this cunt is going to continue wanting something that either hurts or feels like nothing, but it seems clear to me that that nothing is clearly capable of becoming something, almost as if it were a miracle dropped out of a vending machine.

Cookie cutters and vending machines: every time I visit I manage to send him a message in the middle of the night, while unable to sleep. The message tends to have a harmful effect and it comes from a basic disturbance. The quotation above is from the last sentence of one such email, and it makes me curious. What does it mean? In this sentence I am telling him that his penis, in the context of sexual intercourse, felt like nothing, after having produced reams of text which suggest that it has felt like so much, in its absence, in its removal from me. It is reasonable to believe that instead of saying this a night after the first encounter I should wait and see what it’s like to have sex again some other time, but instead I’ve chosen to make it a little textual event. There is almost no choice, now that so much has been leaked, to continue to write about it: I have cried over it, and leaked menses over it onto bedsheets that were not mine; I have incurred charges and damaged several significant relationships on account of this sexual frustration of mine. It was “perplexing,” he said. This was the first time I was having sexual intercourse in the usual sense of the term, and I have been writing and reading a lot about sex in the past year, so the situation was set up for some amount of strangeness. My first sexual relationship was with a woman, and I had hooked up a few months prior to this “loss of virginity” with two different men, neither of whom I was inclined to have sex with because a deficiency in trust had translated into actual closure of the lower orifice. I read this as convenient autonomic response to the fact that they weren’t “right” for me, and had, in the meanwhile, developed a conviction that Z was “right” for me—perhaps on account of the notion that he had read so much of what I had written about my desires, and even responded to it all in his own manner. When he first pushed his penis in there was this dull, senseless pain that I couldn’t quite locate: a non-fitting feeling, not anything like the splitting or ripping that some women describe in novels. This happened four or five times and yet I cannot remember it well enough to describe it further, or to even verify if what I am saying feels accurate. I was probably wet enough but didn’t feel any hunger in my cunt. I mentioned to him in sparse half-whispered speculations that I was no longer afraid of him, and implied that this had something to do with me not being aroused in the lower orifice. I also suggested that I was just tired, and hadn’t been feeling as sexual as usual on account of this. My lack of libido was in turn associated with the fact that the previous month I had been mourning the loss of friendship of a person a liked a lot but had become distant from, and though I did not state this to Z in speech, I had written about it just a week prior and was sure he would connect the impressions from my writing to the present moment. But it’s funny that I believed in these narratives of fear and fatigue, for the strength of my arousal the previous time we met hadn’t been affected by my total lack of sleep, and came not from apprehension but from a deep relaxation, from a comfort that existed in being around him in the atmosphere of his monastic room, with its beautiful wood floors and well-curated selection of books and its pale blue daylight, which emanated a kind of eggshell teal that could have been amplified by the sun bouncing off the walls which might have been more gray than blue but still cool in tone while being warm like fresh eggs. And while I had been anxious during the months leading up to the visit, I was simply not aware of certain traumas which would lie ahead. He had chosen to not write back or respond to some texts not long after we had parted; during this period of absence he had gone to visit his first sexual partner, which had engendered in me an acute sense of abjection. So it is no wonder that when I arrived and found Z affectionate to me I could not believe it; there was a delay between what was occurring and my capacity to respond to it. Anxieties about being not important to him tended not to exist when we were at a distance, when I could concentrate on writing and seeing other men. The third night of the recent visit he was showing me pictures on his phone when a photo appeared of him kissing this ex on the cheek. It was a sweet image, and I did not feel acute displeasure upon seeing it, but something in his response worried me. He had made a sort of a noise and flicked away from that screen; it reminded me somewhat of how he seemed furtive when checking his Instagram messages, and of how I tended to feel when I noticed this: a bit nauseated and afraid of the neurotic movements which suggested that there was something worth being ashamed of there. In the moment of seeing the picture and connecting it to prior moments of subdued anxious jealousy I had come to recognize that some sense of insecurity about our relationship was still stored in me, and that “solving” this issue would be the only way for me to open up in a sexual sense. And so after another failed attempt at intercourse I asked him how many people he had sex with; the number was seven, inclusive. We conversed with an almost comic directness; I was lying on top of him, and neither of us were wearing clothes. After having spoken and heard his responses, I was able to sleep for the first time during the visit, and the next morning penetration didn’t hurt.

