“It’s a dumb business model,” AP says one morning when I’m trying to find my keys

“It’s a fucking restaurant,” I snap. In ten minutes, I will be late, and it is a twelve-minute shuffle to work.  

“I just think you guys are screwed,” he says. I’ve learned a few things in the months I have consumed AP’s alcohol and kicked him out of his own bed because he snores. Rule Number One: get it in before the fifth shot, otherwise he won’t get it up. Rule Number Two: If you want him to shut up, let him watch The Wolf of Wall Street. Rule Number Three: Do not talk about your work with him.

“Restaurants are risky business endeavors.” The cook is already on site and has texted me that she can’t find the key to the walk-in. I don’t have the time to rehash my life choices with AP, who I’m pretty sure has never had to pick the dirt from under his fingernails or unclog a commercial dishwasher

“It’s a dumb business model,” he repeats himself as I slip through his front door and run down the stairs. A blast of eight am air smacks me in the face as I join everyone else running late to the office. I’d left work at one in the morning. I went to bed at five. I have a twelve hour shift ahead of me. I will have to brush my teeth in the bathroom at work when I arrive. I’ve planned ahead for this and keep toiletries in my workbag. There’s a pair of clean underwear stuffed in there with travel sized deodorant, a foldable toothbrush, and a small tube of Crest. A back up shirt is tucked into the laptop compartment.

I spend fewer nights at home and wake up more often to the sun peeling through AP’s thin bedroom curtains.  I’ve been doing this for a few months, and the broken sleep schedule is wearing on me. The skin under my eyes is blue and saggy. I’m sallow and my cheeks are breaking out. My hairline is starting to pull back. I notice these things as I pull on the clean shirt and brush my teeth. I wonder if it will always be like this, I think while I steep my fourth French press and beg the cook for an omelet. She has already administered San Pellegrino with lime juice and salt to quell my stomach flips, and she is near done with my early morning bullshit. But by mid-November, we are used to my routine

I have no AGM, there are twelve employees, and four of them have no idea what they’re doing. My prior management experience is nonexistent, my ascent from floor manager to General Manager too fast, and I am scrambling to make up for it. I accept this as fact of the career path I chose. You said yes, I remind myself when I start to crack. You said yes, I remind myself after I tell the prep cook that no, you can’t just leave the meat slicer out with bits of ham still coiled around the blade, and yes, you absolutely must store the chicken on the bottom shelf of the walk-in

There is staff training. Staff mediation. There are prep shifts, line shifts. Occasionally, I am an electrician. I still bartend. When my dish person can’t get childcare, I clean the plates. There is inventory. Receipt paper and laminating packets to buy. We have five separate accounts for our beverage program, four for food, a Webstaraunt and an Amazon Business account. Dishtowels. Soup spoons. Butane torches for the Crème Brûlée. There are ten checklists that must be followed, although first I must finish writing them. But I have never worked in a kitchen before, so I’m forgetting things like wax paper and white wine vinegar. There isn’t enough time to properly train me, I just sort of have to learn on the fly, and I do not know what the fuck I am doing.

I am responsible for three folders of Excel spreadsheets. “What the fuck are these?!” I ask, because I have a master’s degree in Literature and took a singular math class in undergrad called Mathematical Thinking. I learned about Fibonacci and made jewelry as a final project. Ten years later, attempting to calculate an end of year total cost of goods sold was frustrating for everyone involved. In between admin hours and supervising the floor, I try not to bungle other people’s livelihoods, and I’m a little shocked that my kitchen staff hasn’t walked out yet. I try, at least. I show up early every day and I stay late, trying to convince all of us that I am worthy. And then, I overcompensate for having limited personal time by using it poorly.

I have begun drinking heavily again, and I am back to buying cigarettes. At work, in the quiet hours between lunch and dinner I sneak out for walks along the pier. My lighter and I fight against the wind, which thankfully smokes more of my cigarette than I do. I wonder if it will always be like this, I think as I dodge rain puddles and seagull shit. My hair flies up in my cigarette and singes. It stinks as I sneak back inside, take a swill from the small bottle of mouthwash I keep, and wash my hands. I pick off the burnt dead ends of my hair.

AP texts me when I’m sitting in front of my laptop trying to finish next week’s schedule.

Was last night pleasurable for you? my phone reads, and I scoff. There is an hour gap between when my daytime cook has to leave for his second job and when my nighttime cook can arrive from her first. On Thursday, I will be the kitchen from four to five.

