How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe.

I could feel us attaching and knew that any chance of breaking apart from him emotionally was not possible. I was his now.

This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.

Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment.

I had liked it so much when I got it, but now that it was no longer new it didn’t feel good enough. Now that I had owned it for more than a minute it had gotten some of me on it.

So I was going to try to be happy, even if it brought me more suffering.

Annika and I rarely ever saw each other, although I had promised for many years to take a trip to the beach. I couldn’t get Jamie’s and my schedules to align, couldn’t get him interested, and I was afraid to go alone—to be intimate with her—without him as a buffer. I didn’t want to be seen too closely or I might have to look at me too.

How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was?

“No, he’s, like, I don’t know what. A computer programmer. Might be on the spectrum. Does yoga, though. Huge cock.” “So fun,”