LE TEMPS DÉTRUIT TOUT

Today I noticed the distinctive patterns of ridges of certain keycaps on my mechanical keyboard, a pre-built 60% Vortex Pok3r, and the shine of wear on the N, B, A, F, J, H, T, R, E, W, and left Shift keys. I had been contemplating buying the inexpensive 40% Inland MK47 keyboard available at Microcenter, and ended up biking out on Friday evening to purchase the keyboard before bricking it at home on account of a firmware flashing error. I’ll take the keyboard back to Microcenter sometime this week, and return it, and possibly purchase a replacement. I liked its linear red switches, but was ambivalent about the ortholinear layout. I had expected to dislike its red switches, but found that in comparison, tactile browns tend to feel less precise due to the slight wobble and echo produced around the bump of each keystroke. I am probably fine with continuing to use my brown-switched 60% keyboard, however. I tend to leave it in Manhattan, as I have only separated partially from Adam, whose apartment I still spend time in on Wednesdays, the day I have a class on psychoanalytic diagnosis. His place still houses my monitor, my tarantula, half of my plants, my kombucha culture, half of my clothing and half of my yarn, and many other essentials. Being in Brooklyn half the week has nevertheless produced a definitive sense of change. Typing on this mechanical keyboard in my room in Flatbush may be the most acute manifestation of this movement back to “single life.” Last Friday, having planned no date, I biked to Microcenter, which takes around 30 minutes from here. I was glad to traverse the hilly residential streets of Windsor Terrace and to pass along the east side of Greenwood Cemetery, finally crossing under the polluting Gowanus Expressway before arriving at the big-box store, which lies at the forbidding industrial edge of Sunset Park.

Since I had bricked the initial MK-47, I made a second trip to Microcenter. The second bike ride through Windsor Terrace and Park Slope was brighter and pleasant; this time I did it around 2 PM on a sunny Tuesday before my afternoon meeting. When I got home, I successfully modified the key mappings using VIA. The ortholinear layout no longer bothers me, and I simply contend with the question of how to optimally map certain symbols. Having gotten used to two other compact keyboard layouts before this, I don’t have strong allegiances to certain keymappings, but ideas are coming to me after iterative attempts to get used to a particular map. It’s better to put the period where my fourth finger would be on the home row, and it’s better to put the hyphen somewhere in the main layer since I use it so often. I’ve never before been at such liberty to modify my keymappings, so this was more absorbing than I could have anticipated. At this point, I’ve settled on placing the hyphen to the left of the spacebar. This spacebar takes up the width of the B and N keys—two-fifths of the width of the spacebar on my Macbook’s keyboard. Typing the hyphen here is equivalent to typing a key directly under the V. I don’t know if this is an appropriate transformation of the typical way of things, but I’ve just become single, of my own will, after a year of living with Adam, so it seems like anything and everything can be transformed.

No longer faced with the glossiness and oleaginous ghost-feeling on the N, B, A, F, J, H, T, R, E, W, and left Shift keys of my Vortex Pok3r, I have conveniently forgotten an era of about three years during which I used that keyboard almost exclusively. It is an elegant black keyboard with a few blue keys. Beyond continuing to learn this new keyboard layout, and the slight modifications I continue to make on key mapping, I am now free to think of other things. In this room in Flatbush, next to Brooklyn College, and at the intersection of Midwood, Little Haiti, Ditmas Park, and Kensington, I often think about how I am getting older, the fact that I am not so beautiful, not definitively beautiful, about how time destroys everything. Sometimes, I am sad, and can hardly stand myself, and make trips back to Manhattan to walk the streets around or with Adam. He was, and continues to be, such a sweet man, with this lovely patina of wear that comes from a high-achieving life as a writer and researcher of reports for an activist short hedge fund. I’d like to go back to life with him someday, maybe when I’m 34 and can’t stand vagrancy anymore. But for now, being 26, I need to be single and I need to have a few more boyfriends. So, out of need and desire, I continue to see him, especially on Wednesdays, when I have my evening class on Diagnosis at NPAP.

