List Was Lost

I have fucked so many people, it can’t have been about fucking. I’ve lost count which used to not bother me, it made me laugh. I’d kept a list but the list was stolen, a broken segment on the long line of fucks. That was when I began to lose track. I think at the time I could have reconstructed the list, but I didn’t, and now there’s no way I possibly could. There’ve been people who had to be logged by nickname because their given name wasn’t retained. There have been men with generic names whose faces I could not possibly recall. There is the man who moved in down the block six months ago and all that time I didn’t realize I’d invited him into my house a year ago, asked him to strip, sucked his dick, and kicked him out. I saw him and he saw me. He knew this thing about me that I didn’t know about him. He knew what the inside of my house was like. The inside of my mouth. He knew I would do what I did. I thought he regarded me as a stranger, was probably curious about me, I thought, probably wanted to come inside my house, to feel the pink interior of my mouth. I thought he was imagining, not recalling. Why didn’t he say hello? Was I violated? It was all my idea.

When I got herpes I still was not bothered by the unknowable number, opting not to draw some obvious line of guilt from this telling/no-telling detail to the sexually transmitted disease. Instead I allowed myself to be humbled by the notion that I was not exempt from the indiscriminate distribution of adversity.

So what sadness and desire to cut through is rising up in me now? How am I already fed up again when I just broke up with Wilson? As if Wilson served the purpose of representing all the wickedness of this boys’ world. As if he sucked the wicked in like some kind of magnet, so it was compact and in one predictable place. Now the wicked has dispersed, it seems, and it’s everywhere.

I was not recently diagnosed with herpes; it has been almost three years, actually. There is no real reason for me to react to this current outbreak with such sadness and dread and anger. It cost almost 100 dollars, it was brought on by stress, at work with EM, it was brought on by the rough fucking, the new partner.

If it was not about fucking, then what was it about?

This feeling is not just about the herpes, it’s about the sense that I am always struggling against the awfulness of men, it’s about being so broke, going to work and work is full of fear, and I don’t make enough money, and everything costs so much, and my addictions take so much feeding, and I feed him too, and he’s an addiction too, we can’t sleep apart, he doesn’t know the word “candid,” he thinks the Raiders are from Oakland, oh it’s sweet and he’s sweet and there is nothing wrong with whatever he does or does not know, he’s full of loveliness and probably meant for a life by gentle streams, rescuing drifting leaves, communing with the unspeaking world that seems to love him so.

It’s speaking to Melissa last night and her telling me, “This is the Lisa I remember, you used to be angry! But good angry, angry because shit’s fucked up and you saw that and it pissed you off.” I think, again, of the article, “Why Women Drink.” I think of Michael yelling at me, at the way my boyfriends have yelled at me, of the misogyny I must contend with, at the constant valuing: pretty, not pretty, milf, too timid, too aggressive, too thin, too sensitive, not-right-as-i-am. Leave me alone all you fuckers. We all chopped off our hair when we were young and thought this act alone could save us?

First I chopped off my hair, then I started fucking anyone fuckable that would fuck me. No boyfriend was enough to stave off the darkness, I had to fuck other people while I fucked them. Being single was infused with the goal of fucking, I wanted alcohol, mixers, constantly dressing for appeal, to suggest sexiness and curiosity, to suggest that I was thinking and painting and fuckable. That I was like Tereza’s mother, but taking it further, not only shunning the idea that there was anything remotely private or precious about the naked body, but also that there was anything special about fucking someone else. I convinced myself. I was convinced before I’d even began. I was convinced before I’d even began. I was convinced when I woke to a broken hearted world when I was four and I felt sadness for the first time when wishing on a star did not make Mildred and Dolly real. Tender and full of belief, born into a magical world, I encountered my own sensitivity, the danger in my capacity to imagine, to fall in love with what could be, to send my heart ahead of me into a world that is not, not at all. So it was God, first, who let me down.  

Later, the messages were mixed, seemingly randomly, by all the tired people who got their hands on them. I settled with God-is-within when I felt like I had to make some God-recognizing affirmation, meaning that if I wanted magic I had to do it myself. I didn’t only use sex, I didn’t only use alcohol, and it took awhile before the momentum took me, before New Orleans permitted all of it, before New Orleans stole the journal, stealing my pannier off my bicycle the one time I actually had only one drink, the pannier with the journal in it, the list. I had just found John Byrd, I didn’t want to think about him leaving, like looking away stops anything, like I would have wanted him anymore anyway.

My vagina aches and burns, I can feel it in my stomach, a clenching, a discomfort. It’s very bearable, I’ve experienced so much pain it seems, periods have been painful, bladder infections are worse than this, my weekly electrolysis appointment is a lesson in endurance, when I was struck by a taxi and my bone came out my leg and every morning when I stood up on the other leg, with crutches, the blood would rush down and it was almost unbearable. But this is not unbearable. It is just making me sad. I feel like my body hurts from the world. Like I fucked a hundred guys just to make all the pain go away and now that same spot is hurting me, like I thought it was working, that the pain was going, but I was just a fool, accumulating pain, and now I want a new life, and now I want skin on skin contact, but I am separated from him by latex, by the outbreak which has forced us into abstinence, only feeling the pain, the pain I took from the men who are awful and cruel and rescue nothing.