Until you pushed me off the couch in your sleep, I text back.  The bartender tries to peek over my shoulder at the schedule. I hate when staff does this before I publish it. I almost always have to make a last-minute change and while I warn them not to start planning their week based off of a draft, they almost always do. I tell him there is a guest walking up to the bar.

I meant the sex part, AP texts. The bartender is back, this time with a question about wine. We have spent hours talking about words like body and tannin. We have tasted Bordeaux blends and single varietals. We have practiced opening and pouring. We scoured the wine list and ran fucking drills on it. He still doesn’t know which red is the lightest

“Well then why don’t you let the nice lady sample both?” I ask when the bartender informs me that our guest in the Canada Goose coat would like to know about the Pinot and the Cotes Du Rhone

Yeah that part was fun, I respond to AP, though I’m not sure why I need to stroke his ego.

Dinner hours creak by, or perhaps that is just my knees, springing back and forth between the bartender with two months experience and a line cook who just got weeded. By eleven, I am counting the minutes until close. I start suggesting things my staff can do so we aren’t mobbed with dirty glassware and dishes at the end of the shift. I do not want to spend an hour closing. I want to take off my bra. The bartender sighs and pulls out a polishing rag, and I take a swig of iced coffee that I forgot about two hours ago.

        I miss you someone I care about texts me. I read it and my shoulders drop while I void a misfired crepe on the POS. I miss you too, I think. But I only have the two hands, and they are at work, so I can’t text back.

        I haven’t seen him in weeks. The last time I could, I sat on his couch and did a bad job of not checking my phone. Branding emails. Payroll. Where are the To Go boxes?

“Isn’t it your day off?” he whispered, looking at me from under his eyelashes. He tried to be patient. He held space for my long work rants, the same complaints every single time. He fiddled with an amp when I stopped paying attention to our conversation about film directors and Prince rereleases. There was a time when I enjoyed those talks, even if I felt the film studies stuff to be pretentious, and I couldn’t always hear the difference between separate studio recordings of the same single.

      “Yeah I guess it doesn’t crackle,” my voice trailed off.

I used to see him once a week, now it’s close to once a month. I have to cancel dates, sometimes right in the middle of them. The promotion makes it hard to relate to me, he says. He’d met me as a wayward bartender who made her tips and spent them badly, and suddenly I had this weight of responsibility that was foreign to us both.

“It has been difficult to see what this job has done to you.” I take offense to this, but he says he means my unavailability. The complete enrapture, consumption of self into a career.

      “I’m just trying to hold it all together,” I say. I know that I can’t do that, but I won’t admit it, and I don’t forgive myself when it all starts to fall apart. I know he thinks he is losing me, and perhaps he is. But I don’t feel like I have a choice.

       Sixty percent of restaurants fail within their first year. A combination of high overhead, high payroll, and nonexistent profit margins make it near impossible to pull off. You’re lucky to break even on your investment in the first three years. Luckier still if you turn a profit in the first five. Everything is done at breakneck speed. The stakes are not giving people food poisoning. There’s a balance between having fun and getting so fucked up that you flip your car, and it’s my job to strike it.  The staff turnover rate is around 70% and steadily increases. It costs restaurants upwards of $150,000 a year to bleed employees. Not that we aren’t complicit in these rates, what with the rampant sexual harassment, stagnant wages, preying on undocumented workers, and relying on the tipping standard. These are the things I think about when I try not to schedule clopens, when my payroll is 70% of my revenue, and when I put myself on a double if it means saving someone else from their eighth shift in a row.

        There is no glamor here. Just a lot of Ecolab chemicals and long hours.

       I just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you, the person I care about texts after an hour of no response from me. Oh, shit I forgot, I think as I turn up the lights to signal to the late-night drunks that the hour of departure is upon them. And then, my phone rings. My finger hovers over the answer button. You really need sleep, I tell myself. But I answer anyway.

      “Are you coming over tonight?” AP asks without saying hello.

      “I have work tomorrow.”

      “So?” We play this game every week. I tell him all the reasons that I should not go to his apartment to drink vodka and take off my clothes, and he convinces me of all the reasons why I should. He usually wins.

     “It’ll be fun. You need to unwind. You sound stressed.”

     “That’s just my voice.”