I’ve been “backsliding” less as time goes on, and the dominant feeling is now one of plenitude, of a kind of existential fullness which arises in the purity of my chamber, which is surrounded by single-family homes and relatively close to beaches of Brighton, Coney Island, and Rockaway. I’ve come to love biking through the adjacent neighborhoods, or running through the different ethnic groups: the Bengali and Pakistani neighborhood of Kensington, the Orthodox Jews if Midwood and Borough Park, the Haitians of Flatbush, the whites of Ditmas Park. The first few days were excruciating, however, and I returned to Manhattan just two-and-a-half days in. The second round was much easier, if in part because I was able to make plans to meet with three men over the coming weekend. I met with two of them, and cancelled the third date, and found over the course of the third week of my “single life” that the two dates had left me in a state of profound sadness. I find it profoundly sad to have to reject someone or to be rejected; ideally all these liaisons would turn into friendships.

But like a chemical miasma unleashed to kill mosquitoes overnight, the particulate matter of romantic love is released each time two beings fuck. Sex is never entirely casual; in order to get to the place of fucking, something has to happen with words first, and verbal exchange is central to those cases where a pair interacts on an app before deciding to meet. I’ve become far pickier with who I decide to meet since I became single, and have found that moving back to Brooklyn provides me with more prospects in the humanities or arts. There are no SWEs or traders this far from lower Manhattan, and fucking around with men who read or watch films creates a kind of framework for seriousness which is new to me, and which I’ve been contending with. The last three men I met with all had a literary education and continue to work with writing in their professional and private lives; I sensed in them the intelligence or fluency with a shared culture that would enable a kind of symbolic liaison, the liaison which is marriage. It’s not that I couldn’t imagine this with Adam, who has his own humanistic education in the field of political philosophy, but at the time, I was against such symbolic significance; I didn’t want to fuck around with men who were of the “respectable” type. And now, faced with the open expanse of available men in Brooklyn, I find it hard to imagine a real relationship with someone who writes literary fiction, watches films, or reads psychoanalytic theory. This is my version of the so-called Madonna-Whore complex, though Freud never calls it this in “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love.” He calls it “psychical impotence,” this inability for the “strongly libidinous” man to carry out the sexual act with certain women. I like how he defines it: “The whole sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love. Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.”

Lukas and Dan were the two men I met last weekend. Lukas works for e-flux magazine as a film curator, he’s from Lithuania. Dan is a therapist in psychoanalytic training, with a BA and MA in French literature. He’s from Pennsylvania. Both are 36, and both live in South Brooklyn: one is in Sunset Park, and the other is in Kensington.

(Park Slope – Prospect Park – Prospect Lefferts Gardens

Sunset Park – Greenwood Cemetery – Windsor Terrace – Prospect Park

Sunset Park – Borough Park – Kensington – Ditmas Park – Flatbush)

Lukas seemed sweet and intelligent and had good taste in films but I didn’t like his scent, or looking at his gaunt face, or the texture of his hair or skin. I didn’t like the way he mumbled, speaking for too long and too much in general. We had a rather nice sexual encounter, anyway, because both of us were attentive. I hit him, and acted a bit bored, and wondered if sadism was something I should practice more earnestly in the bedroom. It struck me as almost tragic that I didn’t like him more, as we had clearly manufactured an objective, material tenderness in our sex acts and conversations. I found a copy of Teju Cole’s Open City on his shelf and began reading it the next morning, and found that I greatly enjoyed the novel as I continued reading it over the course of the following week. The morning after the date, I walked around the Chinese main street of Sunset Park, and photographed various frogs and snails and sharks, bought a cheap and bountiful two pounds of muscadine grapes off the street, and went home to my new Cafec Deep27 dripper. I delectated in the successful casualness and stimulation provided by a one-night-stand paired with a pleasant bike ride through Borough Park on Shabbat, where the men were in beautiful shtreimels and tallits. So I was happy, I suppose, even if there was something sad in having to reject Lukas.

Dan truly lives in my neighborhood. I guess it would take almost 40 minutes for me to walk to where he lives, but we met on Cortelyou Road, which I consider to be part of where I live, since I used to walk to the stores on that street pretty often. In any case, it takes 12 minutes on a bike to get to that area, so it’s close. We sat in the backyard of a coffee shop that used to be a bar—I suppose it’s typical for Brooklyn bars to have backyards—and I delectated in the slight uncanniness of being able to meet someone near me. As for Dan, I couldn’t tell if I liked him or not, because he reminded me too much of the psychoanalyst I had met on the train, Ricky, without being sufficiently like him: he wasn’t Jewish, he wasn’t dark-haired, he wasn’t a Lacanian. But he was like Ricky in a certain sense. They were both serious, a bit worn down, and have cats. He also revealed that he likes open water swimming, which struck me as a particularly desirable trait, just as Ricky’s cycling had struck me as attractive. But the way Dan spoke about psychoanalysis made it clear that we were coming at it from different traditions, as Dan was not so familiar with Lacan. Oh well, strange to evaulate anyone through this abstruse metric. There were other things to know and learn about him.

