I saw John while walking to the techno show at Forest City Lodge; it was about a block away when he saw me first and waved; he was about to enter some kind of a sports bar, one of the places for locals, “Uncle Joe’s.” I told him I had intended to go to Margaux’s party, but that I had skipped out because I didn’t feel like talking, and was going to Microtones instead. He said he wasn’t in the mood to talk either, and seemed legitimately tired. I was glad to see him on the way to something else, glad that we both didn’t feel like talking, glad that we weren’t there to talk. But then I found the atmosphere of the show inconvenient, as there were too few people and it was too loud; I didn’t like the music, and had arrived much too soon. So I backtracked and went to where John had been; Praveen and Mira and John sat at a table booth where they had apparently finished eating a meal. I sat there at a table a bit silent and we talked a little about the first day of Erotics of Visuality. Otherwise the conversation was almost mute, with the requisite jokes pushed around by Praveen. I had not screwed the cap of my water bottle thoroughly so cold water pooled around Mira’s seat and we used thin napkins to absorb the water. Later I found that shaking my mohair cap was enough to get most of the water off; such is the pleasant oleaginous nature of wool. I still felt strange in the aftermath of the last meeting with John at the Watershed, and wondered what the effect had been; had it been too intense, had it in fact reconciled something, had it oopened another set of problems. It felt good to have spoken to him about the events of September and December, though the result was that I felt more or less done with him, not attracted to the notion of getting to know him better, if only because I feel like something has been permanently modified and by the fact that I’m no longer male. I think of myself as someone who wears “satan slippers,” as Praveen put it in his customary drunken intelligence, or someone who wears dark crimson lipstick at night. My crime must have involved speaking about sex, not just getting in the way of John’s space to mourn his brother. I went back to the venue, found it still offputting, went home to retrieve earplugs, went back. I saw many punkish teenagers leave a show, or rather congregate around the gallery after the show had ended. The differences between men and women seemed to loom over the forms of each individual; later, when I had finished dancing, I saw many women wearing crop tops in the 30-degree weather, getting into ubers, sometimes leaning against each other, or less often against men, whose jackets remained zipped.

It was strange to attend the show, because I never managed to like the music. It lacked the kind of harsh geometry which allows irregularities to come through with clean force. Last time I came to a show that advertised itself as a “techno,” I had fainted in the afternoon; I was sick with desire for a second meeting, which never occurred, with Alec. And so what I did there was a repeated caught falling, an abreaction of whatever I had missed in syncope. While waiting for more people to occupy the floor, I had tried to read D.H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock, but the beat of the music accentuated each word into its own separateness: such was the interruptive force of its clean and harsh meters. I wore a ribbed cotton tank dress by Anna Castellano, who uses bleach paint to trace organ-like drawings of butterflies and flowers and hearts and letters onto clothes in simple formats. The brown of this dress fades to something like a pale nude, and the fabric is a bit constrictive, though it stretches with the ribbing. It was an ideal garment for the occasion.

This time I wore many layers such that the layers could be removed: red tights and black tabi shoes, which constituted the coldest section of the outfit, and a long black cashmere skirt, and a frilly pale green tank top from the Reformation vintage selection near Houston street, and a purple merino baselayer from Ibex, and a brown front-buttoned sweater dress made of tencel that also functions as a long cardigan, and a light black wool coat from Uniqlo that I bought ages ago, and a heavy orange coat from Steven Alan made of cotton and satin polyester. I went to the show because I had been telling myself earlier that week that I needed to find a way to take “higher quality” breaks, so it was techno for the sake of health. But there was nothing exciting about the way the people danced or how they dressed or appeared; the people were pleasant to look at but only because they fit some kind of socioeconomic standard of health. Perhaps because everyone seemed at ease, there was no tension in the room; no urgency, no sense of anyone being in touch with the stasis of the death drive; ironic that one needs something interruptive in the sound for the splendor of repetition to come into the body. A noise show would have been sexual; this was the most neutered of soundscapes.

