* * *
I’m going to reach the point where I can no longer articulate what I feel, because it barely matters, because the conclusions I can draw from feeling don’t much contribute to my decision-making. I love Max, but he is tiresome, and was very hurt when I told him that sometimes I couldn’t tell whether he only had a mood disorder or if he really sometimes couldn’t access the reality that others access. To be hurt by this, he took a break from being hurt by Cybil, who is sending him very unkind text messages about their breakup, and was that my intention? How much he complains about Cybil to me is the primary reason I think his mind is unable to comprehend that which lies outside it. I told him, it seems to me you misbehave with people in order that they may demonstrate excessive care for you. He resisted this and anyway spoke of suicide. Saw Freida yesterday, in the morning. She says, Catherine, don’t be a sex mommy to this old man. She says, imagine being a real mommy to a grateful new being that you give the world to? What you have is no substitute. And so, I say, yes, but we speak so openly! With a baby, it would take years before an emotionally frank conversation. In the afternoon I saw Ruby enact a Hasidic ritual in North York wherein she swung a hen by its wings around her shoulders, transferring her sins to it, so it could be shipped to Montreal, sacrificed, and fed to the poor. I thought, that’s so funny, before your sins are absolved, they sit cooped up with all the sins of everyone else for six hours on their way to Montreal. Nothing is instant. I’m not going to tell Max about my sin because his hold on reality suffers as it is. Regarding Max, only Ruby has given me the advice that seems right: it’s neither terribly good nor terribly bad, but it does seem like it’s happening. On Friday night I cried lots with my mother over dinner when she said she couldn’t remember a time in life when she was happy, and I inferred from this that I’ve never made her happy. I told Max. And then him with the suicide stuff, and then me, like, do you understand how horrible it is for me to hear that—I’m with you every day. If you’re a salve, you’d like at least to be effective. I want to build a home with Max as though it were forever even though: absolutely not. I have a very disciplined intellect I must inspire so that I may have the life I want. The life I want now, with Max, isn’t the life I want later, without him. There are models for fidelity to the present alone. It’s equally that I will never fill this man up and that I do not want to. You don’t have to make others prove an excess of love. I tell him: Just slow down. Who am I talking to? I used to recount my life in paragraphs but I don’t get the luxury of experiencing it like this anymore. Instead other luxuries, like a kiss to each breast, each morning.
Annual checkup. On first look, even cervical, there seems to be nothing wrong with me. Told young, cute resident physician that I was experiencing chest pains again like earlier in the summer, but that, again, I was stressed. Explained to him my living situation in a brief synopsis. He goes to consult with my primary doctor about whether or not I should be put on anxiolytics. He thinks, probably not, if things don’t become dire. Returns, asks, “But in your living situation, you’re safe?” I say, “Oh! Yes, of course. I’m aggravated, but I’m safe.” He calls me “twenty-five years young,” and I remark that he doesn’t look much older, and look where he is in his life! He says that I am right, but that’s neither here nor there, and it doesn’t relate to whether or not I’m suffering from a heart condition. He’s not exactly correct about this.
* * *
It’s difficult to accept—or not to be menaced by—the prospect that you can be whatever you’d like, even with someone else in the room. Someone can know all ostensibly knowable things about you (family life, dating history, eating habits, writing style, grooming habits) and still not inhibit or constrain you. You accept them, too, imperfect, because it makes the most sense to. It is the choice that brings the most pleasure and comfort to you both. I don’t get all the sleep I want. Otherwise, mostly, life is better. It’s a kind of magic: being handled gently and lovingly on a daily basis makes the world less menacing, because you—your person, your body, your being—have a home. It feels good right now. In the middle of the night kissing sleepily, he asks, “Are we in love?” and I answer, “We are.”
* * *
Even if it were true that a love that does more than serve a function is simply a love wherein you confuse yourself with the beloved, I still need more sleep at night for better concentration during the day. Love is good. Tonight no plans, but I sure hope Max has some. Got a sty this morning. There is a man I woke with who is witness to each of my ailments and gave me crazy head last night during our little Leonard Cohen listening party. Really fucking great. That I can’t come is a travesty. What is to be done? You suspect conversation will be finite, but it never is, particularly if your husband recounts his meals for you with the brilliantly illustrative awe of a toddler. It will be weird later in when I have privacy but I don’t have love. I’ll always have love. Fidelity to the events.
* * *
Contemplation takes solitude; spedness takes contemplation; infatuation takes spedness (in my experience). I have no solitude in my apartment, which is also my lover’s.
Desire in solitude can facilitate extreme cognitive activity. Your understanding of philosophy, the world, and your lover circuit together continually. Each seeks an explanation in the other. So you devise many because you’re driven to do so, imagining you can recover some explanation that reveals the correct path toward getting what you want (or, otherwise, toward cleansing yourself of the need to want it). But when both parties say yes? When they say yes, and further spend all their time together? I am completely in love, but it seeks no explanation. I seek no pathway out of it, nor any way to burrow further in. I feel happy. I wouldn’t mind, however, intense cognitive aptitude. I just want none of the insecurity I’m sure would come with it.
