Tomkins argued that drives, on their own, are surprisingly weak motivators of action; they provide information about motivation but very little impetus to actually move. The drives have psychological power only to the extent that they are amplified by the affects: “The affect system is therefore the primary motivational system because without its amplification, nothing else matters—and with its amplification, anything else can matter” (3:6).
Fear, united with sexual drive pleasure, is also capable of increasing the urgency and intensity of the sex drive. This is the lure of the tabooed and the forbidden, a complex combination of primary drive pleasure and positive and negative affect amplification. Negative affect amplification is here accompanied by the positive affective response of excitement which along with sexual pleasure gives the entire complex a predominantly positive tone. (1:57)
I am a baby straight girl, an infant harlot. I met someone in an apartment of a friend’s which he was borrowing while she was away, where he fed me pancakes and made coffee, asking me to bring the beans. I packed 30 grams of some Gimme Coffee Deep Disco blend in a little square plastic container with a green lid, and both walked and ran to 710 Giles St, carrying just a little red Fjällräven pocket bag and water and phone and airpods and the container with the coffee beans. I was glad to be moving along the creek and under the green shade in the hot late morning, and found with interest that there was a new sidewalk being built on the winding inclined section of the road which had long been extremely dusty and under construction. The person had asked me the previous day, on OKCupid, to meet him spontaneously at the subjacent Mulholland Wildflower Preserve around 6 PM, which I declined in favor of meeting the next day. In his picture he looked attractive and stylish but his answers to the profile prompts produced a more or less conventional image of a modern hippie, with terms like “relationship anarchy” and “slowness” and “compassion” and “community-based care.” He told me that he lives in Berlin, but is visiting Ithaca and is thinking of visiting again, coming back, splitting his time between the two places, starting some kind of artistic retreat here. He is 31.
On account of his day plans and mine (12 PM analysis), we had decided to meet at 10 in the morning. I was happy to go to a date that would have a relatively constrained time limit, but a bit nervous about the possibility that I might be somehow waylaid from getting back to my house on time. His affect in person was colder and more rigid than it was in his texts, he seemed serious and even depressed. I liked that he seemed relatively small (thin, 5'9''), and that he was wearing two different shades of blue, a lighter blue chambray shirt, which I misapprehended as linen, and medium blue pants with a bit of a flare at the bottoms. His hair was long and blond and straight but put up in a bun, and his appearance projected a bit of sharpness (a sharply angled nose), and a bit of fierceness (very blue eyes). I was happy to be served food and hosted inside of the dark apartment, which had very Ithacan (hippie) decorative elements and many natural skincare products in the bathroom. The pancakes were good, not to sweet, and had a pleasant spongy texture, the only issue being that they weren’t hot, as they had been made before I arrived. My coffee, brewed in a metal cone with a relatively low bean-to-water ratio, tasted decent. He ended up revealing a good deal about himself over the course of the 90 minutes; including material about the suicide of his father, the suicide of his friend, that he has four siblings, that he is from rural western PA, that he has lived in Minneapolis, Denver, Tucson, Calcutta, and Berlin since graduating in 2013, with a degree in film. There were two exes: one he spent five years in Minneapolis and Denver and Tucson with, and one whom he met on the heels of a breakup, which lasted only a year. He was depressed in Minneapolis (the coldest winter in fifty years) but found the other three locations quite beautiful.
I told him around 11:15 that I had detransitioned. This led me to say something about my repudiation of heterosexuality (J and K) and my epistolary relations with my parents. He asked me about the timeline. I fumbled a bit on this question—I believe I said that I started to think about it more in February, though I’m not sure that that’s true. Perhaps it’s more true that it began in March, when I met Danny and Vishal, and began reading Seminar XX with John, or in April, when I discovered that John was heterosexual. In any case I bought dresses in March and April and began to taper. March, April, May, June. Four months of detransition.
At the very beginning of the conversation, he made note of my OKC profile, specifically the part where I say I like to exchange letters and emails. I said that my epistolary relationships were based in a more or less immersive IRL component and that I was no longer so hopeful about written correspondence, that I had sublimated the “nearly pathological urge” to write into the work on my website. Near the end, in response to my discussion of detransition, he told me that his second ex was non-binary, and rather androgynous, and that he knew one MtFtM detransitioner who detransitioned because they were too fat to be pleased with their life as a woman. I figured from the pattern, in which the man makes a move of reassurance by telling me something about his familiarity with trans people, that it is going to be easy to date as a detrans woman. And from my serenity I can sense that it is easy for me to tell them the basics of my life without feeling that something has been compromised in the manner of telling. It doesn’t even cross my mind to mention the stuff about fertility, or my more academic interests in gender and psychoanalysis. What does a man want? I believe a man wants pussy, or mama, and that may not be what lies in the middle, but it certainly lies at the beginning (parturition) and the end (coition). V—’s Don Juanism is to be explored. I have no idea whether or not these men would date a woman without a cunt; is that orifice in fact somehow fundamental, or is it just the symbolic appearance of woman that matters? The way he touched my ass or thighs or breasts seems to imply the importance of the signifiers of fertility. I don’t understand how men can be satisfied by touching someone else, because I don’t find an automatic appeal in caressing the butt or thighs or chest or any part of the man except for the penis and the angles of his face, the profile which produces harsher angles. But with Zane I wanted to press everything to me, and I wanted to encapsulate his torso, which as a whole felt like a magnificent tomb or organ, a resonant cavity, a pipe, like in the Magritte painting, or in one of the recordings of Bach’s Art of Fugue. So as a rule I do not care for the man’s body as much as I enjoy the sense of his desire for my body, but if there is somebody exceptional I desire him in an active sense, though perhaps this is nothing other than the phallic mother in me. I adored Zane’s head the way I might adore the cranium of an infant, a very round body that seems so heavy that it can barely be held up by the neonate’s neck. In any case, I excused myself around 11:40, and we agreed to meet again in the evening. I had to run home, which made me feel like a bunny, and got home at 11:50, with enough time left to splash water on my face before analysis.