We had walked around Ditmas Park for a while before he invited me to his apartment; before then, it hadn’t been clear to me if he wanted sex, if he liked me or found me attractive. I still didn’t know what I thought, but wanted to see his apartment. It was a modest but nice studio apartment on Ocean Parkway, and I was very excited, very very excited, to see that he had multiple books by Peter Handke on the shelf immediately opposite the doorway. The main window of the living room and bedroom overlooked a majestic yeshiva, and I found myself wishing that Dan was Jewish, already having confirmed that he wasn’t. We spoke of films by Claire Denis, and he mentioned a few films he had seen, divulging that he had found Trouble Every Day hard to watch.

His male cat had a pretty white mark on his nose, a bit like something spilled on the tabby fur. The female cat was shy, elusive. I don’t care for cats as a species, but it’s always interesting to meet new individuals. I guess I could tell by this point that he wanted to touch me, but I kept on talking about “stuff.” He was very tender, lustful to some degree, but tender. The sex was slow and it seemed that he was considering me as a prospect for a relationship. I had trouble fully enjoying it, perhaps because I was aware I was being observed by a serious man who reads Peter Handke. Afterwards, he said he’d leave it open whether we met again, and reflected that he probably wasn’t going to be in a relationship with someone he had sex with on the first date. I took this as a pretty blatant rejection, and went home feeling numb: an obvious salve for more acute discontent. Though I wasn’t sure I wanted to be with him in any significant way, the rejection felt premature, and I found myself wanting him more on account of this.

Honestly, I want to like someone. I want to like someone a lot. I like Adam a lot, but for some reason, I want to know more people whom I like a lot. I want to fall in love with a fresh being once before I return to Adam. I want to fall in love in a way that feels very strange and very fresh, and then fall in love with some element from the past in a way that’s totally strange and perverse. Nothing more perverse than falling in love. But in the mean time, I acquire new objects: Inland MK-47, Cafec Deep27, and I break some of my plates. One of my plates crashed to the floor in Manhattan, and another crashed to the floor in Brooklyn, both because they had slid out of the plate drying rack as I was adjusting them. I don’t need to replace either of these plates, but it’s a possibility, and each time I break a plate or cup I happily imagine the shift in style engendered by the replacement. And it’s nice to break objects into such tangible shards. It feels like good luck when it happens, and it’s such an aesthetic experience, to look on at the destruction and to sweep it up. I look forward to breaking more plates.

Tonight is the second Friday night I am spending alone in my room in Flatbush. It is possibly the second Friday night I’ve spent alone here in the last year. Since I moved here in August of 2023, I have been spending pretty much every single Friday night out with someone. Today, I had some work to do for one of the two college admissions consulting companies I work for, and only left the apartment once, around 5 PM, to go to Marine Park, and to pick up crickets at the Petco nearby. I saw many good-looking Midwood Jewish couples as I biked across the lettered Avenues H, I, J, K, L, M, N, and a few independent groups of boys and men, and on a few occasions, a woman with her daughter. As I traversed Midwood, I made note of the fact that it seemed far more common to see two-seated strollers as opposed to the kind meant for just one child, and that many of the women wore loud floral prints as if in an attempt to exceed the bounds of the modesty inherent in their long-sleeved, long-hemmed forms. But the main thing on my mind was the fact that many of the men and women I saw were good-looking.

In the wake of Dan’s apparent rejection of me, I took pause from using the dating apps. I seemed unreasonably sad to myself, and certainly incapable of the cold joviality that allowed me to be promiscuous in the past. I considered, and believed, that I should return to Adam, that I should attempt to be monogamous with him, and ended up making plans to see a movie with him the following Saturday. It was a fine movie, and a fine night. I like Adam alot. But by then, Dan had messaged me, that very same Saturday, to let me know that he had been thinking about our conversation, that it had left an impression. I took this as a sign of interest, and told him that I had also been thinking a lot about our encounter. He told me that he wanted to hear more, so in my cheekiness, I told him more, as if to convey that we didn’t need to meet, and then proceeded to tell him that I was free the next day. So we met, on Sunday, the 29th.

