Author’s Note: this piece took a week to write, each sentence breaking my heart. it might be one of the most truthful things i have ever written. i try to understand myself and find meaning between the words.

I don’t think being asexual affects me much and then i’m noticing how many plots in ‘friends’ are based on sex. how many relationships in the sitcom pivot around this accepted, ubiquitous thing. washed with that late 1990s, early 2000s essentialism and that laugh track. and i’m sitting there, rewatching friends in a semi-self-torturous way. and that laugh track. 

And i watch sex scenes in movies with this aching gnawing feeling. it is a tired mixture of jealousy and quiet resignation. in ‘queer’ there is this scene where daniel craig’s character, a tired old man searching for connection, reaches for the back of his young lover with this trembling tenderness and suddenly i am just  drowning in this stupid mocking emotion of longing to long. Too-long.

Rising through me like arms around my chest. and always with this out-of-body aside, a crow tilting its head in perplexion.

And i called myself a poet as a child and, with similes and sighs, made love and closeness such a momentous thing and 
sex 
was an abstract predetermined that would be this poetic solid thing. 

The prose fights with the perplexing realities i research with the detachment of the uninitiated. i hold ‘sleeping together’ or ‘making love’ in some privileged space of words. and i want to want with this unrelenting 
hunger. everyone is in a process of becoming or becoming one with this tenderness and this pleasure and this joy they speak of with such callousness. 

I had a dream the other night where i kissed a boy, some vague facsimile of a background character in my waking life, and in the dream i stopped and said there’s something i have to tell you and when i explained, with such ease, the dream-boy said that’s okay and kissed me, still, and i fell asleep beside him. 

And when i wake, i cling to flowers and my friends like one clings to metaphors and i try to love them just the right amount.