[Friday, Saturday – Tu B’Av]

I cooked some carp from Certo Market, one of the grocery stores on 13th Ave. Jerry came over and I lit the candles in his presence, and then he ate vigorously, commenting that he felt “sickly” from not eating enough earlier in the day. He had to catsit that night, so he left later that evening, and the next morning, I biked over to the cat place. We fucked, and I said, let’s go to Staten Island, I want to visit Fresh Kills, a park built on top of a former landfill, it’s got wetlands and grasslands. Fresh Kills was once the largest landfill in the world. I didn’t tell him this, but I learned about it from a book that my analyst edited, called Considering Forgiveness, which helped me a little in processing the question of whether Adam could forgive me for my transgressions.

So we went, and I guess that’s the longest excursion I’ve been on with another person since I went backpacking with my sister last August in Mt. Hood. It’s also the longest I’ve biked in the last two years, I haven’t done much real biking since I left Ithaca.

We biked about 34 miles: 5.5 miles to Wall Street, 10 miles to Fresh Kills, 7 miles to the Great Kills station, and then another 10 miles back to St George ferry, since the SIR wasn’t running between several stations. Jerry was far behind me during the day, but he seemed to perk up a little at night. I’d wait at every intersection before turning, and wait for him to appear. His power would appear when he went up a hill, but other than that, he was slow, claiming that he was “lazy,” which I didn’t mind. It made it rather relaxing, to feel alone, and then to wait for him to appear at the intersections.

The roads, or rather the drivers, were somewhat inhospitable; sometimes we had to ride on the sidewalks. It wasn’t so pretty to ride through the suburbs, but I enjoyed it anyway, and saw two skunk carcasses which affirmed to me that this was a different sort of land, one hospitable to skunks and other wildlife that wouldn’t exist where I live. I thought it was special to traverse this strange, suburban island full of USA paraphernalia, such as star-spangled banners and bunting flags and thin blue line flags and memorials for veterans, and men who really looked very republican, and honking cars, and the kid who yelled at us through the window with the obvious intention of startling us and perhaps making us fall over, and the dogs that would bark at us, which felt exotic since dogs never seem to bark at strangers in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

The gate connecting the North Mound of Fresh Kills to the western side was closed, so we were only able to experience a small portion of the park, before biking off to another, smaller wetland, which didn’t feel worth lingering within. But we saw two hummingbirds, and a yellow warbler, and many egrets and herons and cormorants, and an osprey, and there were many monarch butterflies flitting around. I like disturbed nature, even absent nature, maybe more than I like virgin forests or natural wonders.

So I liked knowing that there was a place such as Fresh Kills, in which a mound of dirt has been piled on top of a landfill, and native grasses and shrubs have been seeded, in an attempt has been made to make a completely mangled tract of land a habitable grassland. It works, it is enough to have some animals living here, though they warn that one shouldn’t eat any shellfish from those waters, if one is pregnant or nursing.

I felt really grateful for Jerry, and I enjoyed sleeping with him that night. I haven’t gotten to sleep with anyone, to share a bed and a night of sleep in that sort of proximity, since February, when I was sleeping with him and with Sam.

That night I dreamt that I was manning a stand at a farmer’s market and reselling seeds and plants that some other farmers had produced. After selling some items, I found myself speaking to a young man, a teenager, with dark hair, who was seated opposite me. I understood him to be a Jew from Ukraine, and that he was my patient. He seemed scared to speak, and I wondered what I might say to encourage him. A woman sat down next to me and made a comment which made it clear that she thought we were on a date. Her joke flustered me, and I realized I was in fact attracted to the boy, and soon the scene cut to an image of an old shul with faded Hebrew letters, and then to an image of the boy in a tallis which seemed a bit too shiny and synthetic.

I woke up several times, with Jerry’s arms and legs lightly shrouding my body, and I wanted to tell him my dream. But he was evidently asleep, so I fell back asleep and continued to dream this dream in separate segments; I must have lost some of it. It seemed to have something to do with my obsession with him being my son, and it seemed to have something to do with the question of what my Jew-fetish entails, how much of it is a veil over the absence of Adam, over the failure of mine to treat Adam right. Was the boy Adam as a child in some sense? Maybe that tallis was his.

[Sunday]

I bought condoms this afternoon. I had decided to go on a date with a Hasidic man named Mendy. He looked ripped and sort of handsome though I suspected he’d look a bit disproportionate upon closer examination. His first photo was of himself shirtless, with long, flowing payes which framed his face quite nicely; his second photo was similar, but a bit indistinct, and the third photo made him look a little worse, but there aren’t so many Hasidic men on dating apps so I figured I’d see if we might meet.