I came home soaked in sweat, and placed the garments in a bucket along with detergent and water. I spot-cleaned the waistband of the cashmere skirt. After taking a shower, I squeezed water out of some of the clothes and draped them over the folding rack. At some point during the subsequent day I came across a thought about how much I wanted to be inrooted. Not that I want to be inrooted, but how much I want to be, about how this pleasure attends to itself, pulling and amplifying, until the plateau extends itself and now I cannot tell when it is over. And it feels so good to be so much like a dead body resting in a pit in the earth and to not have to worry about cleaning off the mud, because only during these post-orgasmic states do I not think of whether or when I will sleep or wake up. Something about the body feels like the dried meat of the buffalo laid in permafrost for 36,000 years. If possible I would have sex with more people in order to tell Z about it. Each experience would be a disappointment, and in the contours of disappointment he would be able to see what it was that I wanted in the clearest film negative; my analyst asked, in what felt like a bit too much of an intervention, if I imagined that things would have been the same no matter what, with respect to the lack of sensation I associated with sexual intercourse, and with Lila and Lenù’s discussion of the disappointment that intercourse seems to bring to all women, in spite of Lenù’s denial of it. I said that I had trouble imagining a counterfactual, I was so taken by how the “nothing” of the encounter had been resexualized later. Nothing had been replaced by a whole lot of something, and this was a poetic phenomenon; 0 to 1: A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence! (Rilke). There was an attraction in the word “nothing,” too—the pearlescence of the “o” in “O!” and in “zero”—and “nothing” is Shakespeare’s slang for “cunt,” and it’s mine for male humiliation: the symbol of an “o” traversed by an arrow. No man is capable of making a woman feel!

If thy soul check thee that I come so near,
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will,
And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there:
Thus far for love my love-suit sweet fulfil.
Will will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckoned none;
Then in the number let me pass untold,
Though in thy store’s account I one must be;
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee.
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lov’st me for my name is Will.

(Sonnet 136)

After having sex for the first time I started to wonder if my analyst had disappointed someone sexually. Then I told him about this; when he asked me what I thought, I said after a brief pause, “Yes, there’s no way you haven’t.” We laughed together, and I remarked on how I had said that he was perfect previously, how I had just now found a way in which which he might not be perfect. And I said that I did believe that it would have felt like nothing no matter who was inside me, the difference perhaps being that the nothing of others would have felt different—worse—if it had been in a situation in which I had not wanted it, as I had not wanted to have sex with either of the two previous men, at least not during those encounters. I noticed, in the wake of the techno show, that I am repulsed by the bodies of even the most attractive men; I imagine them as unable to elicit even the slightest response in me. The ideal fantasy would be to find a brilliant woman to have fuck me, someone with eyes which seemed to penetrate all, someone all-powerful. She wouldn’t need me; she would appear and vanish, and she would know everything about Z and how much life there was for me in him, she would know how much I think about his cock and his long male body. And unlike a human lesbian she would not feel slighted because she would know that what I wanted was both her frigid power and the blindness, obscurity, spectrality, numbness, numinousness, gaseousness, pedalferrousness, etc. which I associate with him. But it’s so lame to invent fantasies which involve knowing what one wants; I’d rather absorb something new of him, something which causes me to effract and curl into new shapes.

Brow is clenched in some weird dolorous wonder. The book is The Story of O. I felt rather curdled. Z had sent me an email, enough to induce a week of long spasms of inner warmth. The email was nice and I responded with sincere enthusiasm. But I knew that it might mean not much more than let’s keep this bitch around. So here I am, curdled around someone who wants to make sure he has at least some of the best attention.

I wanted to be inrooted, and then someone came to me, a first repetition of a meetup from seven months ago. He came three times; he sprayed warm glossy fluids on my chest and back. The taste of it was first of salt, then of acid and then of peppercorn or huajiao. The second time it felt like rain on my vertebrae. The third time it reached the back right shoulder. I spent about 20 hours with him. I had a dream while sleeping beside him in which I encountered a cluster of small animals, one was a black primate with the face of a sloth standing and carrying a stick over its shoulders, hauling something, she looked sad. Before we slept he asked me about the noise, so I turned off the fan in the orchid terrarium, and the mechanical timer, and the night was beauteous with its new quiet, interrupted as the wind “percolated” through cracks in the tape holding bubble wrap down on one of the large and leaky windows. The sounds were dynamic enough for it to be difficult to tune them out, difficult to fall asleep. The red-striped cloth was used to wipe me down after each ejaculation. Two condoms were used but not used. Each time a condom was rolled onto the penis it became small and soft like a steamed sweet potato. I had never before watched a penis change in size so much, so often—he said was accustomed to not using condoms, that he had sex with one person who was clean, that he was clean, and that he was accustomed to pulling out, and of being aware of his current partner’s cycle. I told him I was in the most fertile part of the cycle, but I didn’t care—I knew that if I had to expend something extra to prevent the birth of a child this would be a decent and simple occasion for that expenditure. You don’t generate precum. His penis was less thick than Z’s: easier to hold in my mouth. It also seemed to face less resistance inside the cunt; there was a game for me in clenching the muscles to prevent it from going too deep, and then relaxing in a kind of resignation, perhaps I liked the mixture of pleasure and unpleasure in that pain. It was more of a low throb of pain than that of failed penetration, which feels like something stretched to a breaking tension; the cervix being hammered was a correct kind of pain, the kind that communicates and fills the space of rest with its regular shimmer or pulsation. When he asked me how it felt, I often said it felt “neutral,” and told him about the clenching activity, and he told me that he could just go less deep. I seem to want to make everything as difficult as possible, with delays in communication, with a desire to wait-and-see.

