XIII. On Being (Porous)

; or, a Pre-op Diary

WEDNESDAY (one week until surgery):

I wake early and take Olive to the park. After breakfast, I do thirty minutes of yoga on my living room floor, then put on the Ronettes and draw a bath, remembering the prohibition in my pre-op care guide: “Do not submerge your incisions. Avoid Baths and Pools for six weeks.” I wonder why these words are capitalized as if they are proper nouns, thinking how this confers a peculiar weight on them. Should I suppose I’ll yearn for these experiences more intensely in the weeks following surgery than I might have otherwise?

A friend asked the other day if I am frightened of the procedure, and I told her no, that physical discomfort rarely scares me, perhaps because so much of my life’s rhythm has been measured in a tiresome waltz between violence and dissociation. My capacity for endurance does not seem to me to be in question, particularly after two years spent in an almost perpetual pre- or post-surgical state. I had my breasts done in February of 2023 and my face four months later in June. This past July I had a difficult health scare for which I was put, again, under general anesthesia, all while preparing this entire year for bottom surgery next Wednesday.

I say, in fact, I feel relief that this will likely be the last surgery I go through for many years, injuries or acts of god notwithstanding.

If I am worried, this worry concerns other losses—time, income during the twelve weeks of recovery, regular exercise, walking freely and all over the place, and yes, long ~*~*Baths. These are the routine, stabilizing gestures I’ve learned to manage the thick suck of depression with. I am anxious, too, in a way I hadn’t expected, about three months of celibacy. Though my romantic life this year has been devastating, I nonetheless feel I’ve been in the midst of a sexual awakening. My desire seems finally to be mine, no longer merely responsive or performative: I fuck, and it’s not just in service of men.¹

I have come, after countless remote years, to inhabit my particular pleasure, and now again, must relearn what it means to be present in my body, to experience the abundance of my eroticism, to thoughtfully and ecstatically give myself over to another.

In the bath I meticulously examine this body, my softness, my breasts rising above the water’s surface—how my hands seem to shimmer and blur when I submerge them. I draw them over the flesh of my stomach, my thighs, my nipples, as though for the first time. In my bed, after, I carry myself to orgasm, once, twice, four times, seeking, I suppose, some sort of ineradicable Final Orgasm, or in any case, the last one with this version of my sexual body.

I make lunch. I clean the apartment. Strange, how I find myself thinking I must tidy things for when K gets home, as if my ex-boyfriend will be returning from a long trip, as if my ex is not my ex but still the man who loves me, still the man living in this now-silent apartment beside me, still the one who will envelop and protect me through my recovery.

But he is not that man anymore, and never will be again. When I last saw him in early November, he’d finally gone cold; he was over it, this revelation passed through me like an electric shock. We had sex, and though I’d first slept with him mere hours into our second date, this was the only time he’d ever fucked me like a stranger. Once he left, I knew he had won.

I see, at last, that I am scared. Not of pain itself, but of being alone inside it.

a recently fatherless-daughter who doesn’t know mommy will be in the hospital for six days (2024)

THURSDAY (six days until surgery):

I’ve been invited to a neighbor’s Thanksgiving dinner. They hope to set me up with a friend who’s visiting for the weekend, a man I met briefly in the immediate aftermath of leaving K. The attraction had been mutual, as my neighbor later confirmed, though (as I recall) I’d been running late for work, feeling rather hectic, and was still in that evacuated, post-breakup state. At the time my ex hadn’t yet moved out of the apartment, which meant each night for four weeks I was sleeping beside a man who despised me. I still loved him but it wasn’t enough, and hadn’t been for nearly a year.

I ambled through those summer days like a zombie, except I had no hunger, and nothing to animate me.

I take another bath, shaving my legs, deep-conditioning my hair. My desirous ablutions. I exfoliate and moisturize and stand nude in front of my full-length mirror. I look fantastic. I perfume myself. I am perfectible; a dazzling thing. I plan my outfit thoughtfully: modest enough in case any parents are present, but slinky and winking, too, for I want this man to drown in his need of me. I knew he’d liked my tattoos. I leave them partly visible. Black bra beneath a sheer lace top; black wool miniskirt; tights, sheer too. Leather thigh-high boots for good measure, though shoes will of course be shed at the door.