But that is where the actual trouble began. I fumbled him around into different positions to see if any of them would feel like more than nothing; none of them did. Eventually we returned to the basic one and I felt that things were becoming more rapid, that we had entered a different mode of doing things, in which the inexorable male urge took over, and so I lay there feeling like a blank-eyed animal, a reflexive animal, one who was observing and thinking about what the other animal was experiencing as he became more and more absorbed in his need. When he came in me for the first time it was beautiful to witness, to hear him speak the words i’m going to cum, and to experience him shuddering. It felt like nothing inside, but I was a witness to much of everything; I remember the brief moments prior to ejaculation that were thrilling to me because of the blitheness or automatism of the associated acts; in this case my legs were being pushed apart and my right arm was being pressed down above my head. What I cannot remember or feel, such as his penis vanishing inside of me, takes on a voluptuous autonomous power. To be exact, it felt like either nothing, or like a little pressure around the rectum or cervix if the angle had changed, but other than that I couldn’t feel. I could hear it better than I could feel it. He was in the incredible position of acting in accordance with what felt like an inexorable need with an associated inexorable rhythm and sequence: everything was moving in his direction and in terms of his sense of what had to happen so I didn’t want to perturb it. It seemed both like an apotheosis and utter negation of his tendency to need to be in control of everything, and to be at a certain remove. Near the end my breathing became louder even though nothing had changed for me except the awareness that he was moving at a different speed. The modifications of my breath or my grip on him were like attempts to pray: that I might feel with him if I follow him! And I had active conscious counterfactual thoughts meanwhile: I supposed that if the penetrative act went on for longer maybe I could start to feel something. After he came, he rested for a moment, and said I had “seem[ed] very attentive.” And when he slipped out he began to hide with comic furtiveness the used condom in a food wrapper, so that it wouldn’t be visible in the trash. I saw the sperm in the drooping condom and it looked to me beautiful, unsaturated colors in the essentially moonlit room made it look like a greek statue which had lost all its paint. It seemed like a good amount of sperm, and I had wanted to taste it, and ingest it—but it was there in its rightful translucent container, a place in which it could stay sublimated, as a remembered picture. He didn’t want me to linger with it, as I had once written a poem about stealing his sperm, and later about wanting his child, and it was cute to see all this writing being acknowledged in that moment. After he had finished fiddling with the trash he said something about becoming quite separate from the sexual after the act. This seemed to function as an apology, which I accepted; it didn’t matter that much that I had been left without pleasure, though the whole thing had been sudden, and I suspect I was to some degree shocked in a way that could have shaded into the form of some negative emotion. I don’t think it’s possible to know what I felt then.

I woke up the next morning telling him that my “condition had changed.” I was feeling more autonomous arousal and I wanted to have sex again. But we had to leave early and I sensed he didn’t need it or want it since had come already. It didn’t really concern me; this could wait. And yet my dissatisfaction and confusion and disappointment increased and took shape in the form of the email. We didn’t touch the following night, as the next morning he needed to wake up quite early the next morning to retrieve some luggage from his previous assigned housing, and we had spent enough time at a bar that evening that when we returned it was around 11 PM. After exchanging some messages with Savitri and attempting to return to sleep I wrote him a brief email expressing some concern about future depression and about having been deluded about my freedom and power all my life, and also the central line at the end: “this cunt is going to continue wanting something that either hurts or feels like nothing, but it seems clear to me that that nothing is clearly capable of becoming something, almost as if it were a miracle dropped out of a vending machine.” In other words, sex feels like nothing now but I’m sure it will feel better. But only after having addressed the problems that have been aired out here, and perhaps ‘fixed’ through changes in your behavior, which I don’t want to and cannot describe or advise on, and mostly just through the act of having addressed you the way I did when I spoke of my jealousy. And then I cried and cried and cried and cried the next morning and afternoon, and that was how we came to argue for the first time, in a way that felt ruinous, and that was how I came to rush into menstrual sex after the conflict, when it seemed that we had reconciled. So I blame myself for “everything.”

