Alex wants to marry me and the first thing we did upon entering his house was get on the bed. Before we got on the bed he asked me to massage his neck, and I laughed and complied. After I tired of this I lay down and he covered me with his warm, heavy body and pressed himself to me until we had sex. I was not aroused, but enjoyed seeing that he was more affectionate than before. He proposed that we start sharing the bed at night, after having maintained for months that he could not sleep well with anyone beside him. I did so at first, but slept alone later, because neither of us had slept well the first night, and I was exhausted from running six miles on Saturday. In the mornings he’d call me down between 6 and 7 AM, a bit after I had awoken. I’d come and get enveloped in his once again “warm” and “heavy” body. He’d once again “press” his lips to my skin and “press” his cock into me and still I wouldn’t be turned on. I find it comfortable to be distant.

Looking at photographs of pussy willow doesn’t produce in me any form of physical response, but my mind twists pleasantly around the question of what it would mean to write a caption for these images that I captured while at Alex’s house last weekend. The aggregation of stamens float softly in the air but seem quite cellular. Because I am looking at images I have time to think, and in this frame of studiousness I think of the turgid walls of the cells that make the stalks and glans-shaped bits look so solid and rigid. In a live breeze the stalks appear so silky and pliant, and I barely register their hardness. I take for granted that the tips of the stamens are bright yellow tipped with a warm shade of vermilion that would be attractive on the face of a woman, on the lips of a woman. But now I think of this coloration as significant, as an arbitrary marker of horniness: and why not blue tinged with green? I don’t know what or how these colors or forms come to symbolize anything for the more significant onlookers, insects. I don’t know what it takes to manufacture these pigments from a live plant’s point of view. The photos also draw my focus to the tighter half-bloomed catkins which seem dry like animal fur cleaned and straightened into a paintbrush, only to be made wet and clumpy after use. Their motion-blurred brushiness retains something of a gesture, and even a sense of fashion. But what matters is how inert the organic seems in photographs; it’s not obvious from the pictures that the stamens pollute the air with plant-semen, pollen, live stuff. It’s this inertness that makes the images sexual, but also so easily aligned with the disinterestedness of aesthetic pleasure. It’s true that aesthetics turns me on. Disinterestedness allows for it.

To be aroused I need to feel cut and dried, thinned out, flattened.

Maybe I need to be atomically indivisible, like a number, or like a scale.

But in the contemporaneous reality of the photos above Alex walks around the garden and shows me a pileated woodpecker in the distance. The pileated woodpecker flies to a nearby tree and we see that the bird is feeding nestlings in the hollow; later Alex shows me salamanders under rocks near the pond. I am interested in how quickly and subtly they managed to slip away, vanishing under small leaves of grass and into the dark cracks between soil and rock. It was as if their limbs were regenerating, as if they were animated and artificial superpositions of presence and absence.

O solar eclipse, I am not so interested in recollection. What happened when you happened was comparable to a strange assortment of common celestial phenomena. The moon waned too fast. Dawn brightened too quickly and without a sun on the horizon. It became dark without a sunset.

In truth, I cannot recall what the darkening was like because it was so strange, so incomparable.

Darkening can’t be new to me as an experience, but a quick and total darkening is categorically distinct. Let’s acknowledge that you were excellent at engendering a true sense of absence.

A true sense of absence. It was the last thing I said before the session ended—I said I wanted to “manufacture” or “experience” it, in order to live with desire. When I walked outside I turned and saw that my bike was absent, absent from where I had locked it. I slowed down and stood and stood in perceptible shock, on the verge of tears, and walked slowly through Chinatown to buy some steamed buns. I arrived at 30 E 9th St and realized then that I had left my phone in the front handlebar bag on the bike, and because of this odd mistake I was able to track the daily life of “kleppie,” who seems to work as a delivery biker in lower Manhattan. When the phone appeared close to 30 E 9th St the next afternoon, I left the apartment to “canvass.” Less than a minute later a tall man with a strong chin walking in the same direction glanced down at me. He told me he thought I was “very cute.” I thanked him, and then he asked if I was trans, and I said I used to be. After this, he asked me if I “like to fuck.” I told him he was “very direct,” and that “yes, I like to fuck.” He asked me what I was doing later, I said I wasn’t free, and gave him my email address.

We talk on the phone for 45 minutes the next Monday; he’s driving to Kansas City to work on a baseball stadium for a client. Luke turns out to be an architect, a fairly successful one, it seems, with three homes: one in Bronxville, one in St. Louis, and one around Miami. He’s 47 and has a 12-year-old son, with whom he spent the weekend watching The Boy and the Heron. He is neither married nor divorced, and has watched a girlfriend get gangbanged at a sex club. He tells me about an encounter with a hot girl in a hotel the other night, whom he couldn’t hook up with because he was sharing his room with a coworker. He asks me about my pussy; he likes performing oral sex.

I feel invigorated, I am very happy to have met Luke. I send him the selfie he has asked for.

Later, he responds with some words about how it makes him “curious about that pussy.” I’m vaguely disgusted by thoughts of “pussy,” the word “pussy,” and figure that my tarantula might serve as an excellent substitute signifier for my genitalia. “I think my pussy is like my tarantula,” I write back, together with some photos of my tarantula and her shed exoskeletons. It doesn’t land; he says he doesn’t like to think about “that” when “fucking a pussy.” The messages end soon thereafter, when I ask him about his preference for pussy eating and its possible relation to avoiding the castration of coming and losing an erection. The last message is his: “Right.”

Otherwise, Luke’s appearance was a perfect answer to the theft, and to the sleepiness I’ve experienced after my move from Hunter to the new analysis with Aleksandra, which had overlapped with the theft, and produced in me a strange intimacy with an unseen stranger.

Many disjunctures make sex possible: disjunctures between what I have and what I want to have, between what I don’t feel and what I might feel. Less about lack than about the presence of a cut, and the marvelous appreciation of the physicality of the cut, the round inaccessibility of it.