       “Whatever. Just text me when you’re here.” He hangs up. He knows it is a ten-minute walk after I close, and if I’m lucky one of his neighbors will let me in so I don’t have to buzz his unit. He also knows I’ve had too much coffee to fall asleep and that I will show up.

At the end of the night I am leaning against the counter waiting for the dishwasher to grab her things out of the pantry so I can finally lock everything and leave, and I remember the text message.

I’m thinking about you, too, I finally respond when AP closes his front door behind me.

“God, but you’re so sexy. Why do you have to be so sexy?” I tried to pull back, but our limbs were tangled, and he was gripping my arm to keep me close to him. He brushed his nose up against mine, shook his head and then tried to kiss me again. I felt my lips smash against his stubble and I told myself not to kiss back. Flat lipped, pursed tight against his mouth and unrelenting– that’s the only mouth to give moments after a man has touched your body, pulled your clothes from it, held it and felt it, and then told you he has a girlfriend seconds after he comes.

“I’m going to hell,” I said after I pulled my ankle from between his knees and pawed the ground for my underwear.

“Are you upset?” he asked me, and I was reminded that he is drunk. After a few shots, so was I.

“Yes, I am upset! You can’t do this to people!” I was saying this to his face and I was speaking it beyond his apartment, where I had spent the last six months hiding from my own reality, one increasingly busy and difficult. I repeated myself louder, more defeated. I was saying it to every man who’d ever done this to me. I was saying it again, this time to myself, and wishing it could just be the first time. Wishing this wasn’t old hat, my normal, some inevitability in the course of a life I chose. But I knew better. I knew what these words look like when a man’s mouth was forming them and giving them volume. I had been here before.

 I am addicted to chaos. I choose bad things for me because I disbelieve that good things should happen. I’m used to toil and drudgery, long hours and short pay. I’ve consigned myself to this lifestyle because I see no other option. My imagination is so stunted I can’t think of much else. These are things to which I resign myself, and I steal moments of pleasure where I can even when the consequence is talking to horrible men. Chasing orgasms has gotten me this far and I deal with the fallout when the warmth wears away. I wish this essay was atonement. It’s probably closer to self-titillation. Look what I have done, teehee, look at this mess I have made.

At six A.M just a few days into the new decade, I finally decided that this would be the last time. Pulling on my leggings, I decided that I wouldn’t spend another ten years like this. I couldn’t pretend to be eighteen forever, when forgiveness and time scrubbed away transgression. There was less time now, and fewer reasons to forgive. I found a grey hair, and my makeup settled into new lines by my eyes and mouth, and I was too old to look the other way when people did bad things and involved my body.

***

“Do you know why you don’t need a relationship right now?” my prep cook asked me one day while doing inventory.

“Because I have fifteen employees who all require my attention?” I scribbled a number next to trifold paper towels.

“Exactly. Because you need to be here.” The commercial mixer whirred behind us, tossing batter in tiny droplets against its splatter guard. The bowl started to rattle, and D moved to turn down the paddle speed. I’d secretly picked up smoking again, so when I coughed a fleck of phlegm dislodged from my lungs and whapped against my tongue. I made a disgusted face and turned to walk out of the kitchen and spit. I counted the jugs of sanitizer, scribbled more numbers.  But I am already here, I argued with myself.  And it’s not keeping me out of trouble.

I met him on my first day as a manager. I said I would never work in French food, and I said I would never manage. I also said I’d never meet a man at work. I found myself at a creperie with a cocktail program, settled into a cozy bar built under the escalator of those awful part-commercial-part-residential buildings popping up in what used to just be called South Boston. He was coming out of the elevator from the movie theatre upstairs. I caught him hovering by the bar entrance, staring at me.

“Do you guys do drinks too, or is it just food?” he asked, and I turned to look at the liquor bottles displayed on the bar shelf above our counter seating.  I should have known then.

“Uh, no, we do drinks too…” I raised an eyebrow at him. He decided to have a seat, my line cook raised an eyebrow at me. I let him read the menu and poured him a glass of water.

“Actually, I don’t even want to order anything. I just want your phone number.” It had been a while since a guy sitting at my bar had been so bold. It caught me off guard. I’m getting a little old, a little soft in the middle. He ordered a drink. I made it.

“Really though, can I get your phone number?” he asked when I dropped off his cocktail. I’m not sure if I scoffed or laughed. Maybe I just coughed.

“Order some food and I’ll think about it.” That’s called an upsell.