The first words I uttered when we lay down involved my notion that all the pleasure from touch arises from fear, which didn’t seem to apply for him; touch to him was associated with a sense of connection. I wondered if it was something specific to me, or something common to women; I had opened with the same comment while with Z in December, and he hadn’t shared in this notion either, though he wondered if other words might ring true: anxiety? But for me it was always a bright and flashing fear, the first touch, the approximation of the body. Dy and I lay down on the sheepskin which had been deliberately laid out rather simultaneously, so it was clear what was going to happen, but it wasn’t clear to me that our faces, pointed in the other’s direction in a close lateral recumbent position, would be at ease. I touched his face, he touched something else, the back of something. Several hours later, after some ejaculation had occurred, I told him about how I once almost lost the neighbor’s cat, that I almost delectated in the notion that the neighbors knew, that they had sensed the fear on the cat’s face after returning to her. “Fear, guilt,” he said—and then he followed with some comment on how these are the things that that you find arousing. He would not be contributing to this area of desire; nevertheless there was a necessary and delectable fear involved in the first touch. His tongue was like some sort of snow in the mouth. I don’t remember much else because I didn’t hate him: I lost doubt.

My mother texted me for the first time since our disastrous weeks together while he fucked me, the familiarity and difference of the cock quickening as it neared its crisis. My face was pressed to the yellow wood of the floor, and then to the sheepskin or pillow, according to the endless slippage of objects on the smooth ground. She asked if my room would be warm enough with the cold weather, and many hours later I said yes, and she told me to enjoy it. I felt I had forgiven her, but that the only thing I wanted to say to her was what I could not say: that a stranger who lived in Berlin but who had grown up in Etters, “PA” was in my room warming me, that his ejaculate had been spread over me three times, that I was obsessed with the shine of cum, that I liked fucking and that I felt that the fucking had summoned her. And if only we had spoken more of fucking, then wouldn’t all our conflicts have been avoided or resolved; what if I write to her.

I couldn’t write, I couldn’t stop thinking about semen and how much I like secretions; five days after the fucking happened I began to shed bright red blood, I saw a movie I liked, I ordered nail polish for the first time, because the “carob” colorway looked to me like dried blood, and because I liked the idea of wearing very pale stone nude earth colors on the nails as I wash dishes. From the color names I learned about Barbara Hepworth, whose bulbous face struck me more than the objects she had made. I fell into a deep afternoon nap on the first full day of the period; I emptied one half menstrual cup into a glass bowl and saw the plasma separate from the endometrium several hours later. I felt little sharp star-like pains in the morning, and then felt aroused while discussing Donne with the students. I ate too many licorice candies the night before; I made anpan, I made shiroan, I made anko, I made mantou, I finished the Neapolitan novels. I watched Catherine Breillat’s Romance and laughed at the scenes that took place in a Japanese restaurant. I hated Z through at least three fictional characters. I thought of all the books I had read which he would never consume; he would remain safe from the worst insults, the worst assertions of similarity. It did not matter because he had long ago found a way not to care about me, to never care about me; and it was unlikely that I would tell him that I had come to hate him through being fucked. It was like last time, when I had come to hate him through what I had read, but this time I had come to hate him on account of the enjoyment I had shared with someone else.

I joked with my analyst that I need to make a new website for Dylan, whose URL would be 25-100.

“Are you quicksands, Clara Middleton, that nothing can be built on you?
Whither is a flighty head and a shifty will carrying the girl?”

Females are probably biologically destined to be fickle cheaters!

