They might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen to speak and move and stretch and smile and mess up and make toast and tea and walk around idly and fumble with necklaces and throw their hands up in silly ambivalence and cry silently, like under a veil, and yap and yap and yap and yap, and yet, we rarely hug. We don’t hug or cuddle like I do with Riley. Olga and I mind-meld, we juggle real things, in the air, real things fly around. We clown and take turns giving dares. We listen to the same songs, over and over, cauterizing wounds with comfort, with routine. It’s all comfort and all routine. Not in the way you think. Maybe opposite to the way you think. The comfort is make-shift, the routine is commitment. A commitment to loyalty. To fealty toward the pact. The pact is about saving. Finding the other worth saving. Externalizing the self. Creating and living an ethics together. Dependence isn’t shameful. No, here, I’m allowed to need you. I’m doing so much needing and a ridiculous amount of yearning. I realized the other day that I once had men dying for me, dying a thousand deaths for me, dying all those deaths and then showing me the bodies. I haven’t seen any bodies lately but then again; I haven’t been doing any killing. I can’t remember the last time I had victory with men. Lately, each conversation’s been ended with some desperate plea. Some call for remittance. I don’t want money just bodies. Show me the bodies, the bodies. I need to see the bodies, I say. They’re never interested in that. They’re never interested in the evidence, in the actual stuff of experience. Everyone’s disappointing me and I can’t think of a way out of my web. No theorem or axiom is helping; no amount of rubbing myself raw is spawning any kind of brilliant solution. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being creative with it but the fantasy of giving up is total technicolor, my favorite kind. I don’t know when I started being so lazy. I’m embarrassed of it, but it also feels central to the new me, to this newfound acceptance of failure. I’m messing up but covering my tracks, and my approximation of things is always about right. After all, I do feel like I always end up getting what I want.