Being in loss

Something about trying not to think about the way my ex’s hands usually felt (good, most of the time), meant that I spent most of the day remembering the way her hands felt.

That might be progress.

When I add up the time, it makes no sense. Two entire years. I’m still having nightmares. Berlant and Edelman (2014, p. 140) said: “On the other side of plotting for kisses, there is being in loss.” So while I am being in loss forever, I am problematically uninterested in plotting or pursuit. I want to be interested. I want to want you — whoever you are. I want in.

And, I like being alone. Or I got stuck waiting for a non-existent sense of “ready” and it’s never going to come. Recently, I learned maybe other people approach dating with more intention than I do. I am plagued by ambivalence and also, lately, yearning for something I can’t hack all by myself or with pieces of people patched together. It’s not that I’m not interested. It’s that I can’t access the subtext. It’s frustrating for everyone involved.

So how about this: get on my wavelength.

There are dating apps that I am not on, and a mentality to the whole thing that I can’t quite muster. I’m getting tired of losing people. I want to slow everything down. “Erotic desire is always in part the desire to stay with what is lost, to live with the absence even as it inflects our capacity for care and intimacy.” (Berlant, 2011, p. 176). I have to learn to love (or something like it) while also attached to gaping absence. Starting and stopping. Connection and disconnection.