When my ex fucked me that September, I knew it was for the last time. I knew it the same way you know you’ll never talk to someone again—the dial tone, the unread text, the single tick mark on the WhatsApp message. The thud in your gut, like a door closing at the end of a dark hallway.
He leaned in to kiss me, and I tasted the iron of the latch as it locked.
And for the first time, my mind was elsewhere. I remember almost nothing of the act itself. But for me, sex has always defied memory. It’s like the memories you don’t make when you’re rolling on MDMA. When your jaw is grinding and your eyes are glittering and your teeth are knives in a Cheshire grin and everything you see is flashing color—light—euphoria—epiphany. Moments like fractals reflecting off a spinning disco ball. Try to replay them the next day and they shiver, dissolve, slur into grayscale.
Only childbirth is more primal, more instinctual than fucking. It, too, holds almost no memory.
Sex: more sound and movement than conscious thought. We only remember the details that we force ourselves to: his face contorted in the darkness, his sweat finding mine, slant of light coming in through the window—and I remember that slant of light more than I do him.
The last time. Did he kiss me, afterwards? Did he touch any part of my body with his hands? I can remember our position, but only because it was the only one we ever used by that time, because seeing me or even feeling me from any other angle would bring an abrupt and dissatisfying end. No, not that kind of end. The kind where he went to the bathroom to jerk off to porn. Whatever was on his cold, hard phone so much more satisfying than my warm, (too) soft body.
Still, knowing it was our last time, I made an effort to remember. To hold the moment, to imprint it on my consciousness.
But the memories were dirty rainwater slipping through a grate in my mind.
In the months that followed, I thought: sad that I hadn’t been concentrating on him. Sad end to a sad relationship. Sad sad sad—so much sad that I could scoop it in my hands, swallow it, puke it back up again. A dog eating her vomit. An uglier ouroboros, a cycle no one wants to talk about. Perpetuating your misery, after all, is always disgusting.
But in the years that followed, I remembered something else. Midway through our relationship, he had told me that whenever we had sex, he needed to think of other girls in order to stay hard. He told me everyone did it, and I’d protested, full of furious white fire. But I’d believed him, too. Hadn’t I? Because I’d stayed.
The last time, I did the same thing. Not because of him, but because of me. My mind was on someone I had never met and would never meet, someone who had died long ago. Whose image still burned through the centuries. Who had surely never heard of porn. I thought of a ghost as my ex fucked me while thinking of his ghosts, his movie stars and OnlyFans models who were less than me and more than me at once. Even after all these years, it is the truest image I have of us: our bodies pressed together, our hearts beating out of sync, each of us dreaming our own illusions.