Since then the sensation in my cunt has increased; I have had five or six major orgasms, each time peaking for around twenty seconds instead of the customary seven to fifteen; it has become easier to insert and remove a menstrual cup; I have gotten my first yeast infection. A dream came to me in which a tarantula hung off my back, and when I tried to remove it, I held it by its back; it bit me when I tried to modify its position from the front; it sunk its fangs into the tip of my finger. I’ve wanted to know the sensation of his penis hanging on to the back of mine; the back of the clitoris being stimulated through the inverse of the penis that is the vagina; but isn’t being moved from behind, from inside, from the back of what’s obvious always necessarily a surprise, and something to be afraid of? It’s as if he would be able to see the truth behind every negation: I don’t think I’m capable of hating you… Merely thinking of this: of him accessing the backside of my lack: makes me activated again and newly; my nose sniffing out the truth quivers differently, and I’ve orgasmed with my fingers sunk deeper in, like the fangs of the tarantula in that dream. I should have found a way to let it bite me while it was still perched on my back, I shouldn’t have removed it. I should have been patient, and allowed myself to not treat it as an emergency.

When I arrived at his location on December 12th I hadn’t menstruated in almost two months. My last orgasm had occurred roughly a month before we had met. I had been attached to him but inattentive to the details of our relationship in the mean time; I was absorbed with the ostensible loss of love of from a friend I had fallen in love with, and felt guilt about having this other attachment which seemed so potent and distinct from the one I had cultivated with Z. My sexual center remained intact: I would feel a great warmth in my uterus and cunt every time I read something Z had written. We had not had sex the previous year, but his withdrawal of the penis had the effect of magnifying my desire for it, and of eventually causing me to return to my former sex and gender. He had not wanted to have sex then, apparently, because sex could have made things “weird” between us. Perhaps I had also been less desirable; I had been taking testosterone since the age of eighteen, and decided to “go back” to the ovarian regime only afterwards, at the age of twenty-four: June, July, August, September, October, November, December were spent in a state in which the shifting ratios of estrogen and progesterone in my body had resulted in just one obvious menstrual cycle and two other more minor or vague segments of “spotting.” All this was motivated by sexual desire; he had planted in me the seed of a quixotic sensibility of sex as a kind of Heideggerian site of aletheia, a forest clearing in which what is concealed is unconcealed and concealed and unconcealed. In the absence of his penis I had cathected a great deal onto its eventual revelation. To not feel anything in my cunt while with his cock inside me had become inconceivable, and it seems that I had come to expect it to function as a beam of light, not as a motion in and out of the clearing, with the chaotic flicker between noise and significance that characterizes all pursuits of knowledge.

What if sex is nothing but a void, a nothing, a nothing to be filled in later? Most reports of sexual intercourse that I have read in female-authored novels involved some description of pain or lack of feeling or some lack of description of pleasure in the act itself. I have come to speculate that this strongly implies that sex doesn’t feel like much for most of these women writers. One just gets swept away in some more nebulous amalgamation of feeling for the other and with the other. Being vague about sex could be a necessary outgrowth of a middling author’s literary pretensions, but the more I think about it, the more I doubt that the lacunae in women’s writing about sex have to do with much more than an actual lacuna in sex from the female perspective. The hottest sex scenes are the ones where the female main character is masturbating, or when she’s dressing herself up, or when she simply doesn’t get sex when she wants it, or when the sex becomes something spiritual and metaphorous and urgent and not-at-all about what we can directly access with words (breast, cunt, mouth, cock). When a woman comes on account of a man in a novel, it feels too much like the kind of wish-fulfillment which highlights exactly what hadn’t occurred in reality: he says something loving just at the right moment, which cues her into mute sexual climax.

