They were smiling and exchanging smiling glances, the tall father looking down, the ashy blonde daughter looking up through her glasses and saying some words, inaudible to me at the distance. She opened her siddur and began to pray; presumably her father had already davened earlier in the morning, and I watched as she bowed forward, bending at the waist, to maybe a thirty degree angle, at certain points in her davening, and then she beat her little fist against her chest, beating being the first word to come to mind, though it was more like the way one might play a musical instrument, with a kind of affirmative certitude, not with strained emotion. I’m aware that men bow forward as they daven in shul, but I’ve never actually seen this in person, as I’ve never been to shul, so it was incredible to see the small nine or eleven year old girl on a packed train doing this next to her daddy. The father was handsome and the daughter was cute; his beard was auburn and lush and ethereal and moreover hid a subtle smile; he had an incredibly straight nose, a very rectilinear look, almost as if he were the subject of a cubist painting, and she was much rounder-edged, with a cube-like face that reminded me of a Chinese-American classmate I had liked in the sixth grade, he was incredibly good at math and soccer and we briefly dated. The daughter looked so glad to be in this world, and I spoke in analysis less than thirty minutes later about how what I had seen was forever inaccessible to me, about the transparent nature of my yearning for some semblance of belonging to a tradition, to a shared communal life.

I have countless experiences of this kind each week, most of them less startlingly clear, most of them less happy. They are vaguely clotted around the fascination I have with yiddishkeit, it became clear to me that I needed to pursue this, without guilt. But what came out of my mouth when I told him that we needed to end things was that I felt like an inadequate partner; I couldn’t feel this sense of commitment with him, this made me feel inadequate all the time, like I had low self-esteem. Besides, I felt unsure of what I was contributing to his life. I imagined I needed a weaker partner, someone with more apparent struggles. Ironically this discourse led to the realization that I have perhaps had an important role in Jerry’s life, that my adoration meant something, because perhaps I did see and appreciate and understand him in a way that no one else currently does. He described to me a life without me with a kind of smouldering anger and I wanted to hug him. His cheeks are smooth like apples, I thought; his hair curls like a setter’s ears, in a shade of dark reddish blond, the red of it recessive and obscure. His eyes are an obscure organic shade of lichen, and his ass is curved like a helmet. I love the mute vulnerability of his backside. I love the backs of his arms, the lines in the sides of his shoulders, all of which evoke traditional ideals, the shapes of corinthian columns, the shapes of Hellenic statues of muscular males with none of the paint left on the white marble. When he moves, he moves with the grace of a gecko. He rests the way a gecko rests, its tail curved and curling, sometimes quivering and vibrating with terror or excitement at the vision of a mate. Then it suddenly launches itself onto another surface, as he does when he begins to speak, muttering in a low strange voice.

But he didn’t speak with that sort of energy, of course he could not, he spoke bitter truthful words, and I felt like I was in a haystack at night, illuminated only with a candle which drips all over the iron stick. He sank into a silent terror which made me want to cradle him in a manger next to a bleating lamb in the middle of the dessert. I knew I’d never get to kiss his face all over again. When I kissed him I always sought out the softest and most delicate skin beneath or above the eyes. I felt that he was an animal accepting incomprehensible gestures from another animal many clades away. Perhaps I suck at his surfaces like a fruit fly. Or I am a man kissing an otter, a man kissing a carrot, a man kissing an orange springtail, a man kissing a mourning gecko, an isopod kissing dead skin cells. I feel my skill and capability at adoration when I encounter him but then it’s absorbed into what we do, one body on top of the other, one organ inside the other. Once I asked him for permission to come over to his house to kiss his fingers, and when I came I first kissed and hugged him by the threshold of the door, as if we were on TV, before kissing his fingers and toes like a troubador attempting to gain favor from a haughty princess. He claims there’s no good in writing about someone you love, but I claim that I feel proud to crystallize my desire and make it a permanent thing. Not in order to do away with it and hide it, but in order to intensify it, to see it brightly, and to link the intense attraction of a mourning gecko’s gold-flecked eyes as captured by my camera to the more diffuse warmth of holding him close to me and kissing him again and again and again. I am aware that I have invented this and other thoughts. My lover, my son, my lover-son. So robust and handsome and shaped like a hero. I can smell you in the air, even though I am focused on the technicalities of writing something robust; nonetheless I brush my nose against your neck, thinking of the unbitten softness. I forget your scent, then I find it again.

