This man lusts for me and being objectified is an intoxicating little feeling I’ve missed terribly.

It’s that my own duplicity sours them.

Casually racist.

I don’t like confessing to not knowing. I’d rather go down with a sinking ship—drowning passengers and all—than admit I’d steered into the maw of an iceberg.

less a violent plunge and more like subtle slippage. An exsanguination so slow, ignoring it comes far too easy. Determined to numb one more bad hour, we didn’t realize we’d numbed our way through one more bad day. One more bad year, numbed. How many do we have left?

Has it been longer than that? Not some tepid jerk-off sesh while our shoulders touch but real sex? Pounding, bleating sex that lasts both too long and never long enough? SEX sex.

The ambivalence-soaked air of relationship purgatory is stifling, bordering on painful—