When I met him again at 9 PM, I was aware that there might be some meeting of the bodies. I even masturbated earlier in the day, because the notion aroused me. I couldn’t imagine desiring him in particular, but I liked the idea of being pulled into it, of not knowing my fate, of being passive to some external power unrelated to his specific interest in me. I seemed unable to do anything during the day, in part because of the heat, but in part because of a sense that it was a kind of sabotage to accept the invitation to meet in the evening, as I felt tired and numb, and at which point I knew it would rain, so I even had to bring an umbrella. His affect had changed entirely when I arrived; he was cheerful, animated. He sat on the couch and asked me if I wanted to sit there too, and somehow I evaded this. Then he asked me if I wanted to go to the porch and I said something about mosquitoes but went anyway, and it was completely dark but pleasing to be in the humid but breezy air, with the sound light rain, and there were, in fact, no mosquitoes. I taught him the word “geosin” and am now embarrassed to realize it’s actually “geosmin,” pronounced with a /z/. I started to wonder about its etymology in a way that displaced me, it was as if I was at a dining table in Cambridge, Massachussetts. Out of the neighboring house’s window came a very loud voice speaking in some enunciated continental English. It was so loud and clear that I wondered out loud if it was in fact a live performance or if it was a recording. Dy guessed that the neighbors were watching TV. He kept on making impressions of the voice, which I didn’t approve of because they were impeding my ability to listen to the words, and because they weren’t very accurate. I told him it couldn’t be a TV show; if it was not a TV show, or a movie what was it? I figured out after some time had passed that it was an audiobook. We could make out that a woman was washing dishes, listening to her book, presumably on very high-quality speakers. After we tired of reacting to this scene we went back indoors. He had told me various things, but what I remember was that his mother had had her first child when she was fifteen. He was the fourth. By then I had become quite aware of what he meant when he said that he enjoyed being silly, but that it took a while for it to come out with new people. So he was comfortable with me. And it took the mere 90 minutes in the morning for him to trust me. Or something in his afternoon spent with the tenants of his dead friend had affected the change. Perhaps he was also happy that I had showed up at all; he mentioned on the porch that people he messaged on OKC would sometimes ghost him. I told him that they might judge him for his spontaneity, and that I didn’t consider it to be ghosting if they hadn’t yet met. I revealed that I had been ghosted by people who had known me for months or years, and he reacted with some consternation and amazement. I smiled, recognizing that I couldn’t relate to his sense of the injustice of it, that I loved the people who had suddenly left.
I resumed my position on the chair, he resumed his on the sofa. I have produced an unflattering picture of who he was to me thus far, but my mood was pensive and neutral. I knew already that there was not much more for us to speak about, but I wanted to figure out how to steer the conversation, and asked him tepidly what movies he liked. He mentioned Kiarostami, and The Taste of the Green Papaya, and other films which I can’t remember the names of, including a documentary about people working in a mine. When I asked him more about what he had been doing during his two weeks in Ithaca, he said more about his dead friend. He had come to Ithaca to memorialize him, to interview people who had known him, including people who had simply been served by him at the café where he had been working. Dy had spent a great deal of time crying with these people, and said that it had been good to grieve with others and not to grieve alone as he had been doing before he came. It was February when Luke had died. Luke had been rather gender non-conforming, non-conforming in a lot of ways. His most notable quality was that he gave long and affectionate hugs. It was particularly sad, Dy continued, because he felt the world needed more people like him, and it was sad that the people who seemed most needed were often the ones who were hurting the most. I had a little selfish thought of the sensitive and valuable qualities of Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, which didn’t coincide with the suicidality and depression I envisioned in relation to the friend. I thought of myself, once depressed, but no longer vulnerable to anything but piercing ecstasies. I suppose I might be one such valuable person, but this value seems to come from my unusualness rather than what I can do for others, certainly not from giving tender hugs. The intensity of my being, moreover, which is sexual, does not seem to exist primarily in relation to poor mental health; it is a part of my vigorous persistence, though it might coincide with a certain chronic relation to the possibility of suicide, or at least to the loneliness which invites its possibility.
As the conversation became more sparse he asked me what I was thinking about, which made me smirk a little, as I had been thinking about the question of whether or not he reads books, at least books that I would read or want to read, but I didn’t, and couldn’t say that. I believe I said something about how I wondered about friendship, how to be a good friend. Then I returned the question to him and when I did this he became quite hesitant to speak. For some strange reason, I filled the silence with speech—it seemed nervous of me, to tell him that he didn’t have to say what was on his mind, that the question was funny because when it was asked it tended to be in situations where either the addressee wasn’t thinking about anything at all, or where the addressee was thinking about something that he or she wouldn’t want to say out loud. Well, he paused, I’m thinking—and he looked at me furtively, which made me realize he had probably been looking at me a great deal the whole time, especially since I had a tendency to look away from him, at the ground—I’m thinking about how you’re cute, and there was enough of a pause here for me to say not “thanks,” but It’s nice to hear that. I immediately felt the falseness of the statement, though I had believed, while carefully laying out my words, that it might be better, more truthful, to say anything but a perfunctory “thanks”—“thanks” for what? I seemed to be making contact with a memory of Kevin Xu, who might be the last person to have made me feel whatever I was feeling in that moment—a kind of revulsion mixed with flattery, strong enough to make me feel heat in my skin, a blush of true embarrassment. He continued to reveal what he had been thinking—that he wondered if I wanted touch, but was unsure about asking this directly because he didn’t want to produce any sense of pressure, didn’t know how I felt about it.
To insert movement in the pressure of the situation, or to begin where it seemed reasonable to begin, I told him that I’ve been quite touch-averse, though this was a somewhat misleading way of winding around the more pressing truth of my sexuality, my aspiration towards a kind of sublimated nymphomania, which I had no clear reason to hide. I said something about my aversion to my mother’s touch, and wound up discussing the question of consent with hugs—that I believed it was better to just give and accept hugs, that becoming a person who regularly rejects hugs could be more damaging than dealing with the mild discomfort of physical proximity. At some point I asked the perpendicular question of whether or not he believed it was important to keep secrets, or to at least acknowledge that there were “hidden variables,” so to speak, in life (I didn’t use this elocution). But now I can’t remember if that came before or after the discussion of touch. Just that he asked me if I had had positive experiences with touch, a question which I deflected entirely with a terse “yes,” maybe paired with a twinkle of a smile. I mentioned having enjoyed being squeezed, and I analyzed it—I said it was a defensive posture, that I was like a hedgehog, whose spines might cause the hugger’s body to bleed. Out of some sort of impatience with myself I came to the couch and felt vaguely annoyed by the fact that he was lying with his feet near me, as I believed it would be more appropriate for him to sit with his head closer to me and to just do something, to break the tension with an action, to not ask me, per the comments I had furnished on hugs, for consent.
