I love Ashley. I love talking to her. I love having sex with her. I like having sex with her anyway. It’s like having sex with your best friend. There’s that saying, “Happiness is being married to your best friend.” If that was true, then I should marry Ashley. Then I’d be happy.
But I don’t think happiness is really what we want. If you’re not happy, then you want to be happy. But once you’re happy, you want excitement, you want fear, you want death maybe..but happiness does not want happiness. That’s the problem with it. Only people who aren’t happy want to be.
I don’t think we want happiness at all. I really think we want fear. As in: the state of one who might lose. Or: how you feel before greatness. Happiness is just: peace. Look around you. Does it seem like people want peace?
I think we want fear, because fear is of the unknown. Safety, satisfaction, peace: they are of the known. Fear is more alive.
Probably we want both, which is why we create relationships, then cheat on them. We want to be bad, and we want to be good, one with our parents, one with our friends; probably some fucked-up pattern from childhood.
I feel safe with Ashley, and I love feeling that way. But that’s not enough. I like when someone knows me, and I like when someone likes me more than I like them, because you know they’ll never leave. I like having a best friend. And I like fucking her, too; I like that kind of sex where you completely trust and you know the other person will never hurt you. That sex where you can look into the person’s eyes all the way through, where they can get you off while you’re looking sweetly in their eyes, like a child, maybe, like the care and trust that two adult children might have with each other.
I even like that she knows my past. She knows everything about me and she tells me the little details, the bone-drenching minutiae of every little emotion and the situation with her ex-husband and her mortgage payments and whether she checked the mail and how many sprinkler heads are gonna be in the front lawn and in what arrangement. That’s me and Ash; that’s how it is between us. If she says “do you want to go to a movie” I always want to. I could sit on her craft couch or stand at the window forever, holding my glass of wine, and watch her make cup holders out of popsicle sticks.
But there’s this thing, when you’re with someone—you always want to be with someone else. I want to be with Brooklyn, I need to be with her, and I never will. I’ll want to forever, though. Partially because I never will. There are questions that want to be answered. Once they’re asked, they never go away. If you never ask them, it’s ok, they don’t haunt you, your mind just goes on not-thinking about that question and a whole bunch of others that you never ask. But once a question has been asked, one of two things happen: Either you answer it, by exploration—you’re satisfied (with a yes or a no) through the course of events. Or the question is never answered, because you never get to try it out, because you never get to explore whatever circumstance and whatever possibility the question suggests. In this last case, the question drives you crazy forever. It never goes away.
It’s probably the most horrible thing to say, but Ashley was an answered question. She could probably say the same of me.
Brooklyn was an unanswered question, but a mild one. I’d never get to fuck her, never get to be with her particular body. Who cares. It’s unanswered, but the answer wouldn’t matter. Not much.
The question I was asking while Ashley fucked me..the question that was starting to take hold of my mind, in terms of razorblades and angels and little rubber ducks with devil horns..the question that was forming itself in the words of slow-motion and space, and how you could be between it..that question..
(as Ash and I fucked alongside Worst Mistake and Constance Page, and Chad and Brooklyn’s tantric love..and while, without a condom, inside my best friend’s body, I came)
..that question was Jules.