Personal

Little Girl Blue

Kate Sloan

We met on an app with a blue icon. It seems too saccharine to say, too obvious to point out, but there it is. I saw him first as a blue-eyed boy in my Twitter DMs.

“Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance?” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Five minutes before our planned first date (that neither of us was sure was a date) in a midtown coffee shop, he DMed me, “Just got here and snagged us a table! Wearing a blue button-down shirt.” I knew immediately that I was doomed.

A blue-eyed boy in a blue button-down is a crush catastrophe waiting to happen. A periwinkle-edged bomb threatening to spark into smithereens. I wasn’t nervous, until the moment I read that message at the 5th Avenue intersection and preemptive desire bloomed in my belly.

My smile was too big when I walked through the door. His shirt was as promised; his eyes were so blue. He kept staring at me hard as I spun stories for him, like he was trying to X-ray through my irises straight to my corneas. “I feel like you’re really listening to me,” I said, breathless, the third time his gaze passed through me so razor-sharp that I lost my train of thought mid-sentence.

“I am,” he said, brow furrowed, like: of fucking course I am. I wanted to kiss him already. I knew all that blue would doom me.

“So what would it be a symptom of, to start seeing colors – or, more oddly, just one color – more acutely? Mania? Monomania? Hypomania? Shock? Love? Grief?”

Two days after I got back from the New York trip when I met him, he texted me: “Oh, by the way, keep an eye on the mail tomorrow.”

Hunched over my laptop in a café window and already caffeine-hyped as hell, I breathed slow to try to still my heart. But I couldn’t keep myself from tapping out: “…??? The physical mail?”

He wrote, “Yeah.” I wrote, “……?????” He was, as usual, calm. I was, as usual, very not.

The next day, I waited by the door with a cup of tea, thrilling, swooning, wondering. When the package arrived, I clawed it from the box with an agitated grin, then tore it open unthinkingly. A copy of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets fell into my lap, and I made a sound like a mama lion protecting her cub.

Bluets had been on my Amazon wishlist since the month previous, when Rachel Syme – whose writing I adore – had recommended it. She called it “the very best book about a color and a breakup and obsession and melancholy and rare facts about pigmentation,” so, obviously, I wanted to read it. And now, as I opened it up, a gift note fell out with this impossibly handsome boy’s name inked under the Amazon letterhead. “Kate, I love this book, and when I saw it on your wishlist, I didn’t want anyone else to get it for you first,” he’d written. “I hope you love it too.” I bit my lip hard and wondered – anxiously, irrationally – if this meant he maybe, kinda, sorta, possibly liked me.

“Did you open it?” he asked me via text, and I spilled thank-yous and exclamations onto him. But he merely replied, “Did you ask first?” No. No, I had not.

“You know better. I’ll probably have to punish you,” he wrote. I could almost see the devious, teasing smile emanating from his punctuation. “You should bring it to New York after you’ve read it, and I’ll hit you with it. That’ll be your punishment for getting a little too excited and opening it without asking first.”

I choked on my tea. “Okay, Sir,” I said. “I can do that.” And I did.

“Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can.”

I read Bluets slowly, savoring it, because every sentence was so packed with meaning and pain that I had to pause several times a page just to breathe and think. It is a book about Maggie Nelson’s obsession with the color blue, during her recovery from a break-up, and it resonated deeply with me. I’d had inexplicable obsessions of my own, in the months since the recent break-up that had speared through my heart.

One day, Sir – I was calling him Sir by then – sent me to a local coffee shop he’d chosen for me because I needed caffeine and food and felt overwhelmed by the world. I sat on a church pew in the sunny café, sipping a latte, munching the specific croissant he’d told me to get, and paging through Bluets with biblical reverence.

“This book is like if Didion was a philosopher,” I texted him, and he replied, “God, you’re brilliant. Fuck. I need you.” I blushed a little and slid further down into my seat, made smaller by his words, made heavier and more meaningful by Maggie Nelson’s.