Why and how did I manage to lie with my head near his torso? How aware was I of the fact that I did not desire him and that I nonetheless wanted to witness him getting what he wanted? He had determined who I was in the situation, he furnished it by inserting between my being and an adjective the copula; I was “cute.” So did I not have an obligation to “do it”? I believed, as a narrator might, that it made sense for him to end his stay—filled with tender acts of mourning for his deceased friend, with a little treat, to be the little tart dressed in intellect and eccentricity who would punctuate his time in Ithaca, to promise new life at the end of his grief. The last thing I remember speaking to him about was the question of presence—he had said that he felt more present in his body when he was touching, I said I felt less present, that there was something disorienting about the parity between bodies, that one lost all frames of reference. But his hand was indeed perceptible as colder than mine, and in this sense I had to agree that I had become present to my warmth. And as I felt the long and smooth hair on his legs and arms I became aware of my difference, and somehow as he touched my scalp I became aware of its contours without needing to touch it with my own fingers.
Around 2 AM there was a brief parting of bodies which gave me the sense it was time to ask if he wanted to sleep; I wanted to sleep, and I knew I was going to do it at home. So he went to the bathroom, not knowing what I had decided, and I had plenty of time to get dressed, and as I waited to pee, I took photos of the living room and kitchen, including photos of two photos, ostensibly of the woman who normally lived in the apartment and a man, perhaps her partner. Then I took a picture of a large potato, starting to sprout, in a bowl. When he came out I told him I was going to go home and he said it sounded like it would be a nice walk, that he even wanted a bit to go on a walk. I said something about how the low was high, around 67 degrees, so it would be a comfortable walk in the rain. There was some stillness. I tried to make a joke but I said I had found the potato and that it was the funniest thing I could think of. Then I came up with a real joke (“your house would make a great movie set”)—what I had said to John last week—but laughed and said I couldn’t say it (in this situation). He put his hand on my knee and I moved my hand over his hand for a bit and he looked at me in the dark and I kind of looked away. When I was near the door, facing the kitchen, in the light, he stood behind me and held me for a time. And this admittedly felt good; it was the only sexual touch I experienced while not recumbent, and it was one whose semiosis involved owning, even if it was a fairly standard gesture of affection. I hungered for the elision of pretensions of mutuality, I suppose—the only intimacy I can stand, even with people I have loved, is apparently one of raptus, of seizure. He was naked and made note of it (“a power imbalance!") and when he opened the door and waved goodbye he stood at the door smiling he was still naked. He was elegant that way, you could see the muscle tone in his back and ass when he had walked to the bathroom earlier, and I too found a certain kiddish happiness in walking around in the nude when I had entered and left the bedroom.
My heterosexuality shower, my sluttish youth shower, it was the pleasantest part of the evening, walking home in the dark light rain by the creek. I saw a black cat on Seneca street. I thought about how I didn’t like his scent, the scent of his mouth, how I hadn’t opened my mouth at all during the whole two or three hours, hadn’t made any noise, how everything was mechanical and contrived with a closeted poise, as if I were a puppeteer. When I arrived home I took a shower and washed dishes and hung up some clothes and laundered some others, in a clear and conscious performance of ablution, an even urgent desire to wipe away any trace of his saliva or scent. The whole thing had been, on some level, more sexual than my other sexual encounters, he had thrust his penis quite vigorously between my thighs and even into my labial folds, where my cunt was so firmly clenched that coitus could easily be avoided, so that his not inconsiderable erection slid first towards and then away from it. The next day I inspected Wikipedia in order to find the right word, “intercrural,” but it seems that nobody has coined a term for a kind of sex with respect to vaginismus. He had verbalized just once when it came to his arousal—that his thighs were sensitive, and I said, whose thighs aren’t, thinking that perhaps men didn’t get touched enough, but that I didn’t feel so strongly about changing this. His testicles felt like turtle eggs, as usual, and I ascertained that his penis was more or less the same size as Z’s, maybe a bit larger, but qualitatively very distinct in texture, and a bit darker, rougher, and less pink. Basically everything was wrong with it, on account of nothing—to touch him was to touch a body in the way a doctor or surgeon should, with an awareness of form but none of the tingling or intensity which blinds us to form or texture.
My vagina, no longer a cunt, keeps on clenching when I think about it, as if it were about to cry—not in the sense of “lubricate,” but in the sense of that sudden loosening and contraction one might experience when having to pee after holding it for too long. I’d often shiver, when I was holding in the urine for too long, as a child. I had an experience which I do not regret, which in a sense preserves for me, with a greater, diamantine hardness, the immensity of love’s impact on me, and of my more Machiavellian impulse to expose myself to desire in order to tell a story about it, primarily to my analyst, or to an eavesdropping Z. Now I’ve met two men whose fathers died as they were coming into adulthood. I might not be a hardened nymphomaniac at this time, but perhaps I could become an ausculator of bodies, and of their inverted grief.
To recover a bit, I messaged Lara around 5 AM, which is when I woke up, and Daanish. I was having some trouble urinating and defecating with a sense of satisfaction. The morning wasn’t beginning yet, and I went out, I went to Ithaca Agway to buy a larger watering can, so that when John waters my plants it’ll be more convenient. I was waylaid by flowers, so many wonderful flowers, and ended up buying a black calla lily, which reminds me of the cover of the English edition of The Flowers of Evil. Dy had sent me several messages at 3 AM, which I saw in the morning prior to my excursion, which stressed me out. The first two made note of his sexual health history and involved a bit of an apology for not having told me in advance, and a question about whether or not anything had made me uncomfortable, about why I had decided to leave, and that he might have clarified that it was fine for me to sleep in the bed without any contact, sexual or otherwise. In the last message, he said that he “liked our vibe” and wanted to “take that on a walk,” followed by “you’re great” with a smiley face. It preoccupied me that I would now need to find a way to tell him that I didn’t want to see him ever again, now that it was confirmed that he would have preferred otherwise. In any case, I liked my Zantedeschia, and that was enough to propel me into a polite and quick and truthful response. Something about some of the elocutions that came out surprised me:
Hey, it's fine! I just had a sense that I wanted to sleep in and wake up in my own bed. It's usually hard for me to sleep in a new location. And I'm getting a little tense about trying to get back to finishing some projects these days. [...] When I was walking back, I thought about how I continue to miss the last person I was intimate with, and that it felt quite sad for me to be intimate with someone new because it was like I was testing out if I could write over the past, and it didn't quite work for me. Hope this makes sense, I think it would be for the best to be apart for the time being.