Perhaps I don’t believe in tokens of love: I believe in the acceptance of desire that comes out of the recognition of disjuncture. I believe in the sexual potency of dissatisfaction. But I also believe in care; I believe care is needed to sustain desire. My cunt becomes closed and dry when it lacks a sense of care coming from the other; so in this sense I feel it is right that I feel the most open, aroused, when I have signs of care from him, of attention, and I want that easy sacrifice of the self that happens when one comes to be in love. Without this love, I believe I will tire of him, become blind to him.

I did not trust touch after having had it; I find it difficult to remember touch. Touch aroused me but did not arouse my cunt, the locus of truth. The issue was not that I did not orgasm or feel pleasure because of a lack of touch but that I could not imagine how that touch could translate into inner feeling. The more that I think about it the more I believe that I can’t trust that touch involves much care for my being as it exists in some particular moment; it feels more like the blind possession and lone gratification, the kind that a mother takes from her child. She must love in this way, she doesn’t “know” her infant or care to know it in the same way that she does when she observes its first attempts to see her, or its first attempts to communicate with its voice. I think that most of the intensity of touch comes from a kind of fear that the person can harm you, or that what is happening means more than can be captured or remembered or understood or known. It’s all about this primary experience of the child and the (m)Other. Since I have a fucked relationship with my mother’s body, touch has always been a bit scary to me: it engenders immediate revulsion. There is no body I am more revulsed by than my mother’s and I do not mean this in an optical sense; it is just that if she approaches me, I shrink away. This is probably why I refused to give my boyfriend a hug in 9th grade. So I’m thinking of the first touch of the visit in which Z stroked my hair and how it was like a loud thrill in all parts of the body except the cunt: actual fear and non-knowledge in relation to what this meant, in relation to how much I wanted it without knowing what my response was in response to. It was iconic for me, but it didn’t stir my genitals in the way that could cause me to feel open to him: it was more like the first drops of rain hitting the sand of a parched desert and producing a lot more dust and scent than actual wetness. I think when I feel the cunt as a live expansive soul it’s because of a sense of warmth and care or else it comes out of a big oceanic feeling that has a violent force to it, able to erase or wash off something. It is not so much a thrill that emanates from a particular stimulus, and I know that his touch induced a thrill that I associate with fear because a lot of it would become less intense the more accustomed I became to it. The thing he did that was most consistent for me was kissing with tongue around and inside the ear, which made loud noises like ocean waves about to flood a grotto. It’s hard not to find such touch intense and “fearsome,” but the more amazing moment was a series of neck kisses that were light and separate and sequential; they were distinguished by their “grammar.”

At one point I said to him that it was funny or strange that he kept on petting me, and asked “is that a problem?” in response. I said, “no I like it” and he said, “it’s ok, I respect you.” It did not occur to me that petting me would involve not respecting me until he responded to his own latent presumption. I had made the comment because I wanted to undersatnd what it was like for him to occupy the active position of petting me; for me the passive position had been automatic and nice but it could not absorb me completely because I remained stuck in the question of what his side of the act meant for him. But his response was important clue into the intuition I have just developed; that touch does not envelop the sense of care or connection that one might assume it does; like language it is fallible, bound to signify what could develop into meaning but only in accordance to the way it is stopped and punctuated by other forms of contact—e.g., those of speech and sight.