Twenty minutes and several pages later, I texted him, “lol I’m getting too emotional, I think I should go back to bed,” and he responded, “Welp, saw that coming.” He knew my heart so well already. I trudged through the snow, tears spilling down my cheeks for no reason except that I was so happy about my new relationship and the safety and fulfilment I felt therein, there was nowhere else for my feelings to leak but up and out. I cried in my building’s lobby. I cried in the elevator. I cried in the hallway. I cried as I unlocked the door and weaved toward my bedroom and collapsed onto my big, blue bed.

“Thank you for not thinking my feelings are excessive,” I texted Sir, tears splashing on my touchscreen.

“I am not at all worried about your feelings being excessive,” he replied immediately. “Not even 1%. Not at all.” I cried some more. My periwinkle pillowcases turned navy, in broad, damp patches.

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping – its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.”

One day I asked him if he’d like to pick the hex code that would represent him in my sex spreadsheet, and he was exactly as excited about it as I’d hoped he would be.

Nine minutes elapsed. I could hear him thinking and Googling and eye-dropper’ing from 500 miles away. I read a few pages of Bluets in the interim. My phone beeped. “Can you see how #5FC2EA would look for me, baby? It’s from the cover of Bluets, so I think it fits.”

Weeks later, we laid in a hotel bed side-by-side after sex and I pulled up my spreadsheet on my computer. Just a couple of naked nerds. I opened the custom colors menu in Google Sheets. I sleuthed out the hex code in my messages app. I typed it carefully into my browser. I applied it to the cells bearing Sir’s name. As those rows flooded with brilliant blue, we both moaned.

“It’s perfect,” he said, awed.

“Yeah. It is.”

“One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.”

We were only on our second date when we discussed him collaring me, but by that point we’d talked on the phone for dozens of hours, so it only felt a little ridiculous.

“It has to be blue, right? There are some blue chainmaille collars on Etsy that I like, with heart-shaped padlocks, and there’s Tarina Tarantino heart necklaces,” I rambled over tortelloni at a stunning, stately restaurant he’d taken me to. “Or, the company that makes my turquoise collar also makes a royal blue one.”

“I know,” he said, immediately, piercing my hazel eyes with his blue ones like pinning a bug to a corkboard. “I know that.” Gooseflesh overtook my whole body as I indulged in imagining why he knew that: him trawling the L’Amour-Propre website late at night, face bathed in laptop light, breath catching as his eyes fixed on that electric blue.

Weeks later, we revisited the conversation. It became clear there was no other collar for us. “It’s just… perfect,” I murmured, peering at it in my browser in Toronto while he eyed it from his in New York. “Yeah,” he replied. I heard the pivotal click of “Add to Cart.”

“And so I fell in love with a color – in this case, the color blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.”

One afternoon in February, we checked into a Brooklyn hotel. Cool blue sunlight streamed in the big windows and lit up the white queen-sized bed that would house our passion for two days to come. I still felt breathless around him, plagued with stage-fright, terrified I’d fuck something up.

“I brought you something,” he said, pulling a ridiculous oversized chocolate bar from his suitcase for me, and I laughed. “And something else,” he added, and this time he produced a black leather case, which, when he opened it, contained that stunning piece of cobalt suede. Time stood still in my body, like I’d hit “pause” on my heart and lungs. Oh. Wow.

“Do you like it?” I think he said. I don’t exactly remember, because I liked it so much.

He had me kneel in front of him on the floor, and I stared out the window at the birds and cerulean sky and bare tree branches as he pushed my hair to one side and pulled the suede close against my throat. I’d known this moment would stir my emotions but I didn’t know quite how much. Now, feeling his warmth against my back and his clever fingers doing up the buckle at the nape of my neck, I blinked to spill the tears I felt welling in my eyes. I sobbed a little, a soft sound in the sunlit silence.

We went to look in the bathroom mirror together, and I cried more there, struck suddenly by the blue against my throat and the kind-hearted man standing beside me in my reflection. He held me tight and we looked at each other, at ourselves, slightly disbelieving but wanting to believe. I felt overtaken by blue, and also I didn’t feel blue at all.

“If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.”

Magnet

Kate Sloan

Though I’ve had seemingly infinite crushes in my short, limerence-loaded life, few of them were magnetic in the way often described in pop songs. Usually my physical attractions are clipped onto the sides of more romantic lures; it’s rare for that sexual pull to exist loudly and fully as its own boisterous thing.