He did order food, and I did give him my phone number. He lived in the neighborhood where I worked, which meant that he was of a particular tax bracket that I didn’t know much about. I let my curiosity make my decisions. I enjoyed moonlighting in a world from which I was otherwise barred. I liked the one-bedroom apartment that he didn’t have to share with anyone. When I saw it for the first time, I told myself that I was a tourist, and I was going to do everything short of steal the towels. I liked the black granite countertops in a kitchen with an electric stove top and a microwave built into the cupboards. I liked that the building had a rooftop patio with a good view of downtown, and I liked drinking wine and looking at the skyline. I liked that I felt superior to him even though he obviously made more money than I did and had grown up with better access than I could ever imagine. It felt radical enough to know that I was better educated and not just that, but smarter than he was. I said this out loud a few times to him.

“That’s what you get for fucking dumb and pretty,” I told him early on when he talked about an affair he had with a concierge from his complex, and how it had blown up in his face.

“Oh yeah, is that what this is?” he asked, holding onto my thigh peeking out from a high slit floral printed dress.

“Oh no. You’ve got ugly and smart on your hands. You’re fucked.”

He’d studied business and accounting, had been arrested twice, charged with assault on a police officer once, and had charges vacated or dropped each time. His people were from one of the Boston suburbs that started with a W for wealth (or maybe white), and his father swooped in to save the day when the idiot son threatened to tarnish the family reputation. He liked to talk about his Celtics season pass, how many times he’d been to Gillette Stadium. He made me watch Shark Tank marathons and he judged pitches and offers. He didn’t know how to cook. He smothered whatever came out of the microwave in ketchup.

“It has like zero calories,” he told me one night when he shoved a veggie nugget in his mouth and got a red splotch on his golf shirt. He was my first finance bro, and I was fascinated. Men like this really exist. They truly are this dumb and successful all at once. How does this even happen?

The first time I spent the night, I took too many shots and cleaned his chrome fridge because his sticky fingerprints mottled the surface and were driving my crazy. I asked if he knew that he was thirty years old. I knew I’d gone into dark territory the moment he looked at my dark nipples and asked me where I was from. I knew I’d lost control when he wrapped his hand around my neck, bit my jawline, and asked if I’d scrub the bathroom, too. You are playing with fire, I thought when he pushed me up against his wall and I let him hold me there. You’ve hurt bigger men for less, I thought when he told me to take off my clothes and pose for him.

Christ but I do not want control, I told myself the next morning when I looked at bruises on my thighs. I discovered a bite mark on my ass when I got out of the shower. Just don’t sit down today and you’ll be fine, I reminded myself as I smeared mascara on my lashes.

“You’re American Psycho,” I told him a different night, this time over gin and tonics and Cruel Intentions on his flat screen. “I mean really. Look at where you live. You’re a fucking accountant. And you’re horrible with women.” He found American Psycho on Netflix and pressed play, and then got an ice pack and put it against his eyes when Bateman detailed his morning routine.

“But can you do the push-ups?” I asked after admitting that, okay, that was actually pretty funny, maybe you’re not too crazy to have a sense of humor. When I told my friends about all of our fucked-up encounters—and there are many, his call signal was AP.

            “I’m using him,” I said to a friend.

            “I think you are also hurting yourself,” she replied. Yes, that too.

What wicked game are we playing, I asked the second time we got into a fight and I was drunk and crying on AP’s couch over a different man. I found out that my ex was getting married. I was swilling rosé and thinking about all the fights my ex and I had about family. How I used to want one. How I couldn’t reconcile my desire for a white picket fence with the lifestyle I actually had. My ex used to tell me he’d been married before and couldn’t see himself doing it again. I didn’t know what divorce after ten years together felt like, so I accepted his wishes despite not liking them. When he proposed to my former metamour, I realized that what he meant was he couldn’t see himself marrying me.

“I feel like you like me way too much,” AP said, and I laughed at him for thinking I could cry over him.

I am unlovable, I thought when he reached for me and sat me on his lap. I am unlovable, I thought when we kissed, and I wrapped my thighs tighter around his waist as he pulled up my dress and I discovered I was too drunk to feel much.

“Whatever you say.” I wiped my tears and closed my eyes, and tried not to open them until the morning.

I’m sorry, but they do.