The connection is instantaneous and overwhelming. We pretend to be part of the party for an hour, ninety minutes, but then his enormous hands are on my thighs, squeezing me, he is leaning in to whisper something immaterial and I feel him inhale the scent of me. “You smell incredible,” he says. To the others at the table he remarks on my beauty, bragging about being sat next to me, as if claiming me. I say to him I’m sure we’re being insufferable, but I feel high, I cannot help it. We flit in and out of the conversation, a dynamic pair, acting, already, like a new couple.

He sells himself to me, in the style a man will, talking of his work in a way that establishes his position as a provider. He discusses a history in local farming, an adeptness with animals and children (he doesn’t want kids; I think of mentioning I can’t conceive, but don’t). His hands grow more eager; we draw nearer. He says he wants to fuse with me, to taste me. If I were less of a fantasist, I’d have admitted to myself in this moment that the way he phrases this—“I want to taste you”—indicates he doesn’t know I’m trans, or at any rate, assumes I have a vagina already, but I am besotted, I am melting, and I am tipsy, and he’s told me he wants to spend the whole weekend with me. He’s feeling everything I’m feeling, he said so, and the fact is, I will have a vagina in six days, so what could go wrong but everything?

He has to sleep beside me tonight, he says, he needs to feel as close to me as possible. In my apartment, he greets Olive before carrying me to the bed. He’s a behemoth of a man; tall, burly, a builder. I’m so turned on I could die. Once I’m naked, though, he flips out—I am left to assume the reason—and goes stock still, then silent. His face is red, his expression angry. I can’t tell if I’m scared or just in shock. I begin to cry. I apologize then, for my body or for my crying, I don’t know which. I say I have surgery in under a week, but whatever magic held us in that delicate suspension has dissolved, and I understand, too, by the way he shows me no compassion in this moment—by his refusal even to look at me as I ask him what’s going on, to talk with me about what’s happening—that there is no world in which he wouldn’t hurt me.

I don’t know what I was thinking.

I can’t stop sobbing. I hear myself saying sorry, sorry, and I am choking on the word. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He leaves. I cry myself to sleep.

Friday (five days until surgery):

I wake hungover. I am violently ill. I hadn’t had that much (four glasses of wine and two shots of mescal, sure, though with dinner and across eight hours), but my tolerance has slipped sharply in the past three months since I’ve cut back on drinking. Preparing for this surgery has rendered me profoundly protective of my body. Obviously I quit smoking, even though I only ever had a few cheat cigs each week—this time, though, I know I’ve quit for good. I got better about long walks each morning, yoga every day. I stopped drinking during bar shifts², and after I stopped dating around, became a temperate and sort of occasional drinker. A victory.

I did not want, in the throes of a breakup, to go on relying on my usual crutches: booze, drugs, men. I longed to be present in my fear and this loss, to sit in the discomfort, to truly feel all my terrible sadness.

I can no longer avoid facing myself. Such disavowals never eased my suffering; they merely deferred and exacerbated things.

After six months of this, I am exhausted.

When at last I open my curtains, I see the man walking his dog outside. I feel ashamed. I feel monstrous. I feel like the traumatic climax at the end of some transphobic arthouse film from the eighties. I run to the bathroom to vomit.

All day long, I cannot keep food or water down. I feel as if I’m purging some great bolus, as if every toxin I’ve ever ingested is bubbling up for expulsion. I lie on the couch for hours, prone in my sarcophagus.

I insist to myself that the immensity of my grief this morning only partly concerns this particular man. I think I really just wanted one last, happy weekend. For eight hours, I had a vision of another life, of marriage, of quiet—a life I have always longed for and some version of which I’ve recently lost. Instead I find myself flanked by this strange conflagration of bad intensities. Charlotte agrees, says the timing of this experience just seems “really heavy.” She says she wishes it hadn’t happened, that she could have protected me from it, and I am reminded how unbelievably lucky I am, to have such brilliant women in my life, women who have held and guarded me against this obliterative year.

I finish my Girls rewatch. Hannah becoming a mother in the final season is the right storyline for her character, I think, really a quite brilliant narrative closure, but it pains me, too. Lately I’ve been telling myself I no longer want children, but some days, I think how I’ve spent my whole life persuading myself I didn’t want things I thought I couldn’t have, things I didn’t feel I deserved. Happiness, mainly.

Today I tell myself I am not made for love. I am made for what has just happened: the shock of humiliation. I was made so men could drop into my life like cyclones, do whatever they want to me, shame me, break me, and vanish.