Whenever I tried to reciprocate his touch I felt alienated from the active role, since he wasn’t responding in a way I could detect. I realized that I didn’t derive much direct sensory pleasure from touching him without the presence of response. I’ve felt more direct stimulation from touching someone else in the context of my second and previous hookup; delight in the soft smooth skin of the glans or in the texture of his back or the shape of his mouth; but still in large part due to the sound of his breathing when I kissed or touched a certain part, or the simple but overwhelmed that feels good in response to fellation, and also other words we exchanged while lying still. I liked his stories about dreams and the dreams he had heard from others, and even the way he looked at me and told me that I reminded him of his ex and how we were similar in certain interests of ours. It felt like he was observing me and listening to me in a way that made me feel more real. My cunt didn’t open up to him then, but it did when he had left, and I cried in relation to him too, when he responded to my message, when I found that he had not ghosted me, that my version of events had not been entirely untrue. And I forgot Zane’s penis after this, in that I was no longer able to conjure it, no longer able to conjure holding it in my hand and no longer able to feel its pure hardness.

I’m probably not that fun to touch either, because my flesh isn’t sufficiently contrastive. The skin is softer now, but the composition of the body is somewhat bony and flat, and nothing will change this. I guess the sexed advantage of the skin is the reason why women are caressed more: they’re just more like babies. I think I can only be or remain attractive in relation to how I behave and respond to touch—this is an ongoing and curious process. All attractiveness is the result of projection, fantasmatic projection. When I stopped wanting Z’s child I stopped wanting his penis. When we exchanged a few messages over the summer I realized what I wanted was his hard writing; the days of junesgloom; when I found the light green text of gloomwaif I was back where I wanted to be: learning a new “side” of him, surprised and excited by what was familiar but new. I’ll never have his phallus, not in the way I had it when I wanted a baby, when I was so naïve as to equate femininity with motherhood, when I could see no other way of being. There is no phallus; there is no sexual relation.

What I liked most was looking at him: from a close distance and from afar, at him looking at me, or with the awareness that we were both looking at other things from a similar but distinct vantage point. Often when I looked at him he would make a facial gesture or noise that was like a question: what are you looking at or what do you want to tell me. It felt like he wanted to know me and I wanted to know him or we wanted to know something else together when we did that. This affirmed my sense that the gaze has to do with curiosity about the other, but it also implied that he did not understand that I could look at him for no reason other than to look at him. I said to him once in response to the inquisitive gesture that I was just thinking about how much I liked him. Looking at him was something I did to see how much I could not know about this liking.

The other side of the gaze lies in a more perverse and violent act of “objectification.” I did look sometimes at parts of him in a way that felt almost sadistic, because I knew it must be uncomfortable on some level to be watched this way. Not even at eye-level, but at his penis: I want to look at it. I saw the urethral opening gape a little, noticed the little hairs on the shaft which I hadn’t realized existed last time I had seen it, his penis was different to me this time, it was less of a smooth or hard or brilliant thing. More like a mere “object.” The possibility of his anxiety piqued my interest; I suppose I said I wanted to look at it almost as if to extract from him a certain requisite discomfort. In other moments I would notice razor burn on his cheeks and striations of red on his back from some kind of irritation and wonder with concern if he had found a way to address these issues, but I’d mostly look away. I preferred to look into his eyes: to look for the sake of looking.

I knew I was willing to risk staining the bed. I still lack shame about this, in spite of the upset that ensued. I can’t seem to think of it without feeling that the weirdness of the event overturns all judgment. Z seemed to care more about maintaining an appearance of scrupulousness to the host than about how I might respond to his rudeness; but was there a less rude way for him to react? I thought it was good that he was losing his sense of decorum around me, though I was also upset by the notion that I was not worthy of some kind of kinder language, but what did I expect him to do instead? Answer my question—how are you?—and then add his own comment about the charges? Of course he wanted to make me as uncomfortable as possible, to relay his own upset to me in the clearest-muddiest of blunt messages, the key ambiguity of an “also” prepended, that key ambiguity making for the offense. So my complaint remains close to the level of language, and I could not expect anyone listening to the story to understand—hence my inability to report everything in this paragraph.