 When I see the pock marked skin on the back of my thighs I’m confused, too.  I know the way my stomach curves and folds. I know what my tits do when I take off my bra. I know my ass is fat and that’s supposed to be a good thing if you can just overlook the stretch marks. Men have touched this body. Men have loved this body. Men have felt my softness and breathed in deep the skin on my neck and they have moaned above me, and then called me next week for more.

This isn’t anything you should take personally, but you do. And you’ve decided it is my fault. You did all the things you were told to do. You went to the gym and you eat the spinach and kale. You listened to him talk about his sports team. You pretended you didn’t know how basic technology works so you wouldn’t offend him when he mansplained his Bose system. You did everything you were supposed to. And somehow, he stills fucks me. I know, it’s not fair.

I guess the day I realized that the rules were not made for me—in fact they were specifically designed to bar me and every other woman of color from traditional definitions of beauty—I should have decided that I didn’t deserve sex. Not until I dropped forty pounds and bleached my hair and skin. Not until I put in blue or green contacts. Not until I looked like you, right? But that isn’t going to happen. I’m still going to be brown and fat and getting fucked whenever I want.

I think what you’re actually mad at is that these men in our lives haven’t loved you enough. They haven’t done it properly. They’ve made you feel insufficient and ugly and broken. They took advantage of the space you carved out for them in your heart. They didn’t thank you for a single time you ever performed a caring act. And even when you eat the spinach, and you wax away your pubes, and found that dress that really just hugs your butt the right way, he’s still not giving you what you need. Not the emotional support, not the physical love, not the interpersonal connection you agreed upon when you started a relationship. He hasn’t loved you enough. And when you think about his hands on my back rolls, you cannot fathom what I have that you do not.

I’m going to tell you this because you won’t believe it when he says it, but you need to trust me about it:

He doesn’t love me either.

I’ve had sex with enough white men to know when they’re into it simply because I am a departure from the norm. You see, he’s been coded to pick you. You are the one who goes home to meet Mom. The thin white girl always walks down the aisle. As for me, I get to scroll through really weird messages from dudes who call me “spicy” and who tell me, “I’ve got a thing for Latinas.”

I’ve seen their eyes bulge out of their heads because my ass is an exotic fruit to colonize and they are so excited to dominate something other than white bread. It’s never fun when you realize you are being fetishized. Under hetero-patriarchal white supremacist systems, I lose out more than you’re willing to admit. How I choose to cope with it is exactly just that—my choice. And when these men break up with you, and when you break up with them, and when they come take my bed for a spin, you can’t change anything. You don’t get a say. You are not in the equation.

I am sorry that they have pitted us against one another. I am sorry for the lies they told us. I am sorry for every time you deserved more than what you got. I am sorry that you are not like me. That you still hope for a prince. But he’s not going to come. And if you don’t take back your power instead of trying to rob me of mine, neither will you.

In light of prohibitive anti-abortion legislation down South, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the political implications of writing about sex and how I enjoy having it. A lot of pro-choice arguments hinge upon the further victimization of “good” women. We talk about victims of sexual assault, and of women who have otherwise performed all markers of heteronormativity, who want a child, and suddenly find that their pregnancy is no longer viable. Oftentimes when we talk about equality, we rely on and prop up figureheads who are beyond reproach. Usually, these are Good White Women.

Good White Women perform some glaring oversights. First, we need to replace the concept of “women’s rights” with reproductive rights because these laws don’t only affect Cis-women, and we exclude nonbinary and trans folx when we use these archetypes. Second, people of color are more likely to die of reproductive complications, and unaffordable medical care is already fraught with neglect and abuse. Good White Women leave a lot of people out and considering that they drafted and signed these laws, Good white women are hard to come by to begin with.

Anti-abortion laws treat sex as simple utility. These are lawmakers who believe that their constituency must only have Jesus Sex. Jesus Sex is never pre-marital, it doesn’t know what protection is, it won’t last more than six minutes, and it begets male children three trimesters later. That’s all you’re allowed to have. So, if you’re not straight or if you don’t want children or, for the love of God, if you need more than six minutes YOU ARE OUT OF LUCK. They don’t care about your desires. That is the conservative agenda working against us.  And when we propagate white feminism as a response, we leave the wrong voices out of the conversation. We cannot limit who is allowed to advocate for themselves.  Not when the stakes are this high. Queer people, people of color, trans folk, ­–everyone who is affected by these kinds of laws and the precedent that they set should be counted when they resist. This isn’t just glaring oversight; this is deliberate failure.