The sentiment is familiar; it’s the sort of thing I liked to tell myself in the wake of my rapes: that violation was all I was good for, that I was marked and everyone knew it, that no man could ever love a woman so soiled, so disgusting.

I have labored for years to rid myself of these thoughts, but today, the abject feeling overcomes me. I am porous and fragile. I am annihilated. I am nothing.

SATURDAY (four days before surgery):

It seems a particularly cruel twist of fate that the “problem” of my body for this man is one that will undergo the precise transformation he desires in less than a week. I find myself wondering what might have happened if we’d met in the spring. But love and lust are always troubles of timing; the cadence of want is precarious, an easily breakable thing.

Speculations about some other sequence of events, anyhow, will only hurt me more than I am already hurting. What I am imagining—a fantasy I have so often suffered—is an experience of being loved by a man who has no meaningful love to offer me.

I cannot let myself fall into these patterns of thought, besides. My body is not a problem, and generally speaking, I don’t feel shame in or about it. In truth, men worship my body, and after a decade of disentangling the trauma of a lifetime of sexual violence, I finally adore it, too. My issue, anyhow, has never been one of commanding attraction—what I hadn’t known was how to demand better treatment, to recognize or communicate my needs, to have faith in the notion that I was worthy of love. Until my ex, I had never been in a healthy relationship with a man. I was so scared of being alone, I took whatever scraps I could get.

But I don’t enter this surgery from a place of lack or shame. I enter it through desire. I travel toward it with a feeling of deep gratitude, as, after all, it is a blessing to have wandered across such a vast horizon of experience. I do not understand my future vagina as substitutive; it is an expansion of my earthly possibilities, my parameters, my form, my pleasure.

I see, too, I’ve become accustomed to New York men, men mostly familiar with trans women’s bodies, or who at least are game. Often I’ve been made to feel ridiculous for insisting on disclosure before dates, as if I’m somehow ruining the mood. Usually on my end it’s been an attempt to coordinate some measure of safety—as if transparency has ever protected me against disaster or violence. But these days, mostly, when men behave badly toward me, it is in the conventional ways men who date women behave badly.

In the first three months after my breakup, I dated furiously, fucked manically. I was saturated with an overwhelming, inexorable need. Of my gentleman callers, only one took any issue with my transness, and really, it was less an issue than the fact that he was a collector. I’ve encountered the type before: the fetishist, the sort of man who likes checking off sexual boxes. He didn’t recoil; he only extracted what it was he felt curiosity about and moved on. This didn’t faze me, for it had nothing to do with me—not the broader fact of my self, who I am, the person I know myself to be. It had nothing to do with my soul, as it were. I remained intact.

I am reminded that the ease with which I now pursue romance is perhaps anomalous. My coworker at the yoga studio says she can see why I always have a new story about some man; she says I am magnetic, that of course all these hordes of men want me and have no notion what to do with me when I deign to entertain them. Fumblers, she says, and I laugh.

My neighbor checks in and apologizes. “Are you okay?” he asks. I am decidedly not okay but can’t bring myself to say so. I don’t know what the man told him, though I guess I assumed he’d said something about my uncontrollable crying, speculating on my “craziness.” Men always convince themselves a woman is hysterical if she dares to acknowledge or protest her own debasement.

But if I’m being honest with myself, I was in hysterics. Which isn’t to say what happened was my fault, to say he wasn’t callous or I wasn’t justifiably disoriented, even scared, but that if I wasn’t at the end of this awful year, and if I didn’t have surgery in a few days, and if my bodily vulnerability didn’t seem so outsized in that moment, I might have been more measured. I might have been able to pull my self together.

I tell my neighbor it’s alright; that things don’t always work out; they can’t. Probably I should be relieved to have found out so quickly.

After he leaves, though, I cry. I cry in the laundromat, too, watching my clothes shimmy and bounce around in the industrial dryer. I cry in yoga class during child’s pose, when the instructor approaches and presses my sacrum downward. “Let the mask of your face go,” she says, which I suppose I do. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and clean up, but cry again in pigeon. At home I cry in the bath, and once more when Olive approaches me, her big brown eyes wet with anxiety.

I tell her sorry, I say I’m trying to be strong but finding it hard. I am so tired of having to be strong.

This year, more than any other, has shown me my capacity for tears is endless. My ex hated my crying, he’d claim it was deliberate, manipulative, but I don’t know how not to feel the feelings that surface in me. I asked once if he’d ever reflected on his own strategic deployment of cold stoicism. My weeping at times embarrasses me, as if indicating a lack of discipline. It reveals to others that they have the ability to disrupt my smoothness, to wound me. For many years I never cried. I thought it weak. I couldn’t let anyone know I was weak—I thought such a display would predispose me to more violence. I shut down, and for decades I was utterly absent in my own life. I can’t go back to that. I won’t.