But three times in my life, I have met a magnet. I hope I meet many more.

“I wanna touch your knee, but very casually. I’m gonna get so near you, so I can hear you, silently sitting very, very close.”

The cute boy in my improv class is ruining my entire academic year.

His open face and unreserved grin, his sloping shoulders and sharp collarbones, his long fingers and strong arms, his tall stature, his dirty sneakers, his tight jeans, his barking laugh. I can’t handle any of it. I can handle exactly none of it.

He is very fucking distracting, in a molecular and neurological way I’ve never quite experienced before. One day I’m journaling before class begins and find my pen wandering off the page as my eyes drift toward him. He’s not even doing anything important, just goofing off with the other boys using props lying around in the classroom, but my gaze stays affixed to his form. I feel like a fucking creep. I am a fucking creep. I don’t know what to do about it.

Another day, I’m talking to some friends in the hallway, and suddenly he walks by. I absorb a cloud of his teenage-boy cologne through deep inhalations and lose my words completely. “Kate?” a pal asks me. “Kate, you just trailed off mid-sentence. What were you saying?” I can’t fucking remember what I was saying. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is the way his shoulderblades look, pressing sharply through the lines of his sweater as he saunters down the hall. Fuck.

We perform together in an improv set, and between scenes, I sit beside him in the wings. I am infinitely, uncomfortably aware of his warm thigh alongside mine. I can feel my body singing, humming, buzzing at a frequency that aches to match his. My molecules purr meltily and moonily at his. But he doesn’t even notice. I am nothing to him. I’m just some girl he kind of knows. This pull I am feeling exists only in my body and I just can’t understand how that can be true.

“I’m a magnet. And you’re a magnet. And we are pushing each other away.”

My second magnet is someone else’s boyfriend. Nothing to be done about it but feel it, and try not to feel it.

This time, at least, I am certain he’s feeling it too. We sit close together at a party, our chairs side-by-side so our eyes don’t quite meet, because that would be Too Much. Other partygoers engage us in conversation and we laugh and talk and sip our drinks, but the inches of air between us are warm and whirring. I want to get just a little closer, feel him just a little more, but I don’t. I can’t.

Flirtatiously, tipsily, I admit to him in a low tone, “I really want to make out with you, but I don’t think that’s allowed.” He smiles like the sweetest little imp and neither confirms nor denies – which is, of course, a “no.” I figured as much. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.

Once or twice, I get up from my seat, beer in hand, to totter to the bathroom. Opening the door afterward, I half-expect to see him just outside, forehead pressed to the doorjamb, mumbling, “I just had to come kiss you.” But he doesn’t. He is good. For the most part.

Past 3AM that night, when I’ve long departed the party and am half-catatonic in bed, I get a text from him: “I really wanted to make out with you tonight too.” I know he did, is the thing. It radiated off him like waves of heat. What an awful, wonderful, terrible thing.

I start avoiding parties where I know he’ll be, because resisting that magnetic pull is possible, but not pleasurable. I’m tired of torture. One evening of aching was enough.

“What is the centre between two centres of attention? Is there a centre between two centres of attention? Or only tension between two centres of attention?”

Sometimes you don’t recognize a magnet right away when you meet them. Sometimes the magnetism has to sublimate, stagnate, before it roars to life.

I meet my Sir in a Manhattan coffee shop, before I know he’s going to be my Sir, before I know he’s going to be my anything. He’s wearing a blue button-down that sets off his cornflower eyes, and the excited-but-guarded smile you flash at your Twitter crush when you’re nervous they’re not gonna like you IRL. I suppress my swooning, because we are in public, for fuck’s sake.

We’ve been talking animatedly for almost an hour before I realize the boy across from me is, indeed, a magnetic forcefield. “Would it be too intimate,” he begins, slowly, watching my eyes widen, “if we traded phones and looked at each other’s podcasts?” And then he leans across the table, ostensibly to show me his screen, but really it’s to dial that electric current up to eleven. My eyes want to slam shut as he gets that close to me, because I feel it, I feel the pull, and it’s such a rare and marvelous thing that I want to savor it in every fizzing atom of my little body.