The thing I miss doesn’t correspond with an acquisitive sensation, but something about attempting to write over it just makes me able to feel its embossed nature, and there is something lovely about being able to press down on what’s embedded in me in this more substantive manner. Perhaps it is why I do this, a bit like Joe having sex with so many men in the wake of her father’s death or V— doing something like that with women. I changed my Tinder bio to the title of a tabloid article about Kanye’s dictionary game, and received a message from a restaurant line-cook about it, and late in the night, writing these posts, I considered being properly fucked by a man significantly taller and heavier than me this time, whose sensation is confined in a condom by the fact that he is having sex with someone itinerant, and who has no investment in his specific being. I imagine the persona I might take on: very intellectual and very submissive and very kind, and then very aggressive and intensely sexual, a strange form of harlotry which involves producing a wise but cute cradle for a man who wants to become a baby.
I listened to Tristan und Isolde this morning in an effort to lubricate my vagina and it worked. Lara messaged me about her frigidity. I opened up the essay by Helene Deutsch, “The Psychology of Women in Relation to the Functions of Reproduction,” and it made sense. I opened up Silvan Tomkins and Wilfred Bion and Moten on Bion. I bought some Pennsylvania peaches from Greenstar and ate the softest one. I returned to Chapter 3 of Gender Trouble. I have an urge to spend time in John’s apartment, to go there not only to water his plant but to masturbate in his bed, or to read a bunch of his psychoanalytic books, or to otherwise snoop around and get to know him in his absence. It’s nice to feel so assured in the wake of something so dysphoric that there are people whom I like.
According to Kristeva, the act of giving birth does not successfully reestablish that continuous relation prior to individuation because the infant invariably suffers the prohibition on incest and is separated off as a discrete identity. In the case of the mother’s separation from the girl-child, the result is melancholy for both, for the separation is never fully completed.
As opposed to grief or mourning, in which separation is recognized and the libido attached to the original object is successfully displaced onto a new substitute object, melancholy designates a failure to grieve in which the loss is simply internalized and, in that sense, refused. Instead of a negative attachment to the body, the maternal body is internalized as a negation, so that the girl’s identity becomes itself a kind of loss, a characteristic privation or lack.
We would drive for a while, my neighbour called above the noise of the engine, and when we reached a nice place he knew, we would stop and swim. He had removed his shirt, and his bare back faced me while he drove. It was very broad and fleshy, leathery with sun and age, and marked with numerous moles and scars and outcrops of coarse grey hair. Looking at it I felt overcome with a sadness that was partly confusion, as though his back were a foreign country I was lost in; or not lost but exiled, in as much as the feeling of being lost was not attended by the hope that I would eventually find something I recognised. His aged back seemed to maroon us both in our separate and untransfigurable histories. It struck me that some people might think I was stupid, to go out alone on a boat with a man I didn’t know. But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.
We were out by now in the open water, and my neighbour put the boat into a different gear so that it suddenly leaped forward, with such force that unnoticed by him I nearly fell over the back. The thunderous noise of the engine instantly displaced every other sight and sound. I grabbed the rail that ran along one side and clung on as we roared across the bay, the front of the boat rising and thumping down again repeatedly on to the water and a great spray fanning out to all sides. I felt angry that he hadn’t warned me of what was about to happen. I couldn’t move or speak: I could only cling on, my hair standing up on end and my face growing stiff with the pressure of wind. The boat thumped up and down and the sight of his bare back at the wheel made me angrier and angrier. There was a certain self-consciousness in the set of his shoulders: this was, then, a performance, a piece of showing off. He didn’t once glance back at me, for people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them. I wondered what he would have felt if he’d arrived at our destination to discover that I was no longer there; I imagined him explaining this latest piece of carelessness to the next woman he met on an airplane. She kept pestering me to go out on the boat, he would say, but it turned out she didn’t know the first thing about sailing. To be perfectly honest, he would say, it was the full disaster: she fell overboard, and now I am very sad.
I experienced the first dream as a dream about my femininity; coming out to Laurent as female; what does it matter? What’s his relationship to femininity? Will he suddenly understand my child-neurosis if he finds out that I want to give birth some day? Or that I’ve had a repressed relation to my femininity for so long? It is also, of course, a dream about a wish to reconcile with him in a way that’s purely emotive, as if it were just the stimmung of our interactions that’s amiss.
The second dream was clearly a reference to my recently changed relationship to Nymphomaniac. I don’t know where the fat woman came from if not from a swimming pool locker room when I was 10 or 11. I want to swim, I want to perform an abortion—the stake was a bit like the dilators in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In. The garden stakes and the black plastic netting I used in the back yard haven’t been effective in keeping out woodchucks, and yesterday I came across a juvenile woodchuck a couple of feet away from me, behind the “fence”—there was a temptation to grab it: it was so terrified, so near, so small, and then it ran off.
What a nice website, it reminds me of trying to make up a new language with my sister, but not in any systematic sense: pure glossolalia.
Why are the glossy and rugose and metallic peperomias so beautiful?
I couldn’t sleep for a while last night, it was a calm and cradling sort of non-sleep. I turned on my flashlight and watched the peperomias. I advanced in Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher and in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space until roughly 2:30 AM.
I opened the email around 11 PM, after the animated conversation with Michelle, who wants to be my “gal pal,” and a shower. I wish I had explained to Hunter earlier in the day that I had been an overzealous traveller, like a child who rides about without a helmet, a little too carefree. It took me six years to experiment with promiscuity and sexual conquest in the way that 18-year-olds are supposed to want to do, albeit in the relative homogenity of the campus.