I want to tell myself it’s wondrous I had eight hours of joy with someone, that I felt so astonishing and so wanted, that I was still able—as I have not lately been able—to imagine myself in love again. I try to believe my hope is a glimmering, irreducible thing, especially after the life I have lived, that this hope means I am still dreaming of and orienting toward a fuller, a more beautiful world.

Today, though, my hope mostly feels like an unmissable target I’ve drawn on my own back.

I can hear the scolding twitter takes and think pieces about “female agency” humming in the background. Why don’t I just pick better men? Hell, why not give them up altogether? I am an agent in my life, it’s true: an active participant. Does this mean I control the behavior of others? Does it mean I’ve earned what I am given? For many years I believed as much. It was so easy to shoulder the weight of my violations.

Irrationally I wonder now if remaining open to love is a choice for which I must be punished.

tfw you are considering your body just before ~metamorphosis~

SUNDAY (three days before surgery):

I have a dull dream in which I dart through a series of cornfields and into a house where I’m meant to be cat-sitting. In the basement I discover the cats, but find, also, an old couch from my mother’s home, and photographs of my mom from a time before I was born. My mother with strange friends, strange men, my mother as a teenager, as a young girl. It unnerves me that my friend has been hiding these objects in her basement; I lock the cats indoors and flee. I hide in a gas station, although I know not from what. I go to a house party, where I am invited but unwelcome, and where I run into the man, who I know is the man but who looks like D. I go hunting for booze, and though there are literally dozens of fridges in the house, find only bottled water. The man and I end up in a car together and I ask if we can talk to one another about what happened like adults, soberly. He pretends he has never met me before. Still I am trapped in the car with him.

I wake at 6. I read Emily Witt’s Health and Safety for twenty or thirty minutes before I allow myself to look at my phone. I see D had texted in the middle of the night, saying he hopes I’m feeling loved—but by whom? I should resist the impulse to admit to him that I’m bereft, as he doesn’t want or need to hear that, it’s inappropriate, and anyway, he’s out of state until Wednesday, and he’s engaged (they are open), and no man owes me anything. He’ll be flying back into the city right as I surface from the black box of anesthesia.

Olive refused to poop on her night walk so she is whining and impatient with me. I dress and brush my teeth. I tug on her sweater. At 6:45 we head to the park. It is finally cold, bracingly so, and this shocks something out of me. I feel sad, yes, but like a sort of person today—focused, somehow, and remembering, too, my excitement about surgery. The park is filled with the songs of starlings, as usual. We stop at the fence that looks out over the cemetery. From there, you have an entirely unimpeded view of the Manhattan skyline. The light in this hour is silver and high and clear, and I think how if I just look closely enough, I could find the surgical pavilion where I’ll be laid up in three days.

I do yoga. I have been doing two, sometimes three videos each day, on top of the customary two or three in-person classes per week. At my final pre-op appointment, I asked how soon I’d be able to resume practice, but the nurse’s answer was vague; it would depend on the dissolution of my sutures, the healing of my incisions, what my body felt it was able to endure. I want to get as much in as possible. I want to spend these last days with Adriene, who appears to me so imperturbable, and whose life does not look either alien or glamorous, only peaceful. My god, how I long for peace.

The man leaves today. There is part of me that wants to ask him to talk, I want to understand what he’s been feeling, and I don’t know if this is my writer’s curiosity or some last-ditch effort at real connection. His behavior toward me was cruel and irreconcilable, but with obvious exceptions, it isn’t in my nature to view other people as villains. Selfishly, I guess, I want also to redeem myself, to demonstrate that I am not an hysterical woman, that I am resilient, but probably I would just cry again. And then what.

Another part of me thinks of the coming months with relief, in the presumption that my sexual unavailability will protect me from the whims of men, that I will be a nun now, cloistered in my home, quiet and healing, readying myself for a different world.

In my kitchen to no one I say my heart is broken. It’s been like this all year. My heart was fucking broken for six months before the end of my relationship. I no longer felt cared for or attended to. I began to question my worth and my beauty, to wonder what awful thing I’d done to make the only man I’d ever truly loved lose interest in me. It’s why I had to leave. I haven’t allowed myself to face this until now.