“Love a good table-lean,” I say to him weeks later, over the phone, making fun of him for those perfect flirtations on our first date. But I know it wasn’t so much purposeful flirting as it was his desire to get closer to me. I know this because I wanted that, too.

Our second date comes after weeks of planning, sexting, flirting, and dirty-talking over the phone. I’m so nervous, I sweat through my winter coat. I’m so nervous, I swill his peppermint tea from a paper cup I’m clutching with trembling hands. I’m so nervous, I start exhibiting actual goddamn panic attack symptoms at dinner. He talks me through it all, and holds my hand, patient and forgiving and endlessly kind.

After dinner, we wait in the restaurant’s entryway for our Lyft to arrive. It’ll take us to the hotel where we’re going to fuck each other’s bodies and minds all night – but all moments until then are torture. He steps toward me and gives me a soft kiss, quick, like he’s releasing a little air from a valve so the whole machine doesn’t fucking explode. I whimper and keen and swoon forward against him, my whole body wanting the kiss to continue, but it doesn’t. Not yet.

“I feel like a magnet,” I mumble, and it has never felt more true. The heat of my skin and the knot in my gut and the twinge in my heart are all insisting: Touch this boy. But I am good, and I wait.

“Me too,” he says, the bridge of his nose pressed into mine, and then our car arrives, and we get in, and I pray for the invention of time travel solely so I can skip this goddamn car ride and be naked in bed beside this perfect boy in an instant.

I meet his eyes in the dim backseat, and I can see my smoky desire mirrored back at me. I can feel our pulses pounding in sync. I know what’s going to happen. And I know I’m going to like it.

Do You Want It Too?

Kate Sloan

“Being drunk is making me want to call you Daddy,” I hammer out with clumsy thumbs.

Before I can even get anxious about what I’ve said, Sir types back: “Try it.” So I do.

With the right kind of consent-conscious kink nerd, a new D/s relationship is always an exercise in trust and communication. Always a gamble that catapults my heart into my throat. Here’s what I want. Do you want it too? And then, as time goes on: Are you sure?

Three days after we met, I told this beautiful boy, “I wouldn’t say that my feelings about you are quite ‘Daddy dom‘-esque, but I am very into that nurturing, caring type of dominance, and I do feel that way about you.”

“Yeah, I don’t feel like a ‘Daddy,’ per se,” he replied. “But I do know what you mean.”

We laugh about this interaction now. He is such a Daddy. He likes showing me around his city, holding my hand when we cross the street, carrying things for me. He likes ordering for me at restaurants like I’m not even there (“She’ll have the cacio e pepe“) and letting me taste his grown-up musky cocktails (“Want a sip, little one?”). He makes me feel instantly small with just a word, a glance.

“I just came real hard thinking about you sitting on my face and asking me if Daddy was gonna come from that,” he recounts in a text. “Also, you’re gonna take your iron pills when you get home, right, baby?”

I laugh into my coffee cup in a diner when I read these over, and say to my best friend across the table: “He just sent me a filthy sext and then told me to take my meds. I can’t believe he didn’t know he’s a Daddy dom.”

I have been in too many relationships with people who gave me what I wanted only because they knew I wanted it. This selflessness is lovely, in theory, but over time, it breeds resentment. They grow to resent that I really do want “that kink stuff” all the time, and not just occasionally – and I grow to resent the asynchronicity of our feelings, the way I’m sliding deeper into a dynamic they don’t even really see.

Once, on my way to go see a boyfriend, I subtweeted him. I didn’t entirely realize I was doing it; the thoughts condensed in my brain like rainclouds and I spilled them onto Twitter almost compulsively. “Gosh, there’s such a difference between someone who bites/beats/bruises you ’cause you want them to and someone who does it ’cause they want to,” I mused. “It’s nice to bang someone who’ll beat me up when I ask, but I miss the raw ragged viscerality of a real sadist destroying me.”

It wasn’t a nice thing to do. I know that now, and I regret it. I especially regret it when I remember how he looked up from his phone when I walked through his front door, and met my eyes with a furrowed brow. “Baby, you know I like hurting you, right?” he asked with no preamble. “I like it because you like it so much.”

But therein lay the problem. I wanted him to want it too. I wanted him to lose himself in desire a little when he hit me, his heart stuttering, cheeks flushing. I wanted to feel him get hard through his jeans while I squealed and squirmed in his lap. I wanted a wolfish glint in his eye as he held me down and made me take what he needed to give me.