I cannot stand the insistence of the present tense in The Piano Teacher.
it took about a day for me to click on your email after i first saw it sitting there. it scared me, and then i thought that instead of being scared, it might be more fun if i wrote the email in my head before reading it. i thought maybe you would tell me you were getting married, that was the only thing i could come up with, but not in much detail, because it kept on getting interrupted by laughter. and then i read it and it felt nice because it felt familiar and almost more like no time had passed. i was surprised that my usual desire for novelty and surprise and sharp jabs and interventions and punctuation marks had been replaced by a sense of the value of consistency or of ellipses in time. then thinking about writing here scared me because it immediately conjured up a version of myself that’s more careful with respect to everything. less me as an obsessive email writer, more me as someone with a more massive soul. i don’t think i have a problem with my current way of life but somehow the bar would be raised; you know a lot more about the size of problems. this contributes to some of your paralysis perhaps, but it’s good for me to feel some looming restraint, or at least i’ve gotten to exist around multiple different people in different ways, so i crave whatever is most strange in what i get from you. it might be a sense of restraint, or a sense that i have no idea what’s going to happen. some people insist that everyone is essentially driven by selfish motives, i don’t quite understand why. when i think about what i would like if you were in my life in a stable way, i think about how i could be good for you too, and I don’t seem capable of caring about what specifically you could do for me, though the notion of you getting off to being good to me gets me off more than anything (perhaps for the first time in my life i enjoy the notion of being a recipient, of being passive and smooth). but this is what makes the game or problem impossible to succeed at: that what we demand and what we produce in the other through our demands don’t line up with the truth of whatever it is that drives the demand, so we don’t ever get what we want, not a perfect match. and without this lack of a perfect correspondence everything would be equal and balanced and no relation would exist so it makes me happy to apprehend this structure. though in absence, you have already been extremely helpful, and i don’t have a problem with retroactively justifying everything that’s ever happened to me. recent social liquidity gives me the space to appreciate that through the strange habits and bodies of other people. it means i can assert your centrality without it being nerve-wracking; if i’m capable of promiscuity i’m capable of teasing out or slipping around knots and obstructions. it also reveals in the simplest way that there’s a simple explanation for a lot of past anxieties in relation to you: whatever it was that caused me to transition and then detransition. as i become more accustomed to whatever benefits this brings to my life i shall return to the same old problems. problems that don’t stem from insecurity but from strength. what does one do with all this strength.
I woke up wanting to write an email to Lara about my second meeting with Vieno. Emails emails emails. What if I write emails again. I’m still not comfortable with emails, but neither is he, so we understand each other, and isn’t that nice.
Cunt is cunt again and smells sweet today. Ovulation?
Today is day 20 since I “officially became female.”
I am thinking about how tired I am.
I did work hard, I did work hard.
There’s a strong vanilla aftertaste on this coffee. It has a more bitter and acid front and underlying round sweetness. I’m gulping it down a lot faster than usual.
I thought it would be good if I named the people I liked.
Almost everyone I’ve met recently has been nice.
Didi died at the age of 46, leaving behind a 14-year-old daughter named Cass C.
She began this website on August 8, 2021, at the age of 23.
Her original plan was to get a laminar flow hood and sow orchid seeds in agar.
The first guests to her website were Lara Lewison and Savitri Asokan (October), followed by Daanish Shabbir (January). It is possible that Zane Rossi found it in the mean time by simply searching the title in quotation marks, after a screenshot had been posted on social media. Didi didn’t use Google Analytics until late January of 2022. Abdulai Gassama was invited to the party in June 2022.
There were some random people in Vietnam and the Netherlands and Germany and Colorado who found the site through the NSFW twitter account, @deodandem, or by googling certain orchids or orchid vendors.
Didi began to introduce more “human subjects” in March 2022: Hunter R—, John A—, Vishal N—, and Vieno J—. These were people who she sometimes referred to but did not share the site with. The first was her analyst. The second had a role which remained difficult to determine, though love was involved. The last two she met through dating apps, and they became friends.
Is Didi going to be a Penelope or a Cassandra?
that which makes her feel most alone in the world is precisely what she defends…
I like the smell of bromine.
I went to water the plant again and reclined on a chaise.
This time it wasn’t so exciting, it was more complicated.
I felt the tickle of my uterus, that sensation which cannot be released.
I lay in the bed and thought about my mute princess.
A Child is Being Killed, lay open, face down, beside me.
I feel the same desire, which is a desire for proximity and fusion, for the heat of frequency and breadth and length. It disturbs me a bit that I keep on coming back to the same notion that what I have, what I possess, is the infans—the perfect mute ego-ideal, and that without me coveting this image, the mute princess will be lost and dissatisfied. She needs me to hold up an image of this perfect mute ego-ideal. But it’s possible, now that I read Leclaire, that what we need to do is to kill off this child. And then it would be possible for motion to take over.
The difference between this feeling and the old feeling, if identical in its dimensions, is that now it is the second time, second draft, second place.
I had in fact once bought them a puppy, you see, two years before, under circumstances almost indistinguishable from those I have just recounted, and the fact that we had returned to that same moment, having learned nothing, made me see our life and particularly the children themselves in the coldest possible light.
Hunter laughed particularly hard when I told him the story of Melete, in Outline, who has trouble as a child with chronic bouts of vomiting that are so bad that they lead her to miss school. The parents take her to doctors, therapists, and finally a child psychoanalyst, who advises that she take up a wind instrument.
She learns to play the trumpet, and this solves the issue.
(In fact, the analyst advises that she take up a “musical instrument.")
Then there’s the story of the cats. Marielle, dressed in cerise, high-throated, and a mantilla of black lace, first bought her son a puppy, which was subsequently run down in the street. He had carried the corpse back to their house; this had ruined him. Since then she puts her trust in cats, “who at least can settle the question of their own survival, and while they might lack the capacity for power and influence, and might be said to subsist on jealousies and a degree of selfishness, also possess uncanny instincts and a marked excellence in matters of taste”…
I made Hunter lose track of time today.
Is this the so-called “beginning of analysis”?
The month is almost over and I’ve only had four dreams. 7/5 (x2), 7/7, and 7/14. I have a habit of saying that something’s almost over when it’s halfway over.
This morning’s dream will be remembered by the elevated heart rate graphed out between 4:15 and 5 AM, ranging roughly between 50 to 100 bpm. If indeed I had so vivid a dream but did not wake until 7:44, then it explains why I both remember some of it but cannot remember much of it at all.
According to my notes, I was taking pictures of someone in order to absolve myself of something. This could relate to Janis in Madres Paralelas, who is a fashion photographer, and guilty of hiding something. I was also in NYC. Later I recalled taking some boy up an elevator, a bit like the one in Revolutionary Girl Utena.
I was about to leave for the swimming pool when I received an email from John about how his brother had died. He would be staying in Ohio for the funeral and hence I would need to find someone else to water my plants while I was away.