I had so much trouble sleeping last night; it was like a carbon copy of Jerry was sleeping beside me, all frustrated, full of heartache, resonating through my body. A mosquito that I had somehow let in earlier in the day kept on biting me and buzzing by my ear. It bit the tip of my right index finger, and my left cheek below the temple.

I think I slept from 2 AM to 5 AM. Then I moved to my bed, I had been sleeping on the floor, I haven’t slept in my bed in a while, I like sleeping in the living room where it’s absolutely silent, where the upstairs neighbors aren’t watching TV. But the mosquito was kept out successfully. Then I slept between 7 AM and 10 AM.

I saw Pt. on Tinder. I’m attracted to him in large part because of how he looks, but even more because of the way he talks about Judaism, and about his art practice, and about the pleasures of peeking. In one of his photos, he is lying on a towel on the ground, perhaps after having gone for a run. The towel is white with red lettering, some company name, the name of a protein powder. Around his neck is a magen david I’ve never seen him wear in person; the pendant had fallen off to the side, in a crevice under his collarbone. I realized in seeing this picture that I had never examined the color of his eyes, that I merely knew they were light, but now I could see that they were a strange shade of hazel green that looked almost chartreuse. There’s so much ambiguity and texture to the colors on bodies, this is what I like best about people, their genetic diversity as a people, and how this reveals itself in a single body. Adam’s beard hairs were all sorts of different colors, red, dark, light, white.

I keep on staring at the isopods. There’re the orange ones, Porcellio pruinosus, and the bluish ones, Armadillidium peraccae, and I keep on thinking of them as my little piggies. How nice it would be to focus one’s life on eating dead leaves and having sex with other piggies. Why do I like obsessional neurosis so much? Why do I like the lifestyle of shielding oneself off from the desire of the other? Why do I do this by participating in relationships in which I convince myself that I am merely acting in the right ways to make the other feel seen, so that I can draw out a portrait of the other, or because I want to collect some knowledge which I will use to create another thought?

It’s been startling to realize that I meant something to Jerry. But I don’t think anyone currently really sees me or knows me except for my analyst, and maybe this is why I claimed she was the only real person in my life. Adam only sees a part of me, a small and good part that matters, but not the current turmoil in all its variegation.

Last night I saw The History of Sound, and cried almost ceaselessly. There was something clarifying about the moments in which I was able to hold still, when I had no clear sense as to why I could inhabit a few moments of peace, until more tears came. Perhaps I found it so edifying because of the way it allowed me to connect with Jerry, with all the emotion left in the wake of our little disaster, how could I allow myself to fall so deeply in love and then reject that love. Was my love for him so shallow that a concept of a religion would make the relationship impossible for me to conceive of in forever terms? Could I have just gone further with being myself?

In another world maybe we could have been both born men, one from a single-family farm in rural Kentucky, another practically an orphan, a bit more cosmopolitan, but still deeply invested in folk tradition. We’d go out backpacking in the wilderness finding rural families, whose songs we’d record on wax cylinders, explaining to the families what a phonograph is, how it works, how sound is a tactile thing. We’d sleep together in a tent and huddle against each other just as we have done so many times in reality, even if not on a tent certainly on the floor or on his hard tatami mats.

That would be all that mattered, a shared “oral history” project, in this case musical, all we’d do would be walk in the woods and catalogue folk songs and go back to our university towns and find a way to publish or disseminate or perform them.

In all honesty I’m not sure why I wasn’t more aggressive about sharing myself, with imagining and proposing shared projects, but perhaps I was merely sensitive, to how a relationship might unfold over time, over the course of its manifold resistances.