The problem with meeting someone again is that sometimes you like them more. I liked him more, immediately, intuitively, when he opened the door to greet me. I met him at this place, and we talked for maybe 30 minutes, with a kind of delectable tension, as I explained to him that I had thought he was rejecting me, and as he explained that he had simply felt comfortable enough around me to reflect candidly. In actuality, it was probably fewer than 30 minutes before he started to kiss me, and we proceded to spend about two-and-a-half hours in bed. We talked for less than thirty minutes to start, and in that speech I could feel a lot of expectancy, a lot of tension. Then there was a lot of fucking. Fucking as a form of work, a form of conversation. Not at all engulfed in a haze of feeling, I was my own self, but still very aware of a confusion inherent in lengthy silences. I found him more attractive in a few ways, notably in finding the sweet scent around his chest and ears, but it was all surrounded by a big question: would I be able to do this again, or would I choose to be with Adam? I fantasized about breaking up with Dan on the third date in a Uzbek restaurant, with just a few men at a nearby table, overseeing the ceremony. Women are never present in Uzbek restaurants, for some reason. I suppose they’re supposed to be at home, that it’s a feature of being Muslim. I went to one with Alex, and it felt perverse, being a woman in that restaurant, so clearly on a date with a man, who was in fact just a friend, albeit a friend I would proceed to have sex with that night. I can sense a certain perversity in my interest in Dan which comes from the fact that I don’t want to be in a serious relationship with a serious man, but I’m aware that this threat is precisely what makes me so horny. What if he takes me away from my singleness?

I declared to Aleksandra (my analyst) that I’d pursue Dan over Adam for now. I’m skeptical of Dan, because of what he said, because he’s of Christian stock, because he doesn’t look or behave more like Ricky or Jed or any of the other men I’ve liked. But any tension I experienced was quickly resolved by the fact that I’ve become super horny after that second date. Rained on, absorbed, self-evident, this is how I feel. I’m “metaphysically horny” again. I spend time reading my writing with obsessional intensity and wondering about how I’d like to write. My cunt is writhing or pulsing or otherwise alive. I sit alone and read, and the feeling exists, it exists for itself and unto its own but also induces in me a widened scope for the appreciation of everything. For the last six months, I’ve been unable to articulate what it is that I’m missing out on by not being more in love. I haven’t been able to articulate what it means to be without a libido. I told Adam as much, and confessed that I had seen Dan for a second time last weekend. After class last week, I took the train back to Flatbush with Teacher, my tarantula, and more of my plants, and my kombucha supplies, in several bags.

Dan’s been talking to me over text over the course of the week, too. I like these little conversations, in which he divulges something about his dreams or his patients, or coyly mentions his masters thesis on Samuel Beckett. I found some writing he did for a Christian magazine, and some writing he did on a personal blog whose domain is now down, though the pages are all retrievable through the Wayback Machine. It’s of the same genre as the blogs that Zane and I have kept, but I found it through his Facebook, so he was clearly less shy about sharing it with a wider group of friends. I like the fact that he made an attempt with this weird genre, between the ages of 24 and 27, which might end up being the ages during which Zane and I maintain our blogs, though I suspect I’ll keep charging on until I get married, which, as we know, can’t happen.

Dan’s writing is quite the opposite of Zane’s. It’s straightforward and plainspoken but there’s a beauty or precision in certain observations or flourishes. It doesn’t have the baroque technicality of Zane’s writing, and so you can tell that the author is someone with a liberal arts degree and not a math background. A lot of it is about observing attractive “girls” and trying to flirt with them during those years that came directly after graduation from college, when he was in Tennessee, and then in Paris, doing a degree in French literature. It’s inherently embarrassing material, but I like how he writes about it, and I’m pleased to observe the rhyming correspondence between all these little blogs. I also like the writing Dan did for the Christian magazine, even if it distills precisely what I find so embarrassing about Christianity: its air of sincerity, its insistence on prayer and on miracle, and its implicit demand that you love your neighbor. But clearly, Dan is my neighbor, and maybe I want to love him precisely because of this. Dan of Kensington, Didi of Flatbush-Midwood-Ditmas Park.