It’s possible that the only things partners need to share are sincerity, a definition of fidelity, and a similar respective propensity for guilt and shame. Discussing fidelity, I told Max: it’s so easy to imagine sleeping with only one person, but so difficult—and completely undesirable—to imagine sharing with only one person the best and most intimate conversations. He agrees.
It’s been nicer since we’ve avowed ourselves to each other. Our conversations have taken a kinder, more focused tone. Avowals of love have been daily—often Max wakes to make them in the middle of the night. Our sleep quality together hasn’t been half-bad, though semi-conscious make-outs have been interspersed through each night.
Right now things are fucked-idyllic and neither of us seems to understand how this could possibly be. I love him. I love it. What I have with Max I’ve really never had with anyone, and I get the impression that this is also so for him, although he has already cohabited. Sayability. I feel like it’s impossible that couples ever understand each other like Max and I do, that they ever have our honesty and patience. The jokes. It’s difficult for someone to annoy you when everything they say is in this self-correcting and modulating torrent of discovery, bouncing off you. We both worry about work. This morning, he says, “I wish I could monetize your affection.” I say, “You could! You’d just have to outsource it.”
* * *
Two nights ago, Max said sleepily (we had been out earlier, drinking, at shows), “I wish I could drag you everywhere.” The visual it produced in my mind was that I was unconscious, bleeding, led by a leash. It wasn’t some sex thing. He did not even have a boner saying it. Is love what one feels for another when they behold them and think, I could drag that rag doll with me by a rope? But then we have conversations the following day, and I feel love is less strictly that feeling. It is that feeling together with others. It’s the tension of wanting a privileged being to be both entirely containable and entirely excessive, and to navigate in the space of this tension. In love, the other is simultaneously something growing, expanding, unknowable, and all mine.
My linguistics textbook warns, “Remember, dominatio
n is a containment relation.” I do still read what the world doesn’t intend into my love, fine.
I notice my days are better, and my concentration, too, when we’ve slept in separate beds, and he hasn’t told me he’s had thoughts of suicide. You have to ensure yourself some good days!
* * *
It’s good, I guess, that I’m sensitive to dominant behaviour, because what this keen eye allows me to see is that it’s not really happening. As we fall into our rhythm, I see that Max’s particular style of codependence, as moderated for my own tendencies, doesn’t suit me so badly. I almost wasn’t ready for how good Max would be at this relationship once we decided to call it one. I feel loved; I love him. I feel turned on; he does, too. He invites me out for a night with him and his friends; I invite him out for drinks after I see a movie with Blaise. This is just the recountable stuff. Being with Max changes the way I feel as a person in the world; it is changing my attachment to solitude as a baseline of being. He is making being with another my new default for relaxation. He is making it so being with him is the most natural way I know to be myself. He, or my commitment to him, has finally made it so I’ve masturbated to orgasm with no moments of external videographic aid. For the first time! And the next day, a second. I have finally been able to bring myself to orgasm only with fantasies I conjure myself. Still, the first time, the fantasy was a bit external: I was watching Max fuck slash eat Cybil out. After a few minutes, I came to my mind’s projection of him eating her ass out while looking at me shamefully like, I’m sorry, just a minute, I can’t help it. It felt appropriate that weaning myself off pornography, I might first imagine pleasure at the site of other bodies. It is not bizarre that the only visual fantasies I can conceive of are triangulated.
* * *
Pause: if a panic attack is anything, it’s just: total psychological and somatic concordance (10x speed) and asking the god who finally knows you and is known to you, please, don’t let anyone steal my things while I lie down on the sidewalk in a near-comatose state of absence for the next twenty minutes.
* * *
I wish I could have both my love and my solitude, but it hasn’t turned out this way. As I wrote, I had a panic attack last night, and I haven’t come back to life since. Walking home during the evening from a lecture, I felt sunny, and then speedy, and then like I could string discrete things together into the linguistic structures I’d just learned, and suddenly some unrelated thoughts came together in a way that felt inarticulably just right, and then I felt some light nausea and a tingle of warmth throughout my body that together with some fast and frankly weird thoughts made me feel like I was high on mushrooms, and then I realized how hot and sweaty I suddenly was, and how quickly my heart was beating, so I took my coat off, folded it up, and placed my head upon it as I lay on my back, eyes closed, on the foot of someone’s lawn. Careful not to have anything stolen, knowing I should allow myself to slide into any state of (un)consciousness I needed, I slid my arm through the loops of my knapsack. And lay there panting for about twenty minutes, though it felt like no time at all. Then I was hungry. I was able to curb the heart palpitations quickly, so they didn’t make me scared. Prior to the attack, it had been an average day. I know that, for a period of time, the way I was contemplating my lecture on my walk felt like a feat of retention. I don’t know when I started to feel like syntactic theory was suddenly collecting too much. I felt happy about Max, and he had texted me during lecture to say that he was at his parents’ house and wanted to tell them about me, but it was complicated. He said he showed his mother my picture, called me his roommate, and she said I looked nice.