I guess that’s why we didn’t last. Some people want to make you happy, but the wanting is not always enough.

“You should maybe, uh, tell me what to wear and how to do my hair and makeup for our date,” I mumble over the phone to my Sir. Meek and muffled, because I know how this usually goes. Usually I float this idea and a partner either reacts like it’s totally absurd, or gives me the world’s least satisfying answer: “Wear whatever makes you feel beautiful!”

They always think they’re trying to be nice. And they are being nice, in a way. But they’re also withholding from me the thing that I want. Which is, in a different way, not nice at all, really.

“Hmm,” Sir says thoughtfully, his honeyed tenor tone vibrating against my face from 500 miles away. “Tell me what you like about that.”

No one has ever actually asked me this before, about this particular thing. It’s a conversation I always want to have, about every kink, both mine and my partners’: Why do you like that? The answers are always illuminating. It’s like walking behind Niagara Falls. You knew the exterior was dazzling; now you know its beauty from the inside, too.

I pause and think it through, choose my words carefully, one by one. “I like assignments with clear parameters,” I elucidate at length, “because I like knowing exactly how to make someone happy and being able to do it exactly right.”

“Got it,” he replies. I’ve heard him say this many times. It still makes me swoon every time. Got it. He’s got me. “So, if I was to tell you to wear all black clothing, red lipstick, and your hair styled so I can pull on it, would those parameters be clear enough?”

My temperature rises and a sharp huff of air pushes past my lips, like I’ve been punched in the gut. He gets it, and I love that he gets it. I know my explanation is what helped him get it, but moreover, I love that he asked for an explanation instead of just dismissing my vulnerable request out of hand. I love that he took this seriously because he could see it was serious to me.

Power exchange is a collaborative mosaic of trust and vulnerability. It’s stepping out onto a rickety bridge together, promising to keep each other safe if something goes awry. Here’s what I want. Do you want it too?

I do it for him, too. I try to. Past partners have told me, when I coyly begged them to dominate me, that they worried they’d go too far – or, worse, that I would laugh in their face when they issued a command. “Oh, that? I’m not going to do that. Why would you even want that?!” So I do my best to affirm dominants’ orders. I treat these directives with the care they deserve. They may be barked or growled, but they are vulnerable nonetheless – because I could always, always say no.

Sir unbuttons his shirt and tells me to hang it up in the closet. A bratty voice inside me pipes up to wonder why the fuck I would do that when he’s right here beside me on the bed, warm and touchable and getting undressed. But I know why. He wants to see me do it. He wants to see what I will do for him. So I get up, smooth the shirt onto a hanger, and slide it into the closet, blushing from the way he looks at me. It’s a hunger and a satisfaction: he asked for what he wanted, and I wanted it too.

These moments are small, just snapshots that tell no particular story individually, but woven together, they are a heart-stopping collage. They are trust and vulnerability writ large. Writ very large indeed.

One Monday morning in New York City, I hand Sir two dresses from my suitcase. “Which one, Sir?” I query, and he chooses the red one. I put it on.

I dig through my toiletries bag for fragrances, and hand him three sample vials. He holds each to his handsome nose and selects the Tom Ford. I put it on.

“Do you like making decisions for me?” I ask, playfully, like I already know the answer – but I don’t, not really. I know what the evidence suggests, and I know what I hope the answer is, but it will be a while before I know it for certain, in the pit of my gut and the base of my brain.

“So much,” he groans in response, and I blush as crimson as the dress he chose for me.

Social Media-Era Romance in 5 Vignettes

Kate Sloan

My unrequited love has changed his Twitter avatar, and just like that, I feel less in love with him. Poof. Pow. Wow.

The old picture was heavy with associations for me, months of misery tempered by sparse endorphin rushes when he would slide into my DMs. It was never the love confession for which I kept hoping and grasping; you’d think I’d learn by now not to expect anything from him but dawdling, awkward friendship. But no; I still want more. More than I’m ever going to get.