I listened to his voice, and I recorded it, a recording of a recording of him reading his folk stories. Interestingly, he never spoke in this way, not with that almost regal softness, his voice a pillow… he reminds me of Leda and the Swan… how can those terrified vague fingers push / the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

I’m a “sicko” for what I’ve done and all this pleasure in maudlin thoughts about what is now absent. R called himself a sicko at the end of our last session; we laughed at that. He had been describing how he had gotten so angry about the Philadelphia Film Festvial’s rush ticket procedure. But he went again, with his “curmudgeonly Jewy friend,” and they had a great time there. Perhaps it stood out so much because R is my least sick patient. We don’t know why he came to treatment, really, to me it seems like an attempt to build a NY Jewish identity, and he might have read what I briefly wrote in public about hearing clapper rails in Marine Park: It’s a marsh in the southern part of the borough and something about a sudden encounter with a species after a long day of reading and writing strikes me as worth reflecting on. I moved to the city ten months ago to move from an academic career to a career in psychoanalysis, as a practitioner in its central U.S. location, the site of the Jewish exodus for the Jewish science and while it might be more elegant somehow to think of it as a universal science not affiliated with religion or culture or a specific locale, psychoanalysis has become for me my own ethnic marker of a membership of a tribe, New York.

To cite Jerry, or rather Fisherman Ted, All things come round when space is sound.

The “sound” of health has a proto-Germanic root; it is a different “sound” than the “sound” of sonus, which is a Latin word. I remember thinking of trying to get in a debate of some kind with Jerry over his cyclical notion of time and my linear, almost Messianic one, my tick-tock time, the time of the death drive, or the weak Messianic time of Walter Benjamin. I showed him Yeats’s Second Coming. I did briefly get in this debate with him on the train. I didn’t feel that it was one worth having, that it would just sow seeds of discord. Maybe I should’ve tried harder to talk about it if it was something important to m, but I didn’t want to criticize him. I’d like to learn more about Christian eschatology. I remember how fun it could be to consider Christianity through Jerry, to always feel on the cusp of the illumination of a contrastive position.

Does a cycle imply a return? Is a cycle a way of predicting the future?

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

(Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”)

Ben Bomrind was on the train today, and I sat parallel but on a separate row of seats. I looked at him from the side, not a very flattering angle, and he was done davening, so he was scrolling through news articles on his phone. This was one of the least beautiful views I’ve had of him. I noticed, however, at one point, that he looked through the metal bars at the border of my seat towards me; the interference at the border of each bars made his gaze all blurry, with small flashing lines of light; it was rather angelic. Then when he stood up and I stood up to get off at Fulton Street I noticed he walked with a limp. He got his bearings before moving and walked rather slowly, with one leg bowed out a little at the knee. It was quite painful to see but I also thought to myself that it was hot that he was limping, that I found it so sexually alluring that he was vulnerable and weak in this particular way, that he was bumbling, slowly, and I passed him, thought of him looking at me pass him as I walked up the stairs, and I turned around to see him as if I were Orpheus and he was Eurydice, but only after a few moments when it wouldn’t have been so clear that I was looking at him.

My analyst told me I sounded sadistic and cut the session 20 minutes short.

It was extremely exciting to be pushed out back into the world, it was exciting that she was using the technique of punctuation, scansion, the variable length session, for the first time with me, and now I’m left thinking about my sadism, about the fact that I do seem to find both men and women most attractive when they’re at their weakest. But only someone very strong and noble and capable could be beautiful at their weakest.

She told me to listen to a Mozart aria, Madamina, il catologo è questo:

My dear lady, this is the list
Of the beauties my master has loved,
A list which I have compiled.
Observe, read along with me.

In Italy, six hundred and forty;
In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one;
A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one;
But in Spain already one thousand and three.

Among these are peasant girls,
Maidservants, city girls,
Countesses, baronesses,
Marchionesses, princesses,
Women of every rank,
Every shape, every age.

With blondes it is his habit
To praise their kindness;
In brunettes, their faithfulness;
In the white-haired, their sweetness.

In winter he likes fat ones.
In summer he likes thin ones.
He calls the tall ones majestic.
The little ones are always charming.