It’s time to count the people who don’t want to be parents. It’s time to count the folks who fall outside of the heteronormative standard. Go ahead, lend your neighborhood slut an ear.

 Slut-shaming isn’t new to me, and I think, at this age, it doesn’t bother me anymore. You might have called me a whore and pissed me off when I was nineteen, but a few months from twenty-eight all I can do is nod. However, when someone like me– an unrepentant voluptuary– participates in the pro-choice discourse, people talk about the consequences of my sex life and what I do or do not deserve. How dare I actually like it when I spread my legs? Why would I want to do that and not be a mother as a consequence? They might even throw in a quip about irresponsibility and murder. I’m finished with listening to the other side. I don’t want to come to the table.

I did a lot of work with concepts of flesh and body when I was a student. I tried to intellectualize desire then, and I was really bad at it. But I was fucking every Tuesday night after that class, and I’m starting to understand what these scholars meant when they said they wanted to locate the body. When you exist under oppressive systems, you are divested from your flesh, and you exist as something suspended, stratified, and incomplete. To have your flesh separated from your subjectivity is to never be human, never be whole. That’s what is happening in Georgia and Alabama, and it is systematic, and it benefits white supremacy and patriarchy. It demands that we perform a dissection, where your body belongs to the state and the interior bits that define you become undecipherable. You become unspoken. I’m not going to go quietly. And I’m taking my body with me.

I am tired of having conversations with people who do not believe that I am deserving of basic human rights. I am over trying to reconcile. I am not going to defend my actions. I refuse to waste my time rationalizing with people who reject my autonomy. I am no longer paid to provide education, and I only do volunteer hours on projects of my choice.

And this one right here with the sex, and the moaning and the gasping and the curled toes, this is my choice.

No law will unwrite my desire. You cannot ban that.

Desire is human, and I’m going to grasp at moments of joy when I can get them while I watch the rise of fascism in my country. I’m going to be swept up in the wave of whatever is coming, and I know I’ll have to fight back against these systems that would seize my body as collateral. But, however brief, I will feel good when I can. I will search for those moments of radical love and celebration before the cycle of struggle and mourning spins back around.

I do not accept that sex is utilitarian. I reject this old school Puritan notion that pleasure must come with consequence, and I am not going to treat the post-coital as punitive. I’m not going to silence myself unless my roommates are home and it’s late and I’m trying to be respectful, also no you can’t spend the night.

---

We meet at a bar near my house, which is my first journalistic error. We spend the first beer catching up on work. I eventually recognize the bartender as a mutual of my ex, she gives us shots, and then J and I decide we’re ready to move to a table and get down to business. I’m buzzed by the time I hit record. The next morning when I tell a friend the proceedings, she will tell me, “man, you’re going to have to conduct the rest of these in a public library at eleven am.”

I have six questions to ask, with room for elaboration and follow-up if necessary.

“It’s interesting, I’ve never been asked to do this,” J says.

My pen scribbles next to my recording phone, and you can hear me mutter “hang on,” as I title the page in my notebook the J Interview. My first question is “how did we meet?” This is a leading question, I know they’re all going to say the same thing. I admit that I know he’s going to say Tinder.

“Also, cheers to this,” he says, and I laugh.

“Cheers to this,” intermittent giggle, “thank you so much for doing this.”

It’s hard to play back and have this vantage point of sobriety and time. When I try to transcribe, it is merely a futile process of listening to myself get drunk. I can open my notebook and see it happen in my handwriting. When I do replay the audio, I’d like to believe I tried to stay professional, but these lies have limited sustainability. When my friend and I talk edits and I send her a clip, I will say, “it gets worse at the end.”

“Really? Because I’m listening to dulcet flirt tones at minute four.”

It takes five hours to get through those six questions. We meander from the complications of our past—sometimes current—relationships, our jobs, what we do with the few hours we get off, and the cats that have moved in on us. I ask him how long ago it was that we last hooked up and we agree on the three-and-a-half-year mark.

In the brain cells in the back of my eyes, the ones I tell myself that I think first with, I need his answers to tell me that I’m capable of relating beyond spreading my legs. It’s important that we both call each other friend. It’s important that we acknowledge our ability to hold conversation. When we nod in unison, and I keep drinking the liter of lager I ordered before I hit play, I try to make a point about Tinder having the potential beyond being “the fuck app.” These are the conclusions I want to draw at the end of this interview.