I believe I pressured him into it too, so anyone who wants to demonize him should be able to do so with full knowledge of my power. I tempted him into it, I handled the inexorable cock and sent it into me, and I took it out and rubbed it on my dissatisfied clitoris, and the taking it out and inserting it caused me more pleasure and caused more blood to flow out. I relished the notion of seeing blood on his penis. I took advantage of him in his least clarified state and would continue to do so, again and again taking advantage of the inexorable time of sex. I am a sadist with the messiest hair in all of asia; my sister thinks i’m a monster who eats men: she sends me a birthday card in which I’ve been represented as a fish with the head of a woman; yellow eyes and reddish pink stain of skin and scales, among the other fish who look down or away, one nervous, another smug. “Je sais que cette année sera pleine de poissons frais pour toi (c’est une métaphore maladroite)”—she is telling me to be a slut and a harpy, but a fish-harpy. A genius message. 変態-forward. But I have this one fish.

It’s the reflexivity, the self-awareness of my response to sex that disturbs me, which makes me feel and seem cruel.

It gives the lie to feminine simulation: to the notion that I am pure and gratified when I am given signs of affection.

It’s a bit creepy how easily I give up my indignation. I always wanted Z to be kinder to me, to give me more words: simple expressions on how he’s doing, descriptions of what he has been seeing or observing or working on; the basic sharing of life-encounters. And the deeper I get into things the more I produce the impossibility of such casual speech, I replace it with reflections on myself; he replaces it with reflections on himself. Sex becomes frigid and impracticable in response, which I experience as emergency, and then things get worse for a while. This is the first time we have had sex, and the first time I catastrophize about what it could mean; the first time I am able to place it in this longer narrative. I imagine I can wrangle things into other directions, but he has experienced this same scenario with others in the past. He is afraid of becoming worse than nothing each time. Perhaps he has been worse than nothing each time. I don’t see the point in pointing this out more than once, so that’s why I give up my indignation with creepy ease; I’m not worried because I don’t believe a story has that much power. The Real will intervene no matter what we say in our speculations, no matter how robust our fantasies.

A scrap from a story I wrote in the aftermath of our first sex involved a narrator who had met “D” and “Z” by chance in a park and given them her email address, like a true pervert. Here’s what she said about him, later on (where to put it?):

Lack has a way of growing inside you, of latching on to the zones of absence and annealing to them a new intensity. I can still desire him since what he lacks is embedded in my body: it is scotomized and repressed and resexualized the same way that his absence last year managed to change the way I experienced arousal and orgasm: and it, -Φ, continues to produce this symptom of graphomania, which I find always supports the notion that no matter how much things have not gotten better, they have changed in ways that I find sustaining to think about. I have cathected so much energy into the act of making sense of what is traumatic that I will never give up this insistence on resexualizing the lacuna he brings—not only will I do this, I will expose him to it, and we will see if he “hangs on”—from the front, or the back—like the spider in that dream.

I wanted to append a caution sign to the entrance of this page: do not advance unless you are in the mood to uphold me as the one whom you enjoy on account of her ability to castigate; know that I play the role of a father only in order to bend to a desire you have for this sort of direction. I got rid of the warning because I didn’t think what I had written was that bad. But I still wonder if I am supposed to say any of this. The answer is no. I’m doing what I do in opposition to civilization. But I am getting to a point in my life where it is impossible for me not to be more accommodating and nice. The notion that this text could harm him bothers me; if anything I want our sexual relationship to be more better, more good, for it to follow the outlines of what various outsiders would consider healthful. I want to be forced into quiet submission to what is benevolent and nice. Or I want to ask with the same urgency as always: what does it mean to listen, and what does it mean to write in a way that shows a desire to listen? And do you care to listen? And do you believe that this is written in an act of love?