“We’re reshaping the calendar. The bookmark worked. Every day is Tuesday.”

kundalini?”

If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular,

most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations, never brought to light. A

I would often whisper, Let's dream the same dream, right after we turned out the lights. He took it as a sweet sign-off, but I yearned for this joint dream so hard my teeth hurt. He didn't understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life. I was pretty good at getting

“The initial reaction isn’t the eternal reaction.” This was a thing from a Jungian self-help book that we often told each other when our partners fucking hated us.

“Do you want to be with him instead of Harris?” “No.” That was still easy and true. “He’s not a rock like that. I love him as my lover. I just want to dance with him, I don’t want to raise a child together.”

Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them.

I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.