2/19/2021
i remember this moment so viscerally. he was fucking me from behind and in the dim lighting of the room, the condom wrapper on the bed looked like the condom, so i froze, my body melting. i thought he had removed the condom. i mean, i don’t know why he would do that. he most certainly did not want a child with a girl he picked up while on shift. i think the whole thing was just a game for me, a dance to see if i could seduce the bartender. then i won, victorious on his bed with his fucking raw dick inside of me. i asked really quickly if he had taken off the condom, like almost a whisper. i was so embarrassed. i felt so ashamed to ask, to even wonder. he stopped, incredulously looked me, my head twisted back to see his expression. offended, so thoroughly offended that he stopped. do you want to see? are you kidding me?
that the whole thing was a game is the point. when i entered his apartment i left reality, and whatever occurred in that space of his—the room packed with beer and a kind of new york mold that penetrated everything—wasn’t real, so i could just pack it up and put it away when it was over. it was relieving to live like that, to enter circumstances that i knew i could quickly dispose of, after. why enter situations like that in the first place, then? was it worth it to go through the whole ordeal of convincing my brain that stupid, completely ridiculous decisions that weighed on me weren’t real, were just blips in time? absolutely not. anyways, when i thought he took off the condom was when i was reminded that the whole night with him was real, very, very real, and maybe even more real than most other moments.