Grey

“I don’t think you’re asexual,” he said with a smirk.

Just another man sitting across from me. I’d heard this comment, or variations of it, before. I took a sip of my coffee and placed the mug on the table. What he meant: how could I be asexual if I had sex with him?

“It’s not worth explaining,” I laughed. After all, these labels are just words to describe how I exist in the world. I didn’t give him any more words. I wanted to strangle him, curl my fingers around his throat, and dig my nails into his skin, but he didn’t matter. They rarely do, and I’ve slept with so many. I felt my rage simmer and collapse like hot rain. Weren’t we both using each other?

I didn’t owe it to a stranger to explain my grey asexuality, even if I could. Even in my rage I knew I wasn’t angry at him. I knew who was hurting me.

When I left that unimportant man at the cafe the morning after we had sex I decided I wouldn’t be sexy anymore. I won’t post pictures of my near-naked body on the separate Instagram account I made to watch people want me. I won’t let men I don’t care about touch the sides of my ribcage and thighs to convince them I’m their perfect object. I definitely won’t kiss anyone on that railway pedestrian bridge in Interbay because I haven’t relearned platonic intimacy.

I won’t use my own body as a bartering chip, a fantasy, a weapon. There’s more to my want than being an object, objectifying myself and others, and I have known it. I want something besides touching a body. I sucked to show I deserve somebody’s time, that I can give them what they want. I let my body be fucked to feel the power my flesh can finally hold. Maybe they’re horrible urges clawing under my skin, but I know I’m not alone. I am terrified like so many of us. Just because I’m asexual doesn’t mean I escape this body, its consequence and expectation.

So no, I’m not going to be sexy. I want to be more than an image on a screen, an idea, a performance of the ways I’m supposed to be. I’m a real person, my past is real, my habits and addictions are real, my asexuality is real. I look up at the sky, and this skin blurs into a ridiculously human shape. I point at the cloud of me, and it’s already shifted into a snake or something more sinister. It’s complicated, but honesty doesn’t have to be. I think about the first three times I opened my mouth and it made sense, the light cut through dawn on a morning after. The first three times I said I was asexual was to men in bed.

The air stirred as I laid on my back in the grass, which was still wet from the drizzle, which had just ceased to spray from the grey clouds, which condensed like a top sheet above the entire field in Cal Anderson Park. The breeze I hadn’t expected this far up the hill, this early in the morning, in this empty park just a few moments after the gentle rain and a few moments before the light came was alone with me. I curled my fingers into strands of yellow grass and moist clumps of brown clung to the fibrous roots I pulled out. Wet seeped into the seat and legs of my pants, into the backs of my thighs. The air licked behind my knees with her dewy tongue and the cold of it shocked me.

The third time, M.’s breath tasted like smoke as it lingered in my mouth. I laid next to him on his bed, unable to move. I felt paralyzed in the dark and my drunk. We were only inches apart after a few minutes of making out, but it felt like a much larger gap. My eyes had adjusted but instead of looking at him, his face or his body, I stared wide-eyed at the ceiling. I knew what was happening, what I was supposed to do next, but I didn’t want to pretend.

“I’m asexual.”

It was quiet, not even a passing car.

M. was the first person I knew in Seattle. We matched on Tinder, but we met when he sold me my gym membership. It was one of my first days here when all I did was walk with my roommate on streets we didn’t know, imagine a life I wanted, and swiped. Almost all right. I didn’t want to be alone. I did remember seeing D. on the app, a few images of his tall body and tufts of blonde hair; what stood out to me was not his pictures but where he worked. That’s why I recognized him at the front desk as I walked in from the rain, slightly damp. It’s always awkward to recognize someone you haven’t met, and our eyes communicated that to each other. The thrill of sort-of knowing. Neither of us mentioned it.

After a few dates and a failed kiss, we continued our friendship casually without knowing each other in any deeper way. He was very kind, and easy to have fun with. We met up for drinks whenever I was around and he had time. This had been one of those nights. After a few drinks at the Twilight Exit, we naturally drifted back here in that way things always happen. The week before, I’d returned with him and a friend and without realizing ended up in the middle of a threesome. I tried to perform but every time D. reached towards me I couldn’t act. The night dissolved awkwardly. I didn’t want anything then, I didn’t want anything when we were alone together, now.

So much of my sex has been decided in this very instant—someone I sort of knew, a few drinks, a return to his apartment. There are ways evenings are supposed to unfold, and ways relationships are. I don’t want to be inside someone’s body and I do not crave the pressure of them in my throat but I always know what to do, and I decide. Sex can be the key to meeting someone and learning who they were, opening up. I want to give a man a piece of me to wrap their palm around, enough to make them want more of me. Even though I was never attracted to them at first, I knew I could make that come later. I used to think I could be attracted to anyone if I decided.

With M. in the dark of his bedroom, I was immobilized. His mattress was supported by two wooden pallets. Our casual platonic relationship was rare to me, and precious. The door was closed so his roommate’s cat could not get in. I decided. I would not shatter the small globe of it between his ribcage and mine.

“I sort of picked up on that.” M. looked me in the eyes. It was awkward, but being honest about sex usually is.

I no longer had a reason to stay. I felt a freeing, an emptying. I walked across the Central District’s wide streets in the eerie four a.m. light.

Dawn, before the light, is not beautiful. The sky was an indistinguishable mesh of the night’s leftovers, residual rain and darkness blurred with the expectation of sunrise into the most hideous shades of grey. When I thought of him, my chest filled with stones. I no longer wanted to think, or to want, or to breathe; I only wanted to be buried. It was a dramatic obsession but I could not contain myself as I closed my eyes. I rubbed my muddy hands on my neck and down the front of my shirt. I wanted to be like the natural, filthy creatures of the earth. What else connected us, this planet, the whistling air, a blanket of rain? An undeniable urge I did not feel.