In the mean time, I’ve completed Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, for she’s our most popular Christian novelist, it seems. Dan mentioned liking Jon Fosse, who owns the more severe, modernist, Nordic Catholic form of Christianity. I found Intermezzo sort of fascinating, with its sermonizing, and with its investigations of Peter’s “hypocrisy.” Hypocrisy strikes me as the worst of Christian sins, and probably the most endemic.

It’s hard to write about something so negative, but it seems to me that Z, who in many ways stands behind all my subsequent relationships, is someone I don’t wish to know. There is perhaps no good reason to write this down, but maybe it is better to clear the air with such a declaration. I love my Brooklyn, my Manhattan, and the heat of my mid-Atlantic summers. I don’t care for the West Coast or the Midwest or East Asia. It seems confirmed, to me, that there’s no reason why he would love the place I love; his predilections are the opposite of mine. And so there’s no friendship between us beyond the phantasms of romance. No shared vision, nothing, beyond the baroque technology of flirtation we’ve devised. And that’s a lot, that deserves some recognition, for sure.

But what goes into my sudden desire to declare a repudation, my desire to sign into law yet another separation? Why am I so frustrated, repelled, disgusted, annoyed?

I realized in the last month or so, after having written “Ledger,” and after having been in analysis with Aleksandra for a while, that I’m an obsessional neurotic. Promiscuity has been my ritual, my private religion. Moralism is a site of libidinal friction, as I create a system only to break its rules. This libidinal back-and-forth, this kind of masturbatory rocking motion, this form of infantile sexuality, has never been more apparent than in my creation of rules or procedures around promiscuity, which are then undone. I go from requiring of myself the coldest and most heartless approach to collecting prospects to wanting to “like someone a lot” and wanting to “be in love.”

Z has been an object of worship and profanation and degradation and oblative acts for some time. Madonna in the Madonna-Whore. I believed I had acted in the typical female ways, being hysterically invested in his demonstrations and withdrawals of desire, but there was something obsessional about the way I pursued the impossibility of love-at-a-distance, or should I say, in how I latched on to his silence and absence.

Is Z drawn to this element of similarity, are all the men I’ve known drawn to this element of similary, between myself and them? Most men are obsessionals. For my part, I believe I prefer men because they mirror the chirality of my structure. But I refuse to play the game of obsessional love, or at least the obsessional form of love for Z in which I needed his distance to experience shattering orgasm. I claim now that I “don’t believe in long-distance,” and instead pursue the degraded forms of men whom I cannot “love” so easily because they are too proximate in space-time. I can’t conjure the slightest romantic feeling for a postcard or photograph. My history of attachment to him is so suffused with shocks of jealousy that I’ve completely shut down from the possibility of a reconnection. In Japan, I observed with great trepidation as he sent off his postcard to someone else, and in January, I was overcome with jealousy when I realized that his visit had been made short on account of a visit to someone else before then. In spite of whatever successive acts of repair have come about after each of such moments, I am unable to move on from the fact that I didn’t like how it felt when he was around, didn’t like the opacity that led each realization to come to me so indirectly, through social media, and the restrictive fear that I’d be perceived as too intense or overdramatic. I tamped it all down and made my true emotions undetectable, in a friendly way, and shunted my inner violence into the friendliness of promiscuity.

At least, to avoid the hypocrisy of my own, I can own up to this history of an intense desire for monogamous love, and its subsequent dissolution. The last time I saw him, I deduced that I was in second place to the primary object of his affections; I felt I was replaceable, substitutable, merely more available. This remains something which I’ve never felt so insecure about with anyone else, a problem I’ve managed to entirely excise from my current life, and which rests therefore entirely within my memories of Z. As I imagine it, to this day, Z’s maintenance of his personal network from the past, his mycelium, has nothing to do with the “actual me,” and rather involves a symbolic detritus of mine that is his to admire. This has been true for almost the entirety of our “relationship,” which was founded in March 2020, and in the undying truth of my convictions from that time. It is sad that I haven’t been able to move on. It is less sad, I think, that I still acknowledge the form of that passion from which I have never been able to fully extricate myself, though it now takes form in a blurry repudiation. I repudiate both the purity of promiscuity and of the fusional death that monogamous love seems to entail. I don’t repudiate my former jealousy, but I put it in its place.

It’s a matter of maintaining one’s territory, I suppose, and I feel a little territorial, so I piss at the foot of this tree, and I go on pissing to refresh the clarity of the boundary.