Another detail about Max: the night after the rag-doll dragging comment, he said that his American work visa, which he’d initiated the process for almost two years ago, was finally approved. I had plans with Caroline and didn’t want to talk about it. My fear, then, was that he’d leave immediately, which I did not want to hear. When I got home, we talked about it, and that wasn’t his plan. It is roughly the same as it had been short-term: stay here during the fall and over Christmas, try to schedule as much work as possible to go to New York in January. And this is what I’d wanted, anyway. Living with Max is lovely but also hard for me in ways that a sense of guilt and propriety don’t allow me to make known. I wish I had the luxury he has, that sometimes I were at home alone all morning and afternoon while he saw to a responsibility outside the house. It’s hard. It’s hard when I don’t feel well. On the one hand, he attends to me expertly, and physical touch brings me back to the world. On the other hand, if I feel miserable and antsy, I’d just like to feel that way for whatever amount of time I must, and not share myself with him or feel the pressure to be present. I want to go to bed early and sleep in obscenely. I don’t want to talk. I want to write every awful thing that occurs to me and not share some lighter version of it as dialogue. I don’t want to be made to feel better. I don’t want to share in love. I don’t want to talk about the two of us moving together because it’s no good here when I’m still not near graduation and I won’t have anything to do there and I’ll have to make all my friends from scratch and I won’t have a job. I don’t want to go anywhere with this man unless I learn that he has some fucking discipline, because if he has nothing to do and I have nothing to do and all we do then is give each other an excuse to stream video content on the internet while fondling each other, I will wish to God that I had another fucking life wherein I gave anything to the world!
* * *
Max and I agree that the love we have for each other doesn’t destabilize our lives with worry, which is good, but it can steal us from our responsibilities if all we do is cuddle and talk, which is as good a kind of bad as I’ve ever known. I cried in front of Caroline, recounting my panic attack and how little I want to be cared for when I don’t even know what’s wrong with me, how much I was used to mental health matters being private, how nervous it made me to extend responsibility for my health to anyone else. I think I said, “I don’t want anyone to look after me! I just want to look after myself!” and teared up, embarrassed at the most legible parental issues possible. Then I came home to Max, whom some part of each day I don’t want, but who then fills me with such joy. My mind is doing the work of transforming the body of the woman I masturbate to into one that might be mine. My mind is doing the work to put me in the pleasure room while I am being hit. Max has this joke about an alcoholic failing to remember beating up his brother’s father, and what’s the term for one’s brother’s father? It’s cute. I’m always in the room for pleasure living with him.
Caroline assures me the beginning is always like this, where you take up such obscene portions of the other’s time. But it isn’t always. Then you get back to work.
* * *
Yesterday I had a selection of feelings and thoughts that had nothing whatsoever to do with Max, which felt very healthy. School social. There weren’t many free drinks. Morgan was there and lovely to talk to. He’s quit drinking because he sees himself as having no control over his life, and worse still he might be correct. He has trouble with everything, but speaks, writes, and thinks in such flexible and inventive ways. I tell him, I wish you worked better, and I wish everyone with a sensibility like either of ours worked better, so that we produced the culturally dominant things. He laughed and said this sounded nice.
Left social early to see Max perform two shows. Friends of his I’d seen lately. One of them I get along with enormously well. She’d heard lots about me and was stunned excited. So fun; talked so fast; I felt as though I was being forcefully initiated as a member of Comedy Couples. Frightening but safe. There were glows. I said, we are not a Comedy Couple: I work in a library, and I would like in the future to teach. No one should be unhappy to find themselves trapped by kindness. The walk home, though rainy, was delightful, because it was clear to Max that I’d had a terrific time. Then another gigantic, affectionate bedtime conversation like the others. Max’s c
onstant vocalization of his will to carry this relationship out for the rest of our lives sometimes makes me fear he’s in some sort of exceptional mental state that will later seem like a dream. Like, when he stops thinking this, he won’t need time to adjust and recover and detach himself from the idea of spending our lives together, he’ll just wake up one day and think, what the fuck was that?
We almost always sleep together now. At night, he always asks, and I almost always say yes. He begged yesterday in the kitchen as we first arrived home, “Please, don’t leave me too soon.” I said I had no plans to. It’s the sheer extent of his displayed vulnerability that makes me think it’s not unlikely that he’s a victim of self-hypnosis and he’s bound to snap out of it, but how could one snap when there’s no fucking resistance? Affection’s not physical! But Lord, does it ever have such a number of physical expressions. We always kiss just right. I remember at the beginning of September that he wasn’t kissing in a way that felt good to me, but of course, how could he have been, when I hadn’t been there to kiss? Then you adapt to what the other wants and settle together on a tradition of touch that’s only yours together. And it’s just fucking right! And you even do it in public a bit. A bit. Nothing crazy. But you’re a Comedy Couple now and your friends think there’s really some potential there, so what’s to be hidden? You think there’s another person for you, better suited to you, but there isn’t. All there are are millions and millions of other whomeverthefuck people and then someone who has committed himself to how to be himself for you. Together you come upon a form. A tradition. A relationship! And nothing else could beat it, because nothing else has learned how.
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