In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckoned none;
Then in the number let me pass untold,
Though in thy store’s account I one must be;
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee.

i sobbed in one brief motion as i unlocked the door, and then quickly shifted into a frantic reset: putting away the sheepskins and blankets and yoga mat left in the living room, laundering the blood-stained towel, washing dishes, pulling up readings for class. when i first dared to look in the mirror I saw that my right cheek was pink, and I thought it was so cute—it must have been from being fucked with the one cheek against a pillow. then i saw john as he was walking to class, and we talked a bit. after class he asked me what I had been so occupied with that had prevented me from doing the readings—and I told him that “someone I had met last summer was in town,” and that “i hadn’t even been in my own house,” and he immediately understood, and asked me if it was the one that lives in a van, and I said no, it was the one who came to mourn the death of his friend, the one I hadn’t liked. it was funny to me that i had been made to admit that i had been fucking before class; i’m always worried by my habit of sharing details about my sexual encounters with john, since he had in fact been overwhelmed when i told him about the men i had met in the wake of detransition last september, and because i had told him about having sex with zane in january, which itself seemed to be a dangerous repetition of the past confessional. but this time it felt nice to refer to the undescribed.

it was strange to be in “the erotics of visuality”—part of me was still in the blue room where we had fucked; phantom sensation of a cock inside me retained through the discussion of the lava lamp in hable con ella. someone sat between me and john, and every time the intervening body leaned back i’d stare at john’s broad fingernails. not like zane’s hands, but also beautiful in their heavier maleness. immiscible desire.

i applied a little stripe of the “chanterelle” color on each finger after returning home.

it’s like a small fingernail on top of the fingernail. “earthy greige.” it looks nice, i’m excited, one of the things i like about being away from men is that i feel more free to play with my appearance; i have more space to feel feminine. but i liked making food for dylan and watching him eat the bread with matcha-flavored shiroan, the third batch of bread i had made in the last two weeks, with better kneading technique and tangzhong.

it was nice to share food, though a bit stressful. it was nice to vacuum my room and reorganize my books. it was nice to look at sally mann and to listen to the cold song, to read kunin and berssenbrugge with him. and then we cooked together in the other place, where he was taking care of that big uncastrated tomcat, and i saw that he was competent and that he enjoyed preparing food. i want to cook and bake for them—all men.

he’s currently seeing a woman who opened her marriage after having cheated several times, but the husband is so reluctant with respect to non-monogamy that he refuses to know anything about the other man. I like the notion that he found a woman who found a way to break out. The last ex threw keys in his face, which broke his front teeth. He was also in a relationship in which he did not have sex for five years, because she had never done it and was scared. He’s gone, gone, gone, but he came seven times; I’ve never been happier.

that was much longer than planned: 41.5 hrs together the second time. we walked to campus and made a loop around the lake, and went down the side of the gorge trail, and then ate, and then drew while listening to noise music and techno, and then fucked, and then slept, and then ate, and then went to the house where he was cat-sitting, and since it turned out that the owner was supposed to come back later than anticipated, we tarried there in a stickiness with time, and watched an episode of the Simpsons, and took a walk to the falls in a state park, and watched another episode of the Simpsons, and spent some time sharing pictures, and then went to bed, and then cooked, and then shared more pictures, and then went to bed and read and fucked, and then slept, and then fucked, and then he drove me back to Ithaca, where I ate some leftover pomelo and silkie chicken soup, and rushed off to class. I dreamt of his hair growing from my toes, I dreamt of John.

the desire is immiscible cuz the men are different and remain immiscible.

non-homogenous desire. even the happiness is distinctive: happiness of john in the sun in front of goldwin smith is different from happiness of dy at the door or in front of the church; happiness of dy each time is distinct from the previous happiness. what does one do with this happiness, this beatitude?

On Friday it got cold. I went on a date with another man and he was perhaps a bit intimidated by me; did he enjoy hearing me, watching me, or did he feel fear? This is what I thought the whole night; who am I to him?

