001: MIRAGE
It had been winter so long the snow was mostly frozen debris and I didn’t want to admit it but I was scared. The night terrors were back and I was slipping again, trying to see how little I could feel and feel less, clawing for the bottom of numbness so I could fall through it. I avoided sleep, curled up in bed stoned swiping on dating apps, shuffling through photos of people who were not quite people and would never be people. You would fuck for a night or a year until you didn’t. Their names would become the names of ghosts. It was weightless, a refuge from personhood. It’s where I lived that year.
One night, a man with glasses slid across my screen, looking sidelong at the camera in an expensive shirt. In another photo, a dog slept on his chest, their faces pressed together, his eyes closed. In the next, he carried a surfboard above his head, shirtless, lean muscle drawn in black and white. I hadn’t had sex in a few days. I sent him a message.
The night we met, I wasn’t excited. All I felt on his doorstep was the same stupefying awkwardness I felt on every doorstep, waiting for a stranger to open the door to an unfamiliar home and an itchy irritation with myself for never knowing how to announce my arrival no matter how many times I’d done this. Text? Call? Ring the bell? You can only pick one, or risk looking insane, and I never could discern which would best affect that alluring boredom that’s supposed to get you what you want without making it seem like you want anything.
I gave up and rang the bell, realizing I would feel ridiculous no matter what I did, ever, and I didn’t spend two months in the hospital learning how to stop trying to kill myself only to freeze to death from indecision outside a hot stranger’s apartment. He opened the door, smiling a little half-smile, as if he’d been watching me stand there in agony for four and a half minutes, looking desperately between my phone and the buzzer. I tried not to scowl.
He led me to the kitchen where I sat and lit a cigarette, casing my surroundings. High ceilings. Door to the left. A round wooden table, lightly scuffed. Two mismatched chairs, one of which I was sitting in. In front of me, a white leather couch against a wall that faced a mirror. Beyond the mirror, a bedroom draped in yellow light.
While he busied himself making drinks, I got up and wandered through the apartment, looking for books. I couldn’t find any. I sat back down. He handed me a glass of something.
Thanks, I said. Where’s the dog?
She’s with her mom. Want to walk her with me?
We made a dutiful loop around the icy block and when we got back inside, he kissed me. I was prepared to feel nothing. Instead, the room went red in an instant, foggy with need, engulfing and ludicrous. We fucked on the couch in front of the mirror. I thought, how vain, until he whispered, Look. Another kind of vanity, perhaps; the compulsion to witness how your body can awaken another, but I wanted to see him see me. To understand how this stranger could know the machine of my body. How he could feel so native to my skin while I didn’t even know his last name.
In the bedroom, he propped me up on his desk to face a bigger mirror, gilt-edged, imposing. Holding me open in front of it, he said, Look. I closed my eyes. I didn’t recognize myself, the melt of my body, abandoned to his hands, suddenly demanding: more. Look at me, he said. I opened my eyes, fixed them on his. We came at the same time. Collapsed in the bed, his face pressed to my chest, he mumbled, are you real? Are you a mirage?
Every few weeks, we would exchange the bare minimum of texts necessary to coordinate fucking at some point in the near future. It felt almost like love, which is to say that we fucked like we knew each other even though I never learned anything about him and he never learned anything about me. Sex remained a performance. I hid inside garter belts and body chains. I made sure to be late every time, lest he suspect that he sprawled across the pages of my journal where I recounted our every movement together with a detective’s precision, trying to solve whatever it was I felt. What I did know was that it made me forget. It was so fucking boring, the same nightmare over and over, the flashbacks that rendered me sightless and still in the grocery store, my life become a litany of sweat-soaked sheets and breathing exercises to slow my racing heart every time I entered a movie theater. Sex makes a great anesthetic if you don’t tell your therapist — the annihilation of coming, that brief erasure, to be no one, nothing but a body. Even when it was painful, I could think of worse places to dissociate; when you’re dissociating, every bed belongs to a stranger, especially your own. With him, though, it was never painful. It was bigger than pain, made dissociation impossible. It pulled me into the present like the past weighed nothing.
Sometimes I would stay through the morning but I preferred to leave before he woke up. I became skilled in the art of the silent escape, slipping through a crack in the door so thin it would shut behind me without even a sigh.
He would ask the same question every time — are you a mirage? I never knew how to answer.
Spring came and the shaky sadness melted with the snow. When summer began, he disappeared, and I wasn’t surprised.
I couldn’t honestly say I missed him. What I missed was dissolving into my body. I had never let my body lead me before. I had never known pleasure beyond the abstract, kind of like other galaxies, how you know they exist but they are so remote, you don’t consider the possibility of breathing their air. I wasn’t in love but I wanted to believe I could be. I wanted love to be as basic as instinct, uncomplicated as a craving. I wanted love to be simple enough for me to understand. As if understanding and having are the same thing. As if love is something you have, instead of something you do.