Cruel Imagination

Sometimes I like to imagine the kinds of people you have sex with now. I think I’ve grown addicted to the sting a little. You’ve told me about some, but not all, because you are kind and want to spare my feelings, no matter what I say I can handle. But I am also so insatiably nosy and my imagination often runs away from me. So, when I’m stuck in traffic, or washing my hair, or when sleep eludes me, I take it upon myself to hurt my own feelings.

First I imagine the older woman. She is a working, single mother by day, and a hobbyist dominatrix by night. I imagine how she makes you sweat and blush in ways that I never could. I imagine you tied to her bed frame, when her teenage son comes through the front door to ask her for some money that he will say is for a movie but is likely for weed or whatever teenage boys actually spend money on. I imagine the coolness of her voice as she casually excuses herself to pass through the permeable membrane of one role to another, leaving you to wait in the slick darkness of a stranger’s bedroom.

But this does not make you nervous because you have always craved the safe anonymity of liminal spaces. No decisions to be made. No judgements or responsibilities. Just your body and the buzzing anticipation of a touch you can’t predict. When I imagine this, I am there in the darkness with you, and I can understand the appeal.

Then I imagine the man you invite over to your apartment who shows you his negative STD tests with the same casual flippancy he has with the clerk at the grocery store when asked to show his ID for a bottle of vodka. I don’t do condoms, he scoffs. And for a brief moment you wonder if he could have somehow forged the document and realize that you are not, in fact, invincible, that people can lie or omit information crucial to your bodily safety. But you fuck just the the same and though you do not kiss, you do cuddle for a while, and for the first time you get the privilege of being the little spoon and it is a confusing kind of comfort. When I imagine how you must feel, in this man’s strong, hairy embrace, I am happy for you that you get to meet this other part of yourself. Gifts I could never give you.

I imagine the slender twenty-something women you meet on dating apps who are the type you idly ogled in high school, but never dreamed would want you back. But now you play bass guitar in a somewhat competent band and you’ve mastered the art of masking your insecurity with sardonic wit and while you aren’t expressly negligent or impolite, you’re just detached enough to present a compelling challenge. They are intrigued by your unconventional masculinity, and the idiosyncratic cadence of your speech. But they don't care enough to humor your theories on the true nature of space and time and find your excessive and elitist pillow talk grating, and so your encounters with this type are banal and usually brief.

Then we get to the hard part…

I try to imagine you falling in love with other people. I imagine you circling their orbit, trying to muster the courage to be rejected, but resigning yourself to unrequited yearning because it is more comfortable to remain a tragic hero than it is to take responsibility for your vulnerability. You go on like this until someone finally calls you out on it, the way I did, and you are forced once again to acknowledge the fact that you are, in spite of all your neuroses, quite compulsively lovable.

And with that comes the daunting task of taking control of your own happiness. I imagine the courting, your bewildered laugh when they say something that manages to surprise you, you trying to impress them with your philosophical ramblings, even though you insist that that is not what you’re doing at all. And I imagine someone else being able to cut to the center of you and scare you with how much they see you.

If I manage to bear the pain of imagining that, I will also try to imagine a world in which this person does not completely replace me.

I imagine that you can still have them and we can still have us. We can still talk on the phone for hours and you can still tell me about the shows you play or the books you read and you can ask me about the dates I go on, or indulge my whinging on about work, and I can still show you my writing and the stories I’ve been tinkering with and you are still as interested and engaged by them as ever.

But of course when I imagine you hanging up the phone, I can’t help myself from imagining me imagining you lying in bed with someone else and tracing circles on their cheek or scratching their scalp or massaging their thumb pads and the loneliness I feel is so thick and dark and suffocating that I have to take a hot shower for hours trying to wash away the memory of my imagining.

But sometimes, I imagine I am out with you and your new lover, and we are meeting over drinks, or maybe just a coffee.

I imagine it is probably awkward at first, but that I should at least be able to find some common ground with the kind of person you would fall in love with. Maybe I imagine myself saying something clever and I imagine them laughing and saying something like, it’s nice to know he’s always had good taste. And I imagine sharing a conspiratorial smile with them because we both know what it means to love you and that it is sometimes hard and odd and silly and beautiful and exciting and one of life’s greatest privileges. It is a new kind of intimacy to be connected with someone in this way, to invite that connection instead of turning away from it. And I try to imagine what it would be like to enjoy that feeling. It is difficult, but not impossible.

And sometimes I even imagine that I seduce your new lover or they seduce me or we seduce each other or we’re all having a threesome. It is fun to imagine this when I imagine that I am laying with my head in their lap and you are tending to me while they are playing with my hair or fondling my breast, but of course that is not fair and so I try to imagine that I am watching you tending to them and in my imagination it is hard for me to think of this scene as erotic because I become acutely aware that I am the third, I am the guest star in your new life, an exciting aberration with a past and a history that is alluded to somewhere off screen and when you two have had your fun I will go back to my separate life and have to live with the fact that I am no longer in yours in a permanent, material way. I am merely a nostalgic destination you can visit occasionally. And that part is less fun to imagine.

And finally, I imagine telling you that I imagine all this and sometimes I think this will make you cringe away from my gratuitous yearning or you will look on me with pity or shame. But then I remember that you are also insatiably nosy, and will most likely give an exasperated chuckle and say something like, I’m flattered that I take up this much real estate in your mind. And I will roll my eyes and call you egotistical, even though I am pleased to have you in my mind and even more pleased to know it flatters you to be there, even if it is a result of the futile attempt to circumvent the inevitable grief that comes once you realize you’ve been left behind.