Story of the summer’s end: there were all those semi-magical moments that were being abraded through repetition, so that the old place you’d bring yourself to be in when you were feeling deathly was no longer safe from deathliness.
I was sitting in a circle with some SLE/ITALIC students in a dimly lit room with a fireplace and ornate carpeting, and we were passing around a laptop to sign up for some extracurricular club activity. I saw that the club was run by Zane and that he had built some sort of pumpkin animation story that we were perhaps supposed to develop or emulate. Later I was watching silly videos on the internet with both him and Eri and I was perturbed by the “stupidity” of our comments.
I seem to have slept very well, with my heart rate dipping into the high 30s.
Furtive happiness. I got four hours of sleep last night.
Preoccupied with the fact of John’s brother’s death.
I was in a museum in a group with a tour guide. We came to a place that seemed like an aisle at an airport, close to some wall-height windows, overlooking the tarmac, and out came a little “polynesian” opossum. But the opossum had blunter features and a significant amount of black-tipped fur on its back. It approached me and then began to behave aggressively, with spines coming out of its back, having all the features of a porcupine. It seemed like its display of aggression was also a display of affection and interest. It was also rolling on the floor, playfully. John was there, earlier in the dream, and I asked him something.
I am leaking transparent fluid that smells a bit like dashi.
But that was transient, that was the morning. I don’t find it interesting to say anything about the uterine apparatus as the day goes on. It’s really the dissolution of the objet petit a which make me have faith in life, or which leads to a certain anxiety that isn’t polluted by anything familiar.
Desire feels more like warm curiosity, amathía, inscientia.
I cleaned my room and had to get a new water filter.
Z was in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, in a non-descript hotel room, sitting on the floor, some time in the morning of an overcast day. He said “jump on me” and I somehow fell onto him as lightly as possible, like a mantle or a leaf, with my neck and collarbone pressed to his face. Then I slid or rocked or pushed my pelvis forward into his lap, but since I knew that my “need was too great,” the motions were slow and circumspect, I paused and woke up.
Earlier in the dream I saw his Instagram messages with Ellen: it was uncharacteristically casual, easy. I was jealous. She suddenly asked if he “wanted some more sexting” and his response was “NOOOOOY.” Later I saw him write something about how Ellen liked hanging out on the beach, and how Eri liked hanging out on the beach (there was one extra sentence for each person distinguishing them), but how Didi was always in the water. Never on the beach.
Even earlier I had a separate dream in which the refrigerator had a short top shelf and bottom shelf, in addition to the top freezer and the main bottom section. Neither the top nor the bottom would close completely, they were overstuffed. The refrigerator was metallic, not white. I blamed Elias for having overstuffed it. I was also at a party, “being a Don Juan.” I wrote this in my notes; I have no memory of it.
V described his happy sexual encounter as having been accomplished “donkey-style” though I’m sure he just meant “doggy-style.” His description of jumping up and out as he orgasmed sounded balletic, and reminded me of Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up.” He also mentioned this sense of having reached some inner part of the vagina that felt unknown, and I was struck by the fact that I would never experience this. I also told him about the force of absence, the strength of vapor. I was thinking of the sense I had when Z absented himself that he was everywhere, completely surrounding me. Not just “filling my holes” or “compressing me,” but existing in full contact with my being—he was a rock and I was embalmed in the rock, except that the rock was made of fluid. No erotic experience matches being ghosted.
The earliest part of the dream is fairly simple. I spoke about liking the caption “refrigerators of the afternoon” once, and had recently been preoccupied about a possible change of address. With V I had criticized Bachelard’s notion of the “verticality” of the house, because I don’t think people spend much time in attics or cellars. And he kept on greeting people at the Watershed who had been to the party I had declined to go to the previous night; he had implied that we might find people there to hook up with, which I didn’t see as a possibility.
(I can’t have sex with just anyone because my uterus is crazy.)
(You would need to take forceps and dig it out, or use a vacuum to take out this baby which seems to be a pervert already, rubbing its body against the walls of my womb, licking it or something insane like that.)
I believe that my immersion in femininity shields me from jealousy to a large extent, while possibly increasing my ability to feel contempt. It is dormant, but I am still ashamed of it. In December I thought that if I spoke to ER and EP I would gain some clarity and feel less alone. Perhaps I felt less alone, but it soon became clear that I had learned nothing: everything they said seemed both incomplete and predictable.
I find the quoted phrase, some echo of a thing ER said in 2020, a bit hideous, and find it humiliating that Z was spoken about so much.
Contempt involves an impulse to look away, so I will never understand what makes me feel it, except for the few words I’ve put forth on the subject. Once I told my analyst that I thought /ɛ/ was a weak vowel. I said it was terrible for a person to make jokes of endearment about cats being “stupid.” It’s interesting that “aemilia” is “a gens name from aemulus (“rival, or those in the next valley”) (Wiktionary). I like the fact that he’s transitioning, in part because I have always had such a low opinion of transmasculinity. I like the fact that I disliked the sound of their voice the last two times I heard it. How strange that contempt involves looking away while holding on with some degree of conviction to petty insults. The dream is humorous, maybe even apotropaic.
My jealousy was completely unprecedented in 2020. An intense fear of my impotence coming into anger. The most important thing I said at the time of “reproach” and “eschaton” was the fact that “orgasms would ripple out of me in my afternoon naps with a rough force.” If my sexuality was indeed so strong, why did I feel so afraid? I didn’t know it was so strong, thought of it as transient and useless and unshareable?
I felt worst when I later came to the conclusion that Z was fixated on mourning something which I would never understand. But if someone told me that they didn’t understand what I ever saw in L or someone else I know and love and respect, I’m not sure I would feel so bad. Of course nobody understands what I went through with Lara. Also I think I understand the notion of the partial object. Still, it’s easy to think of this as escape hatch: think hard enough about a misalignment whose proof exists in a person and I can imagine becoming stone-cold again.
I am far more fixated on the possibility that I might be more fickle and uncertain than I imagined. I don’t know what I’d do about it other than be as transparent as possible, but in an minimal sense—to describe occurrences but not necessarily to write about thoughts in progress. It has been common for me to have dreams with both John and Zane in them, or the two of them in alternation. I don’t think there’s a single similarity between the two. Visiting John’s house in his absence has changed something, though it’s hard to know if this sense of comfort will decay. I went there again today, to search for my ID card, but didn’t find it. It was nice but still more frightening than nice.