I asked him when was the last time you had sex? And I knew I would have to admit that I had had sex on Monday; later I gave a sort of speech on how I felt sex was very important, that I almost respected it as if she were a god—I would not be “using” him for sex, I was not someone who believed in having sex in order to come off and go away, I felt that warmth and kindness were necessary to the act. He had not had sex since Moscow, more than a year ago. Five years in Moscow, ethnic jew from Newton, MA; son of a man who owns a family business that cuts large tonnes of newsprint rolls into smaller pieces and resells them. Studied Russian and math at a liberal arts college in Maine; works for the ornithology lab as a software engineer, doing stuff with eBird. We spent some time at Gimme Coffee, at Saigon Kitchen, where he paid for my meal and asked if an element of the Pho was a testicle; Cornell Cinema, to see Aftersun, Pete’s Cayuga bar, his beautiful house on the other side of the highway, with huge glass doors with cutouts of birds pasted to them, in order that birds do not fly into them; the door leads into a blank yoga room, and a large bed; an exhibitionistic situation. He bakes bread a lot, there was flour on various countertops, “work surfaces.” Everything was rather beautiful in there, even had a gongfu tea setup. There was a little loft accessible by tight spiral staircase, where we kissed. Some Babel left open on the carpet. I was surprised by how nice that tentative move turned out to be; I had maneuvered the conversation in its direction, but he was not so assertive. I had maneuvered the conversation well, I thought, but I don’t know if I lied about the desire not to be a slut. I’m completely motivated by sex, to the point of a certain coldness; this coldness of description, for instance. His mouth was wide and suctive and the tongue was thick and went further down my throat than I had expected; he kissed my back like a leech and it was pleasurable. It took a while for me to get the thick and oversized eckhaus latta jeans off; I don’t think he ever took his shirt off. He went down on me before I had even touched his dick, and it was sort of nice with that warm wide tongue of his, but I was tense. When I touched his penis he came within seconds: thick cum that looked like flour mixed with water; I told him this, he was silent for a while, and admitted to being embarrassed about coming soon after not having had sex for a while. I told him it was okay and he seemed more or less convinced and comforted, and then I said the stuff about sex and warmth and not being interested in cold inhuman sex and not being interested in monogamy.

One of the first things I said to him was that I was moving. We talked about his recurrent anxiety dreams involving airplanes and the sea; I talked about Z, he did not share much about his past relationships; we talked about the differences between therapy and psychoanalysis; we talked about our major flaws (him: “hopeless” and “narcissistic”; me: “sadistic”), we talked about Aftersun, which led into Oedipus complexes and female desire, his frightening sexual dreams with his mother in them, we were in Pete’s where I drank a nice whiskey and didn’t turn too red and talked about my detransition, and felt incorrigibly aroused when I asked him what he was thinking about and he said sex, when he asked me how sex had been while male as opposed to female.

He didn’t want me to sleep over, so he took me back; he didn’t want me to sleep over out of embarrassment. We exchanged numbers and he sent an enthusiastic text the next morning; I imagine him happy to have enjoyed himself with a stranger, a minor or major accomplishment, I suppose, which won’t feel so good later. His cock is thick and might be nice inside me, but I’m not sure if I could tolerate him if it didn’t feel good.

The next morning I read a lot and went to the Lacan School session of “The Untreatable.”

“D woke me up from a nap”—third frolic with cartoonish man who gave me this shirt.

A bought me dinner, I bought D dinner, at the same restaurant. I told Dylan about Alex there.

I don’t know much about Zane other than the fact that he doesn’t seem to like sex.

If he persists he persists with full knowledge of what’s happened to me: that I’ve reached incredible happiness through someone who has ejaculated on me nine times this month, with whom I came. That I’m a bitch-cunt-whore who has excessive amounts of time to gloat about her seminal ablutions, who is too aroused to know what’s prudent. The red-striped cloth of tears is now the red-striped cloth of semen.

If you come to Ithaca you are at least the fourth man to lie with me.

Don’t come to Ithaca and don’t come to me, don’t come at all.

I’m going to move to the city and fuck a lot, but not as a philanderer.

I want to fuck fewer than ten people at least ten thousand times.

Intricate, immortal Aphrodite,
snare-weaver, child of Zeus, I implore you,
do not tame my spirit, great lady,
with pain and sorrow.

But come to me now, if ever before
you heard my voice from afar and,
leaving your father’s house,
yoked golden chariot and came.

Beautiful sparrows swiftly brought you
over the dark earth, with a quick flutter
of wings from the sky’s height through the clean air.
They were quick in coming.

You, blessed goddess, a smile on your divine face,
asked what did I suffer, once again this time,
and why did I call, once again this time,

and what did I in my frenzied heart
most want to happen. Whom am I
to persuade, once again this time,
to lead to your affection.
Who, O Sappho, does you wrong?

For one who flees will soon pursue,
one who rejects gifts will soon be making offers,
and one who does not love will soon
be loving, even against her will.

Come to me even now,
release me from these mean anxieties,
and do what my heart wants done.
You yourself be my ally.

(Sappho, “Ode to Aphrodite”)

[Translation modified by Jonathan Culler in Theory of the Lyric]