He wasn’t attractive enough for me, unfortunately, but it was quite enjoyable to talk to him, and I wonder if I’ll see him again, though I think it’s sort of unethical to have sex with someone you’re not attracted to. I was sort of fascinated by his easygoingness, he seemed so well-adjusted, he had this unusual degree of sexual openness, he was also completely religious, he was completely hassidish, just a little more freie than usual.

I had us meet at a fairly modern café a block away from me, on 8th Av and 41st St, which was completely empty at 7 PM. I learned that he lives on 42nd and 12th, so he’s really close to me, maybe a ten minute walk away; for some reason he had driven to the café, and I imagine he almost never takes the subway, as he works for a real estate developer in Boro Park. He drank a cappuccino and I sipped at a passionfruit drink, and then we walked over to Sunset Park, where I pointed out several bats in the sky, and later, a pack of fifteen or so huskies. We had a brief discussion about pets, and I told him I wasn’t that into cats and dogs, but that I had had a pet spider for a bit.

He said that taking care of a pet seemed like a lot of work, and it didn’t entirely make sense to him to do this, and I sort of filled in the thought for him, by saying that I think it makes more sense to spend that time on other people, which he agreed with easily.

He seemed capable of great joy and revelry, to the point where I remain curious about what it would be like to have sex with him, a man who had grown up with eleven siblings and then later lived with his wife and five children, davening in shul, always surrounded by people, and otherwise traveling and taking ayahuasca and DMT and LSD and marijuana with his friends or a woman he was seeing, the daughter of a Satmar rabbi, whom he couldn’t be with because she was divorced. I have not been on many dates with people who impress me with their apparent capacity to live well.

I found it rather charming how he said lilah tov, good night, to me when we parted. I also liked that he asked me if I always dress so hassidish, referring to the long skirt I was wearing; that was precisely the point, I told him, I had been trying to dress more like a frum woman. I learned from him a few things, like the fact that as a Cohen he cannot marry a divorced woman, or attend any funerals unless they are for immediate relatives. I learned the word nitzotzot and I listened to him talk about Breslov Hasidim, for whom being joyful is the greatest mitzvah. I heard him talk about his ex-wife with both affection and sadness, and about his kids. I complimented the beaded headbands two of his daughters wore in the photo on his phone screen, and he told me to compliment his ex-wife. His children all had blond hair, the same color, unlike him, with his medium brown, slightly reddish hair, and I wondered if she was blonde too.

At some point, I spoke to him about the idea of conversion. He asked me if I believed in G-d, and I said I wasn’t sure. He looked rather bemused as he heard this; I knew immediately that it was our greatest difference: that for him believing in G-d was something so deeply ingrained that it would be strange to imagine a life of atheism, whereas for me belief in G-d was like a horizon I might always be running towards, but never close to. It was sort of embarrassing to admit that I didn’t unequivocally believe in G-d. Now I’m really wondering what goes behind my answer to that question; it felt very different from answering Adam’s question about marriage, for which I had an uniequivocal answer, but which I felt I needed to hedge a little.

I guess I only invoke G-d when I’m thinking about sex. I think about G-d being happy whenever I’m having sex, or of him being particularly interested in what I do in bed, whether it’s good or bad. But I don’t think about G-d in relation to much else. Maybe when I’m eating, I think about G-d insofar as I can’t stand wasting food, maybe I think of G-d in relation to landfills and composting and recycling, maybe I think of G-d in relation to writing, because why am I doing this, why do I write, I certainly don’t write for any reasonable reasons, there is probably someone watching over this whole act, and maybe I can feel his eyes on me, the physical sensation of G-d watching over this.

[Monday]

I dreamt that I was being fucked by nobody, and it felt like I was floating on my back in water. I had let go in a sense, but I was also immensely aware of the positioning I had to maintain in order to stay afloat. It was a response to what Mendy had said, about this idea that women need to let go in order to cum, and that men have to hold it together before they can cum, and I said that I don’t think I ever let go completely.

[Tuesday]

Maybe the dream was sort of about mikveh, though I’m not sure if I was thinking about it then, this notion that if I went to a mikveh or dunked myself in the ocean I could become ritually pure, and slightly less sinful for a Jewish man to have sex with.