I like the image of a scornful me in the water, perhaps swimming with dangerous sharks and orca whales. It’s stupid to spend all your time in the water and never on the beach. You can see things when you’re on the beach, relaxing, and you can sit under the shade of an umbrella, and wear sunglasses, and read a book.
Jealousy, according to some evolutionary psychologists, is nothing more than an appendage of fitness, and maybe a useful heuristic: “Ironically, what you really value in life is more often revealed by asking yourself who you are jealous of rather than asking yourself directly ‘what do I value’” (Ramachandran and Jalal).
Vieno wants to adopt a son and be a single father, so he has no imperative to experience sexual jealousy. I want to be a single mother*, so I have no reason to experience emotional jealousy. How about non-procreative jealousy? Jealousy with respect to the evolution of a private language? The question of whose semes are fertilizing this text? The question of whether someone will come and help me till this field?
*I tend to imagine this as the default scenario, “want” is irrelevant.
I had a strong orgasm in the late afternoon. These orgasms don’t feel complete, they’re not like being “embalmed in a rock” or “god visiting me” or “levitating” or “early days of being ghosted” or “early pandemic.” It feels more like I need to be fucked, now that I’m no longer an autotelic hermaphrodite. And then there is a different sort of clarity afterward, since it’s not strong enough to put me to sleep.
the deific version of zane is so strongly embedded in me that it’s impossible for anything to upstage this deificness—the same silences won’t add or subtract from the energy of the infant monster in my uterus. i’m excited to see what happens if zane becomes a true person–not a question of upstaging but of producing something orthogonal and new. meanwhile, i pretend this website is a fruit but it’s actually a bunch of sluttish ephemera. john has never been deific, has always been mottled with age, is perhaps a bit too obsessed with the same concepts, and smokes cigarettes with a disturbing frequency. hope to be constantly pricked by the question of what to do to survive in relation to the inconstancy of desire, which is always ultimately a question of dealing with excess, not of balancing a debt. just watch me make awful flip turns in the pool. it will take months of splashing…
I’m looking forward to something, I wonder what it is. Being more fun, perhaps, the opposite of the fantasy of becoming extremely careful and hard-working. Today I said that the falling dream had possibly been the most erotic dream I had ever had, and that I was getting aroused thinking about it; for the rest of the day I kept on feeling a warm hole under me on the plane, on the next plane, and on the cta. It seemed to me that a few men were holding their gazes for a bit longer than usual, while idly waiting to get off the plane, and a french woman sitting across from me on the metro seemed to be observing me read a tiny brown library-bound Kora in Hell, or write lewd things in my notebook, or maybe just thinking about the fact that I was wearing too much yellow.
His need was too great for her, so he denied all movement.
Let’s sit in a freezing room, she said, so we can boil it off.
They went to the place where the genitals were exposed:
They rubbed their thighs against the bark of a tree:
In the bower everything was held up by muscular tension:
With a hole saw they made an aperture in a round branch,
She dreamed of places with no trees, he dreamed of sawing.
Zane was at the Giles st. apartment, it was sunny and beautiful outside. He invited me to visit his place in the morning; when I went inside there was a roommate, small with nice features, he was “italian.” He said he was into spanking and showed us a video of Megan Fox, she was naked and crouched on the floor on her hands and knees like an animal, sort of oblong and balled up; she was crying intensely and I found the intensity of her sobs quite amazing. I didn’t actually see her get beaten. Then this roommate said that getting his gf to stay over was his way of getting her to text back, and everyone (some unseen set of other roommates) made an incredulous sound. Later, Zane asked me to come to his bed, but I kept delaying. I had gotten a shipment of glasses and wanted to sort through them. I did sort through them, at least five pairs tangled up in a box together. While I did this I was thinking about how happy I was that he had invited me to his bed, but when I entered the apartment he had changed his mind, said we should meet outside and go do something. When he came outside he didn’t want to go anywhere, so we stood at the nice sunny entrance by the flowers.
I thought I wouldn’t have much to write about during this trip, but I keep on returning to a central theme, which surrounds me like a repeating advertisement which can’t be avoided on the subway or in the streets of a city. It might be described as the sense of loneliness which occurs when I think about knowing someone for a very long time in the distant future. When I look at the faces of customers in a restaurant, I wonder why people don’t just give up and move on when they get tired of their lives and the people in them–there are so many unknown people in the world. Nobody in particular is more interesting than anyone else, and everyone seems equivalent in that they are all unknown to me, and of course people do move on, I’m imagining knowing that I’m not happy and that someone I know or live with isn’t, and not wanting to do anything about it, because my sense of what it means to exist in the world would be by then so inextricable from the people and structures that had constituted my life thus far. I’m also imagining watching someone else get tired of me, and wanting to help by leaving, but feeling unsure about whether or not leaving is the right action. I dislike my mother, after having basically liked her for all of my life, and having knowingly identified with her various traits with some amount of pride. It seems impossible for me to be a daughter, and I am starting to view the period of intimacy after the incident of my transition as a falsely induced one, produced through catastrophe like a fraternity hazing; maybe this inner maternicide is a necessary part of growing up. But I can’t quite imagine what it would be like for me to reverse this sense of finality–that my mother is dead to me, or that I could produce a cogent argument for how my mother stands for everything I couldn’t possibly stand for, or that she’s as bad as Kafka’s father in some sense. Lara had a dream today in which her mother discovered her and me in bed together even though we were on top of a cliff with a long ladder and I had “giant mommy milkers.” I’m willing to give up the dream of my irreplaceability because I can imagine retreating to a place of pure loneliness, the shoreline of death. These are the kinds of thoughts which I think of as eminently artificial, induced by a choice to ruminate.
I saw Judy Fiskin’s “Diary of a Midlife Crisis” and liked it a lot. In one scene she shows us the difference between two objects: a painting depicting a black shape, and her computer screensaver. The latter to her initially seems so vibrant and full of movement, but later becomes unpleasantly “glib.” It seems like the mind of an artist ceaselessly trying to come up with something new, stuck in movement; the painting seems to represent something both calming and profound. I’ve often felt like the screensaver, and have often thought of Z as the framed object.
I haven’t slept a wink so far, at 4:30 AM. I am probably being punished for something I thought or wrote last night. I return to the question of whether or not I would like people to treat me more like a…and here I shut my laptop and rapidly fell asleep, but I remember what I had set out to say: “a large carnivore or a small herbivore."