He seduces the old ones
For the pleasure of adding to the list.
His greatest favourite
Is the young beginner.

It doesn’t matter if she’s rich,
Ugly or beautiful;
If she wears a skirt,
You know what he does.

My favorite sung line:

La piccina, la piccina,
la piccina la piccina la piccina la piccina la piccina la piccina,
la piccina è ognor vezzosa è ognor vezzosa è ognor vezzosa

(the little, the little, the liddle liddle liddle liddle liddle liddle ones are always chaaarming, are always chaaarming, are always chaaarming)

In fact I seem to only like pets that are much smaller than my hand. This ensures that they cannot be held easily as they tend to have a prey response. And that they must be inspected carefully to be seen at all. Moreover, one must put consistent effort into attempting to see them in order to be able to discern them readily; it is not a trivial matter, being able to see a thing so small that can hide in so many small crevices. It is not that I care for the ostensible weakness or triviality of the small, which can be crushed so easily, but that I care to see carefully. After banishing mon cheri he’s become vanishingly small, I keep on looking at the few photos I have of him and wishing there were more, I wish he had an OnlyFans, no joke, I’m that kind of sicko.

When young, Stephen was quite like a train, always ready and willing to drive him from A to B. How, for every school day in elementary and middle school years, from 5 years to 13, he’d drive him and his brother and sister to a school a 20 minute drive away and pick them up. And then, for years after, and still now, driving them where they wanted and needed to go. This form of love that is, more than anything, physical labor. How they’d encase themselves in this car, their lives revolving around it, Stephen would move it to his will but really, it was never his will but the cars.

That was my dad too, always driving me and my sister places… We’d listen to strange music in the car. Brahms cello sonatas. Anner Bylsma’s strangely tuned Bach. Glenn Gould of course, and Schubert’s Winterreise. To this day I’m attached to the same music, and I wouldn’t be able to give a defense for it to a skeptic of Schubert or Gould.

The train is where you see how people endure loneliness.

It’s easy to see how each and every person is held together by a thin train of thought. Jerry was on the train, heading to his father’s. His father, Stephen, who was his closest friend and who had not been responding to his texts for the first time in years. This was all he could think about while underground and heading into the city.

Now that we’re not seeing each other I’m reading his writing more carefully. I really like what he wrote about his dad, and recently I responded to an email my dad sent me about renewing my driver’s license with some actual questions: How are you? Have you been reading or watching anything interesting lately?

Love that is, more than anything, physical labor: this is often what it was to be with Jerry; particularly when I biked to his place close to midnight to sleep with him after he had biked 80 miles, as if to tuck the child into bed, my bike ride barely anything, but still a small effort. And all his efforts, far more of them, the bookshelf he dragged to me, the walks and bike rides to me after fishing, the fruit he acquired and sliced.

We spent our last night together in my apartment after having gone to Eichler’s Judaica on 13th Ave of Boro Park, at the odd hour of 9:30 PM, where I bought a Koren Shalem siddur and he pointed out various books, including a memoir someone had written from prison, and Maimonides’s The Guide for the Perplexed, which I bought the next day used at the Strand. Jerry is a perf person to traverse space with, but perhaps we struggled with time. How many times should we see each other a week? What constitutes too much or too little? Are we about to get bored with each other? Are we sleeping too late or not enough? What’s going to happen in the future? Why can’t Bibi commit to an endless present, or to the idea of a future? I often wondered if getting more deeply involved with Jerry would eventually lead me to realize that my obsession with Judaism was nothing but a defensive cage, but in reality it only highlighted the extent to which I needed to investigate this thing; I have to do it as a woman alone.

Can’t this writing go on forever? I find myself on the defense, wanting to stake the claim that none of this is mourning; no, I am not simply trying to get rid of my memories of jerry by recording them. I am not simply trying to move on, I am not simply trying to reduce things to their real minimum. I am trying to stake a claim for how these things go on affecting me, how they remain alive in me, and how I want to continue to investigate what it was that happened and which continues to happen.