Couplets

For freedom, I have learned, I'd barter virtue every time. For any fierce, untrammeled feeling, now I know I'd give up almost anything.

The proof of life is in the aching.

You can’t be lonely, after all, if you’re not inside yourself.

Inevitably, whenever you tried to write as if you were someone else, you would arrive at an impasse which begins, of course, with I.

I became myself. I became myself. No, I always was myself. There's no such person as myself. I wouldn't have to turn my eye inward, I thought, if I could train my eye on him- the one I loved. But I was wrong. My eye loved everything it fell upon. And then one day it fell upon a mirror. And he was nowhere in the mirror. And she was everywhere.

I had let my life become a story. Degradation was a theme, and rivalry, ecstasy, submission, happenstance. The only moral was the pressure f her hands, the grip of leather tugging at my wrist where the cuffs that were her birthday gift to me etched sallow, scar-like creases in the flesh..... Maybe that's why I felt most free when I was choked and tied with cables to the bed; when bound and gagged; when told that I was very, very bad.

but pained me in a way I couldn't fetishize

Still, every time you set out to objectify yourself completely, some small, inchoate voice would start to moan inside you, begging to be given subjectivity. The voice was as stubborn as a child, as terrified of abandonment.

The internet, whose central purpose seemed to be to turn the best parts of humanity— our hungers for belonging, art, and sex— into surveillance logs and payouts for execs

let me say that love has been, above all things, the engine of self-knowledge in my life—and even after everything is still what makes the rest worth suffering.

insisting that the body was a place where events occurred, rather than a thing to which they happened

You will fall in love. The relationship will end, though not at the same instant as the love. Some version of this will continue, maybe forever, happening to you.

dreams both include unappealing truths that usually elude the person living her daily life in prose.

If there was a distinction to be drawn, it was only that the thought of my betrayal didn’t turn me on at all but pained me in a way I couldn’t fetishize.

It was hard to know which aspects to feel guilty for, so I was like my Catholic mother, always rounding up. Maybe that’s why I felt most free when I was choked and tied with cables to the bed; when bound and gagged; when told that I was very, very bad.

She’ll make you suffer in the end, he said— not meanly, but as if reporting something true about women in love and what they do.

It took months to really reach her through the cloud of myth my adoration made. Until I could, I lived in fear she’d finally see my fetish and discrepancy, and flee.

Last year, I met someone I thought I couldn’t live without, and in the process lost another, without whom I thought I’d die. If

I wouldn’t have to turn my eye inward, I thought, if I could train my eye on him—the one I loved. But I was wrong. My eye loved everything it fell upon.

feeling my tongue exult in flights by which experience might vault beyond the mind, become an externality.

Change is constant and inexorable. You will fall in love. The relationship will end, though not at the same instant as the love. Some version of this will continue, maybe forever, happening to you. Don’t promise your life to anybody.

And when I held her cheek against my cheek, I was drawing from the well of love he filled. So I became after all not him exactly but a kind of conduit between them: a conversation they conducted with my mouth. And when I was not unbelievably sad, I was moved to hold inside me both my lovers and to introduce them to each other there, in the hollow just above the heart, among the little folds where the voice starts.