Then I had a dream of my difficult patient, the one who once got very angry with me. She said at the end of the last session that she is terribly alone, and that she doesn’t think I can understand that, because I am young and pretty and the world is open to me. I dreamt that she was one of my roommmates, and she sent me some messages on Discord, asking me “what I typically get up to on a day like this.” It was overcast, and a Saturday, maybe not the best day to go outside. After asking me the question, she wrote a few messages about her loneliness. I was acutely aware that I was her analyst in the dream, so I tried to think of what to say, and eventually came up with the following response: “I cannot answer your questions because I am your therapist, but you should feel free to observe what I do from your own vantage point.”

I woke up around 3 AM to this dream, filled with this fantasy of allowing her to follow me and my behavior, somehow I feel this is true, that if we were to hang out in real life it would be quite tolerable for me, more tolerable than it is to sit in a room with her sometimes. Maybe she would be the only female friend I could actually tolerate, I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to be friends with women still. She likes flowers, she went on a date with a floral designer, I could imagine going to a botanical garden or a flower shop and making remarks about all the flowers with her, one-by-one, with a kind of autistic flavor of focus. Her borderline traits really does remind me of autism in a way, with the flatness of time she experiences, with her inability to put things in some kind of progressive sequence or single something out as more interesting than something else, and the constant return to the same verbalizations.

Meanwhile, Mendy had sent me some voice note at 2 AM.

Mendy told me he went to a Tu B’Av party; it was nice to hear him explain the significance of the day to me slowly in a WhatsApp voice note, and that people wear white for the party, sometimes having to borrow other people’s clothes for this, and that it wasn’t quite a dating event, though historically people would choose someone to marry during a Tu B’Av party, and that at this one, here were around 1000 people there, mostly men, somewere on the UWS, and yes, it happened outdoors.

I’m still thinking about whether or not I should fuck Mendy, and about the role of this fetish in my life; it is a textbook fetish in that it allows me to not think about Adam’s absence while also thinking very much about it. I wonder if Mendy is a substitute for Jed, and I wonder if it would in fact be bad of me to have sex with him while knowing that I don’t find him attractive. But Mendy may not be so fragile, and he may have his own fetishistic desire to fuck an Asian shiksa who hasn’t been immersed in a body of water in more than a year, and maybe I can swim at Brighton Beach this weekend and become ritually pure before meeting him on Sunday.

I guess having sex with strangers is really a matter of the pursuit of knowledge, and I suppose that unlike in psychoanalytic work, it does often pay off to try to have sex with someone, even someone you aren’t attracted to, someone who might even repulse you physically a little bit or even a lot, it was interesting to have sex with Chris even if he didn’t like that it didn’t work, even if it felt messy and a little hurtful for both of us.

What do I want to ask him? Well, I’m curious to know what his first time was like, what sex was like with his ex-wife, and I want to know more about his sexuality. I want to see if he can find another Hasidic man to have a threesome with me, because that’s his fantasy, and I’d like to get to know more Hasidim, maybe he has a better-looking friend. And of course, I want to know what the inside of his apartment is like.

But maybe he won’t let me go there, maybe I have to be kept hidden, in case the gossip gets out, and it becomes harder for him to find a shidduch when he feels more serious about remarrying, which he’s surely going to do sooner rather than later.

[Wednesday]

I had a terrible dream. I remember nothing of it, only that I woke to a burning emotion, and to the thought that I was angry at Adam for giving up on me and our relationship. I thought to myself that I didn’t understand why he still texts me in this friendly way when he doesn’t want to see me, and I was burning with tears in the dream, but when I woke up my face was dry, so I hadn’t been crying. I felt such an intense admixture of anger and sadness, while lying there awake, but I fell back asleep quickly, and had a different dream in which I observed some praying mantis babies hatching from a cluster of eggs; then I saw two mature mantises trying to copulate, though it looked like they were trying to fend off or attack each other. This second dream felt interesting and fascinating and it seemed to neutralize the strong emotions I had felt earlier.

I am very sad about Adam, but I need to be patient and allow him to figure out his life, while I figure out my own. But Adam, why is it so hard for you to be with me?

If only he could see more of the way other people live; maybe he would feel on some intuitive level that the struggles of his life don’t need to be as binding as they are right now, and that there is a way to be oneself, to pursue one’s own desire to the ends of the earth, without all the destructive reduction of the self down to this narrow core. Adam reminds me of a sickly D.H. Lawrence, or a sickly Mishima, many sickly firebrands are so attractive to me on account of the friction which wears them down, which purifies their ideas, but at the cost of the individual’s survival. Everyone dies, but it seems that DHL and Mishima died on account of their ideas, on account of the way they dedicated themselves to their aesthetic-metaphysical causes. They had the mentality of soldiers, the mentality of soldiers giving up their lives for their nations.