Then, I ask him if he is currently in a committed relationship. This is also a question that I want answered in a particular way. If the cells in the middle of my brain decide the intent of this blog is self-flagellation, and the conclusions I’d like to draw are that I am the critical error in my romantic operations, then I need every past lover to tell me yes. I need them to tell me they have someone who they love. He takes a deep breath and sits up, saying “this is where it gets tricky.” You can hear me repeat “tricky” as I write the word down. My print enlarges. I underline the word.

“Yes and no,” he says, and I want to tell him that this isn’t an answer, but he can see my lip curl and he continues.

He tells a story of a couple moving in together that a lot of people know. Dating is hard enough, living with a partner comes with extra demands that a lot of people eventually are no longer willing to make. As he tells it, his girlfriend quit her job, and J found himself financially supporting her. He starts talking to me about numbers and I’m adding up the months of rent, and he says it’s been a year since they’ve shared the same bed.

“I would say August was the last time it felt like a relationship.” He shrugs.

“Dude,” I say.

“So, yes and no,” he repeats himself. I’ve written finances in bold script and given it a few exclamation points. The parts of my brain not drowning in beer know this conversation is shifting and I am losing control.

I ask, “if the answer to that question had been unequivocally yes, would you still have agreed to this conversation?” I suspect no. He insists yes. J tells me he’s interested in the subject from a readerly perspective. Perhaps he’s just telling me what I need to hear.

We rush through the parts I thought I needed for this blog. My blue ink is scratchy and erratic. Sober me can’t decipher what drunk me thought was important, or why there are stars and exclamation marks next to words like “yeah” and “fat ass” and why they have arrows pointing to empty margins. The person who sits down to write this blog doesn’t trust the person who went to the bar that night, and all I can do is laugh at our conversations.

“Okay, so these are the questions that I’m scared to have answered,” I say as we reach the halfway point. Here, my notes change color. I guess I’ve lost my pen.

“Why did you want to sleep with me?” Why am I asking this?

“It was a double feature of conversation and physicality.”

“Yeah I always thought that you and I talked well with one another. We were always friendly.”

“Right. Like it wasn’t just a ‘you up?’ kind of thing. If it were then you wouldn’t have had me bring beers over and we wouldn’t have hung out. We would have just…”

“Done the thing.” Eloquence is a distant memory. I am minutes from dropping my Bombay Sapphire.

There are moments when I know I no longer care that I’m trying to make some sort of scholastic point about the ways I’ve taken off my clothes. I can hear hushed tones, peals of laughter, and I’m going to delete the recordings once I post this blog.

There’s no denying the tension that we’ve let build since the first bar. When we go to another two doors down, and I’ve elbowed three quarters of my gin and tonic off our high top, the interview devolves into my hiccups and giggles, and the way we purr when we speak. There are ten more minutes left on audio file before I already know that three and a half years later, we’re going to take another trip down memory lane.

In forty-five seconds of clarity, when I tell him I think he’s supposed to be mean to me when I ask him if there’s anything he wants to say to me, but never got the chance, we state our plans.

“I mean, I’d do it again,” he says after I try to explain the intent of my blog. I know this is true before he’s finished his sentence, because when he got up to use the restroom, I wrote “this got sexual real fast” and I texted my friend who knew I was conducting this interview, “Oh, Bailey.”  I knew I helped set this into motion when I spoke of the understanding I have with myself—or the one I’m trying to attain. The way I want to talk about my brand of non-monogamy, how I’m going to make art out of my weird life.

 I don’t pause for long before I say, through a long exhalation of breath, “I would too.”

We walk back up the steep hill to my apartment. It is chilly and humid, with puddles from the day’s rain still collecting down Highland avenue.

I know how to drink beer.

I know how to talk to men.

I know how to unlock the front door.

I’ll laugh later and ask myself if I even wanted to be a journalist about this.

When I took a shower and put on clean underwear, did I think there was a chance we’d sleep together again? In edits, J tells me “it almost seems like you’re writing that I went there with the intent of the night ending up that way.” I scrunch my nose when I read this.

“I just have to ask. Like, did you think that was going to happen? Was it even the tiniest thought? Because I don’t think I did but I have to be honest with myself. I did take a shower.” I pull away from my phone and look at the Word document.

“But if you insist that no, the endgame here wasn’t sex, then I have to write that too.”