The new picture is an instant shake-up in my psyche. It takes a few moments, each time he messages me, for my brain to register that it’s him. Those moments aren’t much but they’re enough to distance me from my knee-jerk love reaction, a pause that is a prism, refracting my crush into questions to be pondered: How much do you actually like him and how much of it is just habit?

Maybe love is always a habit. Always just an addiction you have to kick. Maybe there are tricks that make it easier, like nicotine patches and impotent cloves. Maybe a Twitter avatar is no small thing after all but actually the big thing that kicks off a seismic shift, blessed and unexpected.

The bartender is fumbling with coins, pitchers, and a misfiring computer system. Unhappy customers crowd around the bar, waiting for their drinks, waiting to even be acknowledged. Welcome to Friday night at the Cavern.

“I wonder if we’ll ever get our drinks,” a British accent bemoans beside me. This stranger turns his good-natured smile on me like highbeams, and now I have a face to connect with the warm tweed that’s been rustling against my arm for the past five minutes. He looks like Prince Harry and Fred Weasley’s charming lovechild. Oh, hello.

We strike up an easy, tipsy rapport, and he pulls out his phone to show me a song on Spotify that he can’t get out of his head. My eyes sweep over his playlists, taking in the names. There is something so intimate about peering into someone’s music organization system, digital or physical. You’re seeing the soundtrack of their brain in the way they’ve chosen to arrange it, the way that makes most sense to them. It’s like resting a palm against the slickness of their coiled brain, feeling it pulse with private electricity.

Later, he comes to find me again, weaving through bar crowds to tap me on the shoulder. “I’m getting on a flight back to Britain in the morning and figured I’d seize the day and ask: want to go smoke a joint?” he proposes, and I do. “Great! I’ll be right back. I’m just going to change my outfit.” I nod, and he goes, but he’s gone about an hour before I decide he must’ve fallen asleep in his hostel room, and decide to leave.

I find him the next day by searching some of those Spotify playlist titles. I didn’t even have his name, but I had those. As I scroll through his tightly curated music selections, I feel the echoes of awkward hostel sex that could have been. Swing and a miss. Maybe I’ll meet another Weasley another day.

My habit of fantasizing too far forward about online dating suitors is exacerbated when they’re polyamorous. The way some folks compose their OkCupid profiles, I can creep not only my potential partner, but also my potential metamour.

On late nights with nothing better to do, I comb through these women’s compatibility questions, seeking the places where we touch and the places where we differ. I try to parse what it means that a man is into both me and her, what it says about him, what it says about me. I stack myself up against her obscure favorite bands, the outline of her lipstick, the cool candor with which she speaks of sex and food and Arrested Development.

The sore spots that ruffle my feathers are the spots tainted with internalized misogyny. When I’m burningly jealous she’s prettier than me and think, At least I’m smarter than her; when I hate her pink hair because it renders me a boring brunette; when I snort derisively at the pretentious Wes Anderson movie she’s chosen to quote, I know the patriarchy is whispering bitterly in the back of my brain. I rarely really hate another woman. I just hate the opportunities for which I’ve been told she’s my cruellest competition.

When I’m feeling happier and lighter, sometimes these metamour-creeping sessions turn into fantasies of their own. If I was dating her partner, we could go shopping together, get manicures. We could gossip over burgers and fries about his secret fantasies, his favorite blowjob tricks. We could be best friends who shared everything, and I do mean everything. It would be so cute, so sweet.

But I never quite follow through, both because online dating is exhausting and because I am too awkward and insecure to pursue friendships with metamours without reservations. I hope one day I work through this, because I still dream of that girl beside me at the nail salon, sharing the weight of my heart.

The new boy I’m flirting with asks-without-asking: “I had a crush on you, but I didn’t think I was being that obvious about it. Apparently I was wrong.”

He was wrong. But he probably doesn’t know the exact moment I realized he like-liked me. It was when he left a comment on an Instagram photo of me in lingerie: “I unhearted this, just so I could heart it again.”

He must have written this so that I would know. And I did know. Because people don’t write Instagram comments like that unless they like you. They just don’t.

When my last serious boyfriend first introduced himself to me via Twitter DM, he provided a list of links to his other social media. An Instagram profile, an alternate Twitter handle, a full name so I could Google him. “I don’t use Facebook, though,” he wrote, “because Facebook is the devil.”