I think how I am crazy to share all this in public, how flayed I feel, but writing through the muck is all I’ve ever known. Anyhow, I tell myself, no one reads anymore. Mostly this will go unopened, unacknowledged; it will be a message in a bottle that sinks to the bottom of the sea.

MONDAY (two days before surgery):

After I finished writing yesterday, H texted to ask if I still wanted to see him. We’d made tentative plans for the afternoon, in part because we understood there was a time limit for how much longer I’d be able to be fucked. Yes, I replied without hesitation, although immediately I found myself wondering if I was still too fragile from what happened Thursday, if I was throwing myself into a situation that could compound my grief. But H and I have slept together before, which isn’t to say no surprises or challenges are possible, but that, at least, I know our bodies fit, that he’d given me a great deal of pleasure and had made me feel safe while doing so.

“I am full of desire!” I exclaimed during an intermission, and H laughed. “But I am!” I said to him, and he told me he knew it, that it was just so perfectly Me to declare such a thing in earnestness. “You can’t get this anywhere else,” I replied, clownishly bouncing my tits.

Because I’d like to go on sleeping with H once I’m able, I’ll say only that the night was beautiful, and that it passed.

He tucked me in and went home. I called Olive to bed. We slept through the night as though dead.

Today I must run my last errands, clean the apartment, work through an essay on which I am behind in a mostly self-imposed deadline. I need to send emails, and texts, to finish three freelance pitches and to confirm aftercare dates with friends.

I am sore in places and tender. I do more yoga. I have been occasionally cheating on Adriene with this utterly unhinged couple who work under the name Boho Beautiful Yoga. I feel like I’d rather kill myself than be in the same room as them, but the practices are shockingly solid, and the woman offers a wealth of yin videos.

I masturbate, remembering. I am relieved that Thursday was not my last sexual experience before surgery. I’ve washed it away with last night’s pleasure. My skin glows. I take photos of myself. Who knows when I’ll next feel lovely.

I am nauseous, having commenced the pre-surgical laxative regimen I am forced to follow. Another purge.

Emily, who will be staying at the apartment with Olive while I’m in the hospital, drops by to go over the mechanics of her care. They bring pastries; I make peaberry tea. They remind me how wonderful it is that I’m doing this incredible thing for myself, that it’s okay to feel excited about a transformation I’ve wanted my entire life. Charlotte says something similar, that the experience is mine, and no one can take it from me.

D texts. A texts.

My editor messages me to see how long I think I’ll need to be left alone by my publisher. “A week?” I offer, and he says I should, or anyhow can, take the month. I’m too retentive for that. I’ll be restless as soon as the Oxy is gone, which will hopefully be early on in the process. I hate Oxy, it doesn’t lessen discomfort for me, it just makes me feel as if I’m floating helplessly around in the pain.

I take a long bath. I finish Health and Safety. My nausea worsens, and I try to cure it by singing and dancing in the living room to a playlist I’m working on for my hospital stay. I catch up with the girls. I do a restorative practice, wishing with my whole heart that I was allowed to take an edible.

Instead I crawl into bed. I’m nearly finished with the new Hollinghurst, but I don’t want to take it with me to Langone. I want something I’m not in the middle of. My fresh pussy calls for a fresh book—I’m superstitious, maybe. I take my meds. I pass out.

TUESDAY (the day before):

I bolt awake at 5:30, from a dream, I think, but the haze of unconsciousness dissipates immediately. I don’t recall a thing. Olive hears me stir, staggers slowly from her dog bed, and then leaps into our shared one. She paws the duvet, demanding entry. I lift the blankets. She circles and curls into herself between my legs, licking my foot cursorily before falling back asleep.

I try to read but can’t focus. I begin running through the list of last things: clean the apartment, change the bedding for Emily, pick up a Christmas tree, call my mother, call my sister, email my editor at [magazine], email Kate, email my publicist. Wait for the call from the surgical team about what time I’m expected tomorrow.

I am remembering the last serious procedure, eighteen months ago. The nurses questioned and prodded me, inserted my IV, and vanished. We waited—K and I—for two and a half hours as reruns of The Golden Girls looped above us on a small TV. Into the crook of my elbow the needle needled, a dull pricking of half-felt pain. Was I scared? Mainly I remember being tense, excitable, as on Christmas Eve, with the elated anticipation of inevitable discovery. Will I receive what I so badly desire?

