me about meeting up when he was lonely just to be affirmed by my desire to see him, then never show. I would’ve let him do that repeatedly. 

I would’ve been told I was too much by the decade-long graduate student in his mid-thirties with the tragically shitty apartment, his lifestyle supported by his parents and their multimillion dollar house on the east coast. He would push me away and pull me to him at will, more than he did for those short six weeks we saw each other. 

I may have given that second-year med students who gave me such strange vibes more than one date, shoving down my instinct that he was not going to honor my boundaries. 

You did all these things, repeatedly. But it was never you. Even the pain you caused me was not pain specific to you, but pain that I needed to experience, pain that I sometimes thought that needed as a punishment for my past sins or for daring to live a life where I chose to do what I wanted to do, but pain that taught me something. It was written for me. 

It was never you. That’s what sticks out to me so vividly now -- how little we actually had in common, how much I didn’t like spending time with you except for when we were fucking. Everything we experience in this life is through the body, so perhaps that explains it. The pleasure you shot directly into my body, surpassing my heart and my brain and my feelings that you bruised continuously a matter of routine, as a matter of your obliviousness to anyone’s feelings but your own. 

I miss the ten minutes before yoga classes start. I’d always arrive early, mostly because I would hate to be judged for being late, but also because I loved that ten minute slice of time in the darkened room, as others tiptoed in and set up their mats around you. It was sacred time, when the instructor was not there telling you what to do. You were allowed to just simply be. And you were allowed, in the presence of other humans around you, to acknowledge your full bodily form. You could stretch, lay down, sigh. People witnessed you doing these things, these things you so often needed to do but suppressed because of what was expected of you. They held witness to your humanity in its bodily form.