Why?

After we reconnected I looked for an image she had sent me, or that I had sent her. It doesn’t matter the direction in which it was passed along. We needed something to reestablish the connection using past mortar. I never found it. Instead I locked on the pictures she took of me, naked in her bed, naked in her living room, naked in her kitchen, naked in her mouth. This was the safest feeling I know, to be totally bare, obscured by nothing, fully exposed. She commented on how remarkable it was that I would “emerge” from the bedroom with “nothing.” With her I felt best and safest that way. The pictures she took of me reminded me of this. It’s not always like that with women. They get nervous, antsy, uncomfortable at all that junk jangling around, all that damned penisy nudity.

In some ways we had all the makings of a beautiful success. She didn’t care that I am poor, and my drinking didn’t bother her. My drinking is nothing like it used to be but it’s there, and she thought nothing of it. Her previous men had been junkies and winos. By comparison I might have seemed positively clean and sober. But her other men were mostly impotent from being drugged out all day every day. My sexual energies were too much for her. They always were, going back decades. She was the only woman I ever knew who said to stop. “It’s too much. Too fast.” Such fouled-up intimacies were common with us, but never with anyone else I knew. Most liked it hard, fast, a little rough but never abusive or demeaning. With her it was different. A thorny brambles of indecision, conflict, reflex reactions to past abuses.

Why is it cold today? I almost cracked a sweat yesterday. Today my body chatters from the cold, and repeatedly masturbating seems unstoppable. I need to walk. Today is Thursday, which is my Sunday. I work Friday through Monday now. I like working. I like going somewhere to do something, despite the obvious insufficiencies of the arrangement. Yesterday I got around some. A failed arrangement at Grand Army Plaza (one of my least favorite places in this city) led to an impromptu visit over at West End Avenue, where the fabled last four phone booths of Manhattan continue to provide phones that do not work, not even for 911. It’s a violation of the franchise agreement which states that any PCS shall provide 100% uptime for emergency 911 access, but nobody cares.

I just stood up and walked to the nail clippers. By the time I got to them I forgot which nail needed clipping. It was the left pinky. It has been shorn of its nail but I do not feel satisfied. The nail is now a nub but I feel the cleansing and the purging of my bodily effluvial detritus should go further, deeper, beyond the topical and into the psychological. I should be trimming nails from the fingers in my head, from the toes scratching at the rodents in my soul.

I was bluntly reminded of another woman this morning. She lived here for 3 years. She would buy me designer shirts for $1 at the Salvation Army, an attempt to groom me into something she could be proud of. I clean up well when it makes sense but at 16 years my junior I don’t see that she could have made much of an impact on my settled-in sartorial habits. I see those shirts now, buttoned only on the top button and hanging from a thin metal hanger, and I see another man wearing them. She didn’t want me. She wanted whoever she saw in these ugly-ass shirts with irritating patterns and off-kilter buttons. Her so-called love for me was based largely on fantasy, as is almost all forms of love. I need to rid my closet of those shirts. I will do that now.