I begin to cry again; last night I fell asleep (again) crying, thinking how K held my hand through those long hours waiting for the surgeon to arrive. Lately it’s been easy to feel bitter towards him, especially after our last meeting, when we’d discussed the possibility of reconciliation, just before he disappeared altogether. I should have seen it coming. That afternoon I could tell he was finally feeling better, moving past things; the pain had begun to recede in him, while for me, unexpectedly, it went on gathering force with the passing of time. November was harder than October, which was more grief-filled than September, which was twice as bad as August, and so on.

In the past weeks I’ve latched onto my anger, I think because anger makes forward momentum appear more predetermined, somehow cleaner. But there was so much happiness in our relationship, too, and so much that felt easy about it. We rarely fought, though perhaps this was part of the trouble—we never fought well. Probably a lot of resentments bubbled just under the skin of things. But there was a lot of pleasure, a lot of laughter, and I had never laughed with a man the way I laughed with K. Recently I told my therapist that this has been the greatest disappointment of my recent half-year as a single woman. None of these men make me laugh, as in really laugh—deeply, uncontrollably—and that always counts more than you expect it to.

I’ve had some fun in these months, but most men mostly don’t put effort in; there’s something mechanical to modern dating. It lacks effervescence; it lacks romance. Maybe this is what felt so indescribable about My Eight Hour Thanksgiving Fling: that man decided on and proceeded to woo me. A woman should be made to feel she is dazzling. Perhaps particularly in New York, perhaps especially against the needful, unrelenting siren song of the smartphone, it is rare to feel you’ve commanded a person’s undivided attention.

That night called to mind the feelings I had when things were at their best with K. With other men I was always disposable; a doll in a toy box full of them. K made me feel exceptional, irreducible. Before him I’d never been handled gently, with tenderness; no man I’d ever been with was scared to lose me. And to me, K was so strange, so utterly unlike other men, with a brilliant creative eye and a deeply unanticipatable way of seeing the world. Desire thrives on mystery, and I often didn’t know what to expect from him. Not in the frightening way, as with other men, but in the sense that our time together was so frequently surprising to me.

The thing is, I don’t want to be angry with him, I never have, and I want so much to keep the beauty we shared alive. He changed me, irrevocably, and I will forever cherish our time together. I see, too, how holding that goodness close—feeling present in those moments—leaves me raw; it anchors me in the past. Letting go of him feels like letting go of the only real love I’ve ever experienced, a kind of love I’m terrified I won’t find again.

I shake the thought off. I do yoga. I get the call. I’m expected at the hospital by 7:30AM, a relief, as I can’t have food or water after midnight. Late surgery is hell.

I call my mother. I call my sister. I ride the L train; a cute guy dancing to the music streaming through his headphones notices me and grins. We eye each other shyly until he exits at the stop before mine. I run my errands, though the miniature Christmas trees aren’t stocked yet at the Whole Foods. I purchase two books at McNally Jackson to take with me for my hospital stay. The person who rings me up tells me they love my all-pink ensemble: “The books match you,” they say. I hadn’t noticed, but it’s true.

I see A. “You’re going to look incredible with a pussy.” It’s true.

I cum.

I tell my therapist about the week, and this document of it, and she asks why I’m so resistant to letting myself be angry with the people I love. It’s something to do with the history of my disposability, I think, my terror of abandonment. I conceal my bad feelings, because if I express them, I contaminate something in the relationship. If I have conflict with someone, they won’t care enough to work toward resolution; they’ll just drop me. Certainly, it’s what happened with every man I dated until K. I’d tolerate anything. What I wanted didn’t matter—I needed so badly to be loved. The therapeutic hour vanishes in seconds.

I tinker with the sequencing of my little playlist. In the shower I wash my hair, I shave my legs, I ready the body. I won’t be allowed to shower for several days. As I rub lotion into my belly and over my ass I realize I’ll likely be under anesthesia in twelve hours.

No more time to write. I have to schedule this for publication, set my alarms, make dinner, sleep.

1. I feel I should say—because my breakup slithers through this meditation like a half-seen ghost—that this healthier, more pleasurable sense of my sexual self was made possible by the world I shared with my ex. However things ended, being in a loving relationship with a man to whom I could trust my body revolutionized everything I had ever known about my eroticism. The fact that we aren’t together anymore doesn’t and will never erase this.

2. For what it’s worth, this is a not-unusual practice in New York bartending, but I’ve been at it a long time and was ready to stop.