There is so much reduction in what I write. I tend to remain at the surface of things, I prefer not to plumb the depths of my imagination or to follow the thread of my desire to those curlicues I used to inhabit when I studied literature seriously. The height and the thick halo of the weeds along the sides of the train yard, coming out of discrete rectangles of uncovered sidewalk, remind me of the fact that nature is full of sensuous reminders of what I have left behind.

Nothing really comes out of me quickly anymore, my superego damages and corrodes life.

Various species of grass create a feeling of seminality in the air, and I like that I don’t know what I’ve seen when I run by the thickets of weeds. It has been a month or two maybe since I ran to Prospect Park and this is why the weeds ambush me so. And I walk to Boro Park’s kosher groceries and see an oak tree with excessively curled spines on its acorns, which have largely fallen and separated themselves, nut from the calyx. But now I want someone without qualification. A crush, or the feeling of love in its first stages. It has been too long since I have had a crush like this, on someone I have not had sex with, but who I might have sex with later.

I come back from the climbing gym and it is 10:18 PM. I listened to Bill Orcutt’s guitar throughout the session and shut out the sounds of others speaking. But I could still look at the boys and girls and their lovely bodies. Each lovely whether conventionally attractive or not. This is what it is for me to live in the city. To see the life in another, a separate life, which is enough. Someone looked like he was dying on the train, frothy saliva coming out of his mouth. Someone else moved closer and tried to speak with him, to shake him awake. For a while he shook him and tried to speak to him, but there was no recognition of an outside world. I observed them, thinking it was important to not avoid a crisis in a stranger’s body even if I wasn’t helping him.

I realize that I’ve lived in Brooklyn for more than three years now, and that tomorrow is the anniversary of my analytic relationship with Susu. It’s also D.H. Lawrence’s birthday: 9/11. Two thin columns of light come out of the old grounds of the Twin Towers to commemorate the date. Three years ago I was reading Lawrence assiduously and still working on my dissertation. This is somewhat related to the fact that I was still writing and receiving emails from Zane. Emails were still very much part of the way I experienced life, they were an enrichment of life, a greenhouse in which the more difficult botanical specimens might actually grow or survive.

Anniversaries and spans of time reduced to something like the word “three” mean nothing when written down. What do I actually feel about these events, dates, anniversaries? Can any of these experiences something physically felt? The question of how I feel never feels quite right to ask or answer. I’m just thinking that it’s crazy that I want to do the email thing again in 2026.

I have the worst oral herpes outbreak on my lower lip since the first one I ever got. This was about a year ago, after I first started camming, and stopped being especially promiscuous. I wonder how many people in public look at me thinking I’m a pretty girl and then find themselves face-to-face with the very image of sluttiness in the form of a weeping blister.

Sometimes, I think, receiving text from the beloved can be so much more intimate than anything else. The risk that’s taken to communicate in this way is immense, as it involves stripping oneself of one’s body and claiming a new one. At least we can claim we didn’t choose our bodies, we can’t claim that of the words we write. In speaking of my crush on Josh, I’ve said to a few people that he doesn’t have a body. In saying this I am pointing to the fact that his body has changed so much since his heart surgery, and that I wonder if he is not making himself look messy and overweight because he does not want to charm anyone after realizing he is so much more likely to die of a genetic heart disease. He has had more than a handful of lovers, and I think of him as someone who doesn’t have to worry so much about having or finding someone.

I do indeed look pretty these days. I got a haircut that looks a little punk because it is a mullet, a long mullet, and maybe the effect is subtle enough so as to not look explicitly countercultural. Being pretty doesn’t make love easy. When I desire someone the way I desire Josh, I assume I am too much, I assume that the excess of my desire can be felt even when I moderate the volume of my correspondence. We text, I call him somewhat frequently, an unsual new act of mine. I find the assumption of my excess unshakeable. Like any symptom, it must be supporting something. Maybe I think I’m too much because I do in fact want to smother and kill.

When he was lying in my bed I thought of entering it, of standing up from my sheepskin and going there, he would have to see or feel something to know and he would move over, making space for me to exist in the crook of his elbow or neck, or otherwise lying in parallel somehow. I didn’t because I felt it would be a violation. We might as well pretend to be just friends until that illusion cannot be upheld for one second longer. He claimed there was a list of six people he’d marry without hesitation and went through the list. Eventually, after a pause, he said that I was one of them, and I told him that I thought about it sometimes too, we seem to get along really well. When such sentences are exchanged I can’t tell if we’re just being coquettish with each other. As if flirtation were merely a quality or aptitude. But obviously it means something.

Most of what I think about Josh is rather physical. There is a yearning to see photos of him and to imagine what his body might have been like at any given moment in time in the past when I wasn’t paying attention to it, or what it might be like in the future when we next see each other. I think it’s in this knot of fantasy that much of my libidinal energy is caught, and it’s what causes me to write so much more seriously these days. The problem of moving between the physical and the psychical or the physical and the spiritual (the immaterial, but willful) matters to me.

That time we spent at the cemetery was rather incredible for some reason. Something of the flatness of the landscape and the walk through the grave stones. The fresh graves which had no greenery, just the sand and pebble substrate that covers the casket. The stones piled up on top of the graves which makes the space distinctly Jewish. The names, all the names, names meaning so much, even if they only remain at the surface of things. Names and dates remaining at the surface of a life, the only remnant after the deceased is gone, names and dates and stones.

But we were there reciting kaddish, then a psalm, he invited me to read. I read in my broken Hebrew for the first time with somebody and for the actual purpose of doing something in the memory of Nathan and Jeanette Wagner. I learned some things about their lives from their grandson who had never met them. I spent a lot of time with him and them not talking, and observing the Italian wall lizards and butterflies and catbirds which lived amongst the graves.

It’s clear to me that there’s something to learn from him, to learn from being obsessed with him. And one of those things is in this problem of what it means to describe a photograph or be with a physical landscape, to say or to say nothing about it, to contextualize or decontextualize it.