He meant this in an anti-capitalist, anti-surveillance-state, anti-terrifying-algorithms sort of way, but Facebook is the devil in a different way, too. Facebook lets people linger in your life who haven’t earned the right, simply because unfriending them feels too aggressive, too unwarranted. What he did was bad, but it wasn’t UNFRIENDING-bad, you know?

What he did actually was unfriending-bad, though, in that he ended our relationship suddenly and unceremoniously, after reassuring me for four months that he had no intention of doing this. But as he didn’t have Facebook, I never had the chance to unfriend him. I had to settle for deleting the messaging app I’d used to communicate with him and unfollowing him on Twitter. (What he did was unfollowing-bad, but it wasn’t blocking-bad, you know?)

What’s nice about his Facebooklessness is that there wasn’t much damage to undo when things went sour. No unfriending to attend to, no photos to untag myself from, no relationship status boxes to uncheck, no mutual friends to bicker over. He never got entrenched in my digital life, so when he left my physical life, he dissolved from the digital, too, like a ghost. Poof. Pow. Wow. And that was all.

Slow Burn

Kate Sloan

There is no sex hotter than the sex you almost had.

We almost had it. But the timing wasn’t right. Time was not on our side. Out of time. Time to go.

So we took to our phones and made up for lost time.

There is no sex hotter than sex you picture for weeks before having it. Months, even. In slow-unfolding sext-a-thons and wandering phone calls. In café daydreams and bathtub reveries. In subway imaginings too carnal for public consumption.

Do they know? Do they know I’m thinking about you?

Do you know?

I’ve considered your body. A body I don’t know well. I’ve considered its weight.

I’ve been crushed beneath you in my mind a thousand times. A myriad of melting me’s, acquiescing in sequence. I’ve looped the mental tape like a well-loved song. Your kiss is catchy. Your eyes, an earworm. Your heart, a hook. And I’m hooked, and I’m helpless.

They say a memory’s not just a memory. It’s stacked with neural residue from each time the file’s been reviewed. Date Modified: Today.

So the image of your touch isn’t really your touch; it’s the ways I’ve remembered it, the ways I’ve reshaped it by remembering it. I wish I’d made duplicates. I wish I had the pristine originals, tucked away in a lockbox deep in my limbic system. But even those, I would take out too often and muck up with dust.

A few days after our first date – that blazing conversation over coffee, and the rough kisses that unavoidably ensued – I texted you, “I wish I had paid more attention, even though I was paying very close attention. I wish I had it memorized.”

“I wish I took notes,” you wrote back. “I wish I had it recorded somehow. I wish I could rewatch it.”

So we replay it in micro-detail, a back-and-forth volley of “Remember when…?” and “Then you…” and “I thought…” We layer and re-layer memory engrams, like neuropsychological Jenga. We fill in every blank for each other until our first date becomes not just a story but a legend. Not just an anecdote but a prophecy fulfilled.

Sometimes you think you know tiredness, because bleary-eyed yawning is part of the fabric of your life – but then one day you come up against exhaustion, and it’s a different beast entirely. Its maw opens unendingly and draws you down, down, down. Habitual tiredness is not exhaustion. You know exhaustion when you feel it.

Just like you know desire when you feel it. You can go through life developing quaint crushes, flirting with people in elevators and bars, and spouting wink emoticons like an addictive currency. But those things are no more desire than a handful of potato chips is a meal. You know desire when you feel it. It knocks you over like a truck smashing through glass.

You know it because you can’t ignore it. There are so few unignorable sensations in the world, so few experiences we can’t tune out if we press our brains to the grindstone. Desire gnaws and needs and needles you. It chases you down neural pathways. It whirls pointlessly in your periphery. Stop, you say, and it laughs and says, Naaah.

I’ve considered your body. A body I don’t know well. I’ve screamed into my pillow while considering it. I’ve grasped uselessly at places where you weren’t. I’ve dragged more orgasms out of me than I thought possible, clinging to the notion of your face. And still it’s not enough. And still I desire. And still, I can’t be still.

I hope to find my mind again someday, when the smog of want has cleared. When this slow burn snuffs into smoke. But I hope – my secret, darkest hope – it stays alight a little longer.