orgasm, empty

Endless want has led me nowhere.

orgasm, empty

On occasion, after sex, usually with a stranger, I have felt empty. J. calls that “post-nut clarity.” I’ve heard the feeling reflected by others. “I was watching porn or having sex with someone, and when I came, I felt disgusted. Like, I’m a monster! What am I doing?!” I’ve felt that, too. And yes, it’s funny, when one’s mood changes so abruptly – it makes the fluids and your body and the pulsing in your temples all absurd. But for me, it doesn’t last an hour. It begins as a single prick of shadow in the splendor of pleasure, and slowly with the hours, with the days, it grows until it vacuums all thought and feeling to the core of meaninglessness. It passes eventually, like an overwhelming cloud. But while I’m in it, it’s hard to see beyond myself.

What does an orgasm clarify?

In my twenties I thought sex would make me free. This is common for queer men. Suppression destroys the human spirit, and after spending years of lying to myself about wanting to fuck other men, it was liberating to choose sex freely, openly. But on the other end of sexual liberation, whatever that means, I found it was, well, silly, limiting, exhausting, to equate freedom with endless anonymous sex. I learned quickly, as many people do, that there are sweeter, more sustainable pleasures in life, like taking care of a partner, showing up for friends, making art one can be proud of.

Sometimes I look forward to a point in my life when sex is just an afterthought. When it doesn’t complicate everything. I hear the things people say about testosterone and desire. It drives me crazy. I don’t want to be told I’m bound to the whims of my biology. I churn within myself when I hear my trans guy friends admit that taking T has made them ravenous. Are men, cis and not, bound by our chemistry? I don’t mean to be gender essentialist. I’m only worried about the limits of the body. I wonder what kind of society we’d be, if we spoke of men as hormonal, too.

Prick of shadow. The black hole it becomes. Post-nut clarity. It’s an ice-cold shock. The body saying: I have emptied myself. Now what? Nothing.

Endless want has led me nowhere.

---

LOCA Love

A friend texted to tell me that his partner was sitting next to a total stranger on the train this week who happened to be reading Loca. I’ve yet to run into someone in the wild randomly reading it, but that’s a nice affirmation. Sometimes I think, ‘it’s just my friends reading the book.” It’s a nice reminder that the book is making its way into the world slowly.

In other news, totally unrelated to the novel, I have a new short story out in the Spring issue of American Short Fiction. You can check it out here.

I have a complicated relationship to short stories (in that, I don’t know that I’m very good at writing them). But I’m really proud of this one. It’s a story about cousins who find they’ve grown up and don’t know each other as well as they once did. They go on a hike, and on this trip they’re forced to face some of the shit that’s been holding them back from connecting.

I haven’t seen a story of mine in print since my chapbook came out four years ago. I’m glad this piece found a home with such an incredible publication.