But he is also so kind. I don’t have any doubts that I could be with him primarily and enduringly, because he’s so kind, though maybe he needs to be kinder to himself.

[Thursday]

Terrible nightmare. I was walking in the West Village; it was much like the short walk I took between patients on Monday, during which I felt a strong sense of sadness around Adam. In the dream I was walking the walk again, but this time I saw Adam sitting in a parked car. He got out of the car not long after I passed him, and we were walking almost parallel. I was grinning and excited to see how long it would take before we interacted. I turned to enter some path leading up to a building, perhaps a church. He also turned, and walked the same narrow path, and it was incredible to me that he still hadn’t noticed me. Eventually we were face to face. I was ahead of him, and I had turned around, and still incredulous that he hadn’t seen me, I waved, and said a greeting. He looked annoyed, and a bit scared, and he asked me in a frustrated voice, why are you talking to me, why are you here? I was so shocked by his hostility that I approached him, getting close to him as if to keep him from running away. I said that I just wanted to see how things were, and now I understood. My voice was pleading and shaking, I wanted him to listen to me and talk to me and reconcile. But he clearly felt even more threatened by my emotions and he began to try to run away, to get around me. At this point he had turned into a Japanese man, resembling the male actor from Asako 1 & 2. Some people around us were noticing that he was running away from me, and a woman noted in a dry, critical voice that his tote bag implied he had used Chaturbate during the years when its owner had been some kind of sex criminal.

I am having a “trauma dream” with very little displacement, but this one was more interesting than an absolute repetition of a previous experience. Because he turned into the man from Asako 1 & 2 and that movie was unforgettably moving and complex.

I’m still convinced that this is reality, though, that if Adam did see me on the street he would ignore me or act annoyed, even though he is texting me these days, asking me how I’m doing, sharing cute pictures of animals, and being completely friendly.

Then there was a dream in which I was with my youngest patient and her father; the patient told me she had neutered cats as as a child by forming an electric circuit with a cat and electrocuting it; I imagined she was holding the cat’s paw and forming a circuit including her own body and some live outlet. The cat would survive, and be neutered.

I was terrified that I’d show signs of my own horror in whatever I said next, and that her father would fire me for disapproving of their family’s practice; I had a sense that he was a narcissist who could not deal with any blemishes on his or his daughter’s “record.” So I tried to figure out what to say, and ended up asking her what felt to be a safe question: how does this work, biologically? She said that the cats got so sexually stimulated by the electricity that they would only come to her for sexual stimulation afterwards, and never to another cat. I found this horrifying but also a bit funny.

Before these two, I had a dream in which my mom, somewhat frustrated and tired, was visiting me, and I told her we should go to a food court that was labelled on the map as belonging to some Hasidic sect. We went there, and there was an extensive hot bar. My mom begrudgingly asked if I wanted to eat a soup that contained mung beans, which struck me as a bit odd since I associate mung beans with Asian cuisine. I said yes, though I was curious to try other foods, and wanted to spend more time looking.

[Friday]

I’m spending this shabbos alone so far, I cooked rainbow trout from Certo Market. I am so tired because my sleep continues to be interrupted by dreams. My dreams from Thursday were so difficult. Thinking of them, writing them down, caused me to cry a little yesterday, and today I sobbed for a while, finally those repressed emotions were able to break to the surface of my waking life, and then I went to get challah from Taam Eden, and then I talked to Adam. It was impossible to be anything but affectionate towards him, it made me very happy to hear his voice.

I feel like a cat who gets neutered by being electrocuted; the idea that I will always go back to Adam for sexual stimulation seemed to be the dream thought. I’m neutered. I’m so bad at having sex with anyone else now, that’s what the dream was saying.

Also, there is a cat in Asako 1 & 2. The Baku look-alike, the man whom Asako is on the point of marrying, throws out their cat when she leaves him for the re-appeared Baku. And she goes out into the fields and calls the cat’s name.

The night the bathroom light fell off, from having short-circuited, was the night before I went to take my plants from Adam’s place, and then had that terrible phone call in which I said, I just want my pain to be heard; he said, OK, but not for much longer, and then he said, I don’t want to have to explain myself again and again, and the second time he said that, I hung up on him mid-sentence.