I’m trying to figure out what I want to say about sex and myself. I yearn for a clear direction in my writing on this subject, and I am consistently frustrated at its impossibility. Sleeping with J again disrupts the objective I laid out before I sat down next to him at a bar and ordered a hefeweizen. I’m not sure if I knew that was going to happen or not, and whether or not it’s what I wanted. So, what is my project here? Do I want to fuck past lovers and write about my hangover? Am I searching for patterns in my daily life that might explain how I’ve gotten to this position of single woman with four fuck buddies and a cat? Do I want everyone who reads this to laugh at my pain? Is it even pain?

I don’t have many answers. But I do have 213 new matches on Tinder, and I’m willing to keep looking.

He has always smelled the same. I’ve always meant to ask what it was, why he smelled like vanilla, what deodorant did he wear? Three years later he hasn’t changed, except the skin around his eyes is going crepe the same way mine is and we both wear the years of long bar shifts on the corners of our mouths. When we met, J worked in a lab, and I was about to start my first year of grad school. Now, we both try to convince the old women sitting at our bars that we are worth at least 20% of their bill.

He was my first tinder.

After my parents left me in my new apartment, I found myself completely alone in a Boston suburb. Now, having traversed larger parts of the city, it’s sort of funny to think that Waltham was so discombobulating for me. But I felt the loneliness on my bare bedroom walls. I missed my dog, I missed my friends and family. I was two weeks out from the beginning of my coursework, and I was lost.

I texted one of my childhood best friends, Ashley, and told her I didn’t know what to do. We’d known each other since we were thirteen, we got “married” when we were fifteen for no reason other than boredom and oddity, and despite its silliness we still call each other Wifey thirteen years later. She helped me pack the last of my things into my mother’s truck my last night in Virginia. I drank four-dollar Walmart Cab Sav, she had a few Budweiser’s. We pulled my curtains down on top of us, we shoved my clothes into duffels, and we did a bad job of not crying when I finally had to get in the truck and leave. Six states away, and I still needed her help.

            “I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know how to start meeting people. I haven’t even left my apartment yet,” I wrote.

            “Dude, download Tinder,” she responded.

            “What?”

            “I’m serious. I have one and I don’t even use it for hook ups. Sometimes it can be a good way to see who’s in your surrounding area.” I thought Tinder was stupid when I still lived in Hampton. My personal life had been colorful enough without the help of the internet, and I felt queasy about swiping on people who graduated with me from Phoebus. But, I was lying on a newly un-burrito-rolled IKEA mattress that smelled like plastic fart in a basement apartment that would grow ice on the inside of the windows come winter, and I figured, here, I had nothing to lose.

So, I downloaded the app. I thought too hard about my profile, I got to swiping, and J and I matched in those first few days. He was the first guy I invited to my apartment. I remember I was afraid to let him inside because I thought he might murder me. Plus, my new roommate and her boyfriend were camped out on the living room couch and I was unclear on the proper time to let them in on my personal life. Upon which night of the new lease can you safely fuck?

He brought beers, and I learned he was really into craft breweries– things I’d really only pretended to care about in my nascent bartending days. We sat in the parking lot of my complex and I felt comfortable in the August humidity, like maybe not everything was so acutely different from Southern Virginia. Perhaps there were familiar things to cling onto when the novelty became overwhelming, like the first time I got lost by myself in Boston and I had no one to call for help, or orientation at Brandeis—the first in a series of realizations that I did not fucking belong there. Out here, in the early hours of my twenty-fourth birthday, with a heavy breeze brushing against my ankles, and some stupid IPA in my hand, I could rely on the recognizable.

I knew how to drink beer.

I knew how to talk to men.

I knew how to unlock the front door.

We know where this goes.

The next morning, I texted Ashley, “you right” and started living a different life. I’d had some astounding failures in monogamy back in Virginia. Well, I thought, I’m not doing that shit again, and 1,633 matches later, I’ve mostly stayed on course.

I’m still friends with J now, and when I started dropping snippets of my sex thoughts on my Instagram and mentioned that I was interested in sitting down and interviewing former hookups, he agreed. When we met for the interview, he made fun of the e-mail I sent him, pointing out my forced tone, and the deliberate way I tried to phrase my intellectual interest in our physical past. Trying to sound professional about fucking is difficult, and I’m working out the kinks.

I recorded our interview, and I thought I would transcribe it into the blog and do a collection of interviews of former hookups who agreed. Some of it I can reproduce and will. Some of it I can reproduce and would prefer not to.

And yet, here I go.