Closed-In Living (Part I)

on gay yearning, the death of horny, and "pissing against the moon"

“Come here and be gorgeous for me now”

I’m trying to parse how I can honestly and openly talk about my life without revealing more of myself than I’m comfortable with. In that spirit, I tell you that I spent the majority of the last year trying and failing to get over someone and now I kind of hate cumming.

The timing was always wrong for us. It was just like Wong Kar-Wai’s mournful masterpiece In The Mood for Love, except instead of being married professionals in a socially conservative 1960s Hong Kong who spark a romantic connection over noodles after realizing their spouses are having an affair, we were two gay non-monogamous weeb sluts who kept hurting each other but couldn’t resist the urge to express our affections via sending each other furry art and hentai (I’m not a furry, I just think furries are neat). We met as any young lovers do when I had come over to get creampied by her partner, a porn performer I knew from my old job working sets, and we fell for each other rather quickly. In the time leading up to LA’s first COVID lockdown, L and I would spend stretches of days together in the bougie high-rise apartment her partner paid for, playing video games, watching anime, and fucking and sucking. 

Boundaries weren’t really very present and their partner would often get between us and vie for both of our attention and affection whenever I was over, which L said was very different from how they acted when I wasn’t around. These days were euphoric but I knew it wasn’t a good fit. When I look over journals from that time, it’s clear I saw every red flag coming. I knew their relationship was messy, that her communication skills were lacking, and that she felt intense jealousy around polyamory. I knew we weren’t a good fit, but still I fucked them both and fell for her. 

They were both beautiful and fun and L made me feel things I’d never felt before, so I chose to ignore the warning signs because unfortunately I knew I’d rather listen to someone else’s boundaries (or their lack thereof) rather than have any of my own. Maybe it’s out of fear of being given less because of stating my needs. I mean, I liked being double stuffed and I loved her wanting me. I’d say I’m an utter fool with love if not for the fact that I also have multiple partners that I’ve been committed to for years. But sometimes we all make bad choices when faced with what we want.

Desire is humiliating, or at least the ways it manifests in me feel shameful. It always feels like it hits me with enough force that my knees buckle and my teeth click. I often act confident in my perversions online, but that’s only because it’s so much easier to pop off a tweet like “haha i want milf dick” than it is to be real about how devastated it leaves me. I don’t like that I needed to smell her shirt, with a scent I struggle to describe, to get off when on my own. I feel embarrassed of how often I rewatched the home video of her fucking my face to the point it became a comforting sleeping aid. I didn’t want to crave her so much, but I did.

In my experience as a gay person who writes about sex, I’ve had so many queers ask me how to come to terms with their sexual desires or how to act on their heart lust, but my problem has always been not with figuring out how to do those things, but with how easily I do them. In every other aspect of my life I may be a total coward, but I’m never too scared to dive into another and put my feelings on the line in hopes I’ll gain a new experience or further insight into myself. 

In my last essay on this affair, I touched on our first confession of love and subsequent breakup, but not the half dozen that followed. In the time between us falling apart in April and reuniting for one night in July, it felt like we dissolved due to miscommunication and subsequently readmitted our love for each other like clockwork every three weeks. We became star-crossed lovers, except she just lived in the valley and neither of us had a car. I tried to quit her so many times, even at one of my partner’s behest, but in the same way that puddles of squirt from my time working porn production would often send me reeling and nearly crack my skull open on valley pornhouse marble, interacting with her quickly went from fun to slippery and usually left things a huge fucking mess. In months where I wouldn’t see her, the hazy memory of how she smelled still fucked with me. I won’t pretend she’s the only girl I’ve ever been hung up on, but she was the hardest to get over. I can’t tell if the endless days of stillness brought on by COVID are part of that.

I released myself from this love affair a couple days before the new year began. It wasn’t why I had gone over there, but after hours of cuddling, teasing, and talking, I realized I was holding onto something that was caustic to me. An idea of romantic happiness with her in it. In truth I knew she didn’t love me as much as I loved her. She’s fond of me as a person, but I think so much of our continued courtship had been because she knew I’d give her my affection she didn’t get elsewhere. Yes, she strung me along, but I don’t really even fault her for it when I kept throwing my affections at her with such wild abandon. But never one for a clean break, we still exchanged shirts, although this time she let me see her spray a flowery body spray on the shirt she was wearing, demystifying the smell I’d once found so ineffable (ha).

There’s an old Flemish proverb originating from a 16th century painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that translates to, “Whatever I do, I do not repent, I keep pissing against the moon.” The painting depicts a man, well, pissing on a moon, with a later painting depicting a similar tableau, except this time it’s clear the man is only pissing on a reflection of the moon in a body of water. My understanding is it means “to futilely reach for something unattainable.”

In the months following the first time L left me, my partner confided that I lost much of my taste for sex. It’s not a fun thing to hear but I knew it was true. I was still horny, but my libido was gone. Yes, I still thirsted after the women in my life, I wanted my girlfriend, and I craved the intimacy that comes with erotic activities, but I just so often would reach my capacity for sex after getting choked or getting rimmed a little. My active want for sexual interaction had shrunk like the heart of the Grink who stole Christmas, but it also wasn’t as if I was just turning down tongue-on-hole action either. 

I just didn’t have energy or focus for the intimacy both my partner and I wanted. I tried finding small comfort in the timeless pastime of watching hardcore fetish porn and vibing a few out with my Hitachi, but that just made me develop a burning self-loathing every time a nut was bust. I’d long gotten off on the fantasy of letting go, but the very idea of letting go was more than I could handle. I kept trying to recapture the joys of eroticism that have long been a huge part of me, but whether it was my romantic heartache or the state of national disarray, my longing for the erotic energy I once had felt like pissing against another moon.

When we ended things, L asked me why I was so in love with her. I had fucked and dated other [ ] before, but never fallen in love with someone so much like me. Being with her made me realize a long held hatred for my body stemmed more from my fixation on others’ perception of me than how I actually felt about myself. Being seen so clearly by her fundamentally changed how I saw myself. It’s not even that I was caught up in a fantasy. I knew that while there was genuine affection and experiential understanding there, it was also mostly euphoria brought on by our intermingling of our incredibly compatible pheromones, but it was a euphoria I’d never felt before that I couldn’t bear to let go of. A month later, that camisole she gave me really only smells of the chemical body spray and not the warmth and pheromones I was obsessed with.