My sleep was then interrupted by two dreams. I managed to record the first at 5:21 AM, the second I have forgotten. Both seemed interesting.
Margaux encountered me on a field. She was smiling as if entertained and asked me if I had slept with John, and when I didn’t answer, she asked did you have intercourse with him or not; I said coldly that I did not have intercourse with him, which led her to understand that I had had some kind of sex with him. I was essentially angry that she was asking me this without any context. She then clarified her reason for asking: “ok he’s kind of confused.” And she presented me with a large, hand-bound book in landscape format, in which she had written by hand some entry about his concerns: the words were often written without spaces between them or spelled oddly, with extra inflections at the ends: “whitelishholderishman… findinganygirluseful.” And then I started to get excited, happy, and she lifted me and some boy in the vicinity up and carried us running across a soccer field. As she did this I scrunched up my body in preparation for the fact that I might fall off and would have to roll without breaking any of my limbs.
I walked seventeen miles today, and sat down at three different food establishments: Win Son, a hip taiwanese bakery-café (mediocre); Bombay Chowk, an UES indian restaurant (good); Archestratus, a Greenpoint café attached to a bookstore that specializes in cookbooks (the plums were good), and the Williamsburg Whole Foods (just there to sit). Went to the MET and Bookoff with Abdulai. Also stopped by Yoseka stationery in Greenpoint. I tend to avoid buying food when I’m in NYC but it’s quite nice this time. I disapproved of Win Son because the dough of the fermented red rice doughnut seemed improperly proofed, because there was nothing noticeably special about the glaze, and because they served the oolong tea in a glass cup that was too thick. At Bombay Chowk I learned what a veg cutlet is—it is made from mashed steamed fresh vegetables, primarily potatoes and peas, and is therefore pleasingly wet. I’ve never tried deep-frying a trituration of fresh vegetables. Also picked up a chocolate croissant from Alita café.
The streets in the morning, between Ridgewood and East Williamsburg, were nearly empty. I saw a latino man drive a three-wheeled roofless car with blue flames on its sides. I passed by the phantasmic storefront of the NYC branch of Mission Chinese Food: trace of California. I have a sense of this city as more like “nature” due to its complexity, and as therefore soothing and familiar, even if I’m in a place that’s new to me.
Abdulai bought at least five books from Bookoff, all in Japanese, including some novel called スープ オペラ。A man in line told him it was impressive that he could read all that and asked him how he had managed to learn the language so well. I was glad that he was buying something, particularly stock from the store that I presume very few other people would be able to read or would choose to pick out.
The MET was somehow less affecting than it has been in the past, but I admired and liked looking at Louise Bourgeois’s paintings. The colorized Greek sculptures looked like toys, meaning that they should make more of them and sell small plastic versions in the gift shop.
Visited B&H, MTC Kitchen, Rachel Comey, Reformation, Frame, Rag & Bone, Acne Studios, Snow Peak, Takahashi Bakery. Bought ROR and Zeiss lens cleaning fluid and extra microfiber cloths; a brown plate, a pink plate, two sake glasses, a coffee cup, a tall glass tumbler, and a large red melamine ramen bowl; agedashi tofu, lemon cream bread, matcha red bean bread, and white bean walnut bread.
I was unmoved by the offerings in Soho. Too much of the interesting stock is available online but not in store, and everything is still geared towards the summer. I want clothes to say something about the future.
I noticed that Takahashi bakery uses Gimme Coffee’s Leftist blend.
Lara and I sat down at the restaurant down the street, Rustico, and I attempted to summarize what happened with Zane. It was easy.
I am too tired to write anything, but I think one thing is assured: I’m more interested in the intergeneric, formal question of the relationship between lyric poetry and narrative fiction than I am on the figure of the Child. And the aspect of that relationship which I’m most interested in is how they use the figure of apostrophe and other forms of address. I should be working to specify my project around these technical questions, and produce some work which will be useful for writers.
I dreamt that Lara was showing me an apartment she was considering moving into: it had a hexagonal main room with six beds in a circular arrangement around it; I told her she probably shouldn’t move there.
Lara dreamt that I was being sent to jail for my restless leg syndrome and that she was trying to save me. Yesterday, she dreamt that she found a butterfly; its pink and blue iridescent scales were falling off and she brought it to me in the hopes that I could put it back together again.
On Monday, I started to sleep next to her in bed, not on the floor.
Did analysis with the iPad propped up on an inverted ramen bowl in the kitchen. Took a walk around the neighborhood in the morning, then a long nap, then left around 3 PM: went to No. 6, Sézane, REI, Tokio 7, Credo Beauty, Detox, John Derian. Took long 5-mile walk with Lara in the evening to the Ridgewood reservoir, most of it in the dark, a good strong sunset. Little messages about the weather make me happy.
Kim Beil was assassinated in front of me on a field by a man in a gun. I was with some random girl and I tried to shield Kim with my body but I “missed.” Then I slipped off a gargoyle in a museum-like building while trying to figure out where I could find the correct faculty member to inform of the news. Lara’s dream was complicated and neither of us remember it. I started to have a sore throat yesterday but did not test positive for COVID. Today I went to Salter House, TheRealReal, Damascus Bread, and Eataly before going to the office for analysis.
I cannot talk about my analyst’s office, it is too beautiful.
I did not attempt to write here on the 28th or the 29th. I wrote Zane an email instead, on the 28th, when I was feeling a bit feverish, though on the 29th, I felt even more feverish. On the 28th I went to Maryam Nassir Zadeh, the LES Reformation which has a vintage section, Assembly NY, 3standardstoppage, and Café Himalaya. On the 29th, I went to Pongal. My cunt was stroked that morning. We spoke about it in the evening, sitting outside at a ramen place while I poured myself genmaicha from a tetsubin. I still feel like a little rabbit without a conscience, though I already miss and feel tenderly towards Laar. It strikes me that my home is set up to maximize the anxiety of creation. The air in Ithaca is so dry.
I had a strange dream in which E admitted to having given “her” eggs to a man so that he could have a child, and in exchange she got a clitoridectomy—I watched a video of it getting removed. I wanted to ask more about what was going on with the donation of eggs in exchange for castration, but s/he kept on disappearing. S/he seemed happy and quite masculine. Many other things happened in the dream but I don’t recall much else. This dream probably has something to do with cunnilingus and the fear of the mouth biting off my clitoris.