My stomach was slick and my underwear was still on. K. stood over me as I laid with my head near the foot of his bed. My arms at my sides, a blank stare. His apartment was minimal and felt unlived in. I’d tried to touch him as he came but he shrugged me off. I’d never felt more like an object.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looming above me.

It was the second time, but not yet. K. was a special kind of stranger. I was already obsessed with him when he’d slid into my Instagram DMs from the other side of the planet, and I wish I only answered because I was interested in his photography, but it isn’t true. I almost had a panic attack when he messaged me, and I answered because I already ached for him.

He only messaged questions about sex: if I jacked off, if the guys I worked with were hot, whether I would let him into my bed. He was shockingly frank, but his inquiries felt performative. When I asked if the only motivations in life were sex and power K. said No, but then texted I want to suck your dick almost thirty times in a row. He had an ongoing project that involved showing his latest photos to strangers in their bedrooms, and it excited me. I also loved being as close as possible to a stranger, intimately communicating with someone unknown. It made me feel wanted in a way I craved. Often, that nearness and intimacy was only possible in an exchange of bodies, a conversation in that language I had taught myself. Without the words for it, sex seems like the only way to express our desires. Magnetically, I wanted to be near him. My lack of words for that want frightened me.

I felt a spiraled burning in my throat that helixed rage, lust, hate, and power. I craved his attention and how he seemed to only want one thing from me, but it was far too easy to collapse the few messages and texts we exchanged into a one-dimensional view of a person. I knew there was more to him than I could see on the internet, but it became more difficult to separate those ideas from his flesh. I both wanted and did not want him. I wanted to give him everything, if only to be with him for a night.

I unfollowed and didn’t speak to him for months, but the next time I was in his city we ended up in bed together. He said we didn’t need to have sex but he asked to jack off onto my abs, and I let him.

“Why don’t you take off your pants?” He furrowed his brow as he laid next to me, as if there was only one reason to be so near to a person.

I made a joke. At least I could make him laugh. I felt safe holding him and I burrowed into his back. He turned his head towards me, but not enough for me to see his face.

I felt an urge, “I think I’m asexual.”

“Then how do you jack off to men?” That irritating snark.

“I never said I did.” Which was asinine, and has nothing to do with asexuality.

He was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes I think I’m asexual, too.”

I wondered if we both played parts in this fantasy, even when we didn’t want to. We didn’t speak for a while. The silence covered us.

We haven’t seen each other again, and I don’t claim to know anything about him. It’s become difficult to remember what is real except that moment. I stayed the night with him and we felt natural together. I ran out the next morning before he was fully awake, and the first few blocks were golden.

The atmosphere shifted, and I knew. The sun’s first rays pierced my eyelids in that faint pink-white of light through skin. The breeze had taken away the clouded piece of sky and it would rain on some other field, or onto the old buildings in Pioneer Square, or into Elliot Bay. I didn’t look up for a while, just absorbed the warmth as it returned to me. I would walk home, take a shower, change my shirt and underwear. The mud cracked my skin as it dried.

The first time I talked about my asexuality, I felt broken. R. is the only masculine person in my life I am truly close to. We have always been platonic in a way that confuses acquaintances, who beam when they say how perfect we would be as a couple. R. and I laugh uncomfortably and exchange a sideways glance.

When I first met R., I hated him. It’s often this way when two young queer people first encounter each other, before they’ve inherited their bodies or expanded beyond the pasts they’ve lived through. He was one of my best friend’s roommates and I was jealous of their closeness, the laughter they shared. I watched them laughing over a joke. A haze emitted from R. that I couldn’t put my finger on, musty and brown and slightly glowing. Our queerness felt threatening and sharp to each other at our conservative military college, until it didn’t. Needless to say, we became inseparable.

When we moved to Seattle together I had just begun drinking too much, often past the point of functioning. It was one of those nights before we knew anyone besides ourselves, when we lived in a micro studio on First Hill. We slept on a futon and a sofa bed, but the space was so small the gap between us was only a few feet. I was crying: some nights we’d talk about the pieces of our lives that felt out of place. We both had memories that didn’t line up, empty places we’d lived that swirled in fog, words spoken to us that concerned others when we repeated them. Chunks of us, our flesh were missing as if they’d been taken from us. Our conversation that night had pointed me towards a muscle in my left side that was gone and irreplaceable.

He just listened to me, a warmth in the small space.

I didn’t look across the grey air at R. when I told him I was afraid I would always be alone.

The window of our apartment looked out onto the sloping sidewalk and a street lamp. Even through the blinds, unnaturally yellow light cast long shadows on the concrete floor. Everything blurred together painfully. My tears, my want, and aches from the past that I didn’t want to remember wouldn’t stay separate. I looked then at the shape of R. laying on the futon, a brown cloud with slats of gold.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His silence meant I wasn’t broken, what had happened to me wasn’t my fault, and didn’t make me who I was. He listened.

In his silence, his breathing across the room from me, R. meant that I wasn’t alone.

By the time I made it back to the micro studio, it was a beautiful day. The sidewalk was still a damp grey and the grass still shone with wetness but the sun had risen. It was the sunniest day we had seen in Seattle in the week since we arrived. R. laughed when he saw the mud caked on my shirt and skin, and poured me a mug of coffee. I walked to the window and opened the blinds.

***This piece was originally published in Aze Journal on April 15, 2020

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