“Fuck me alive again.”

—King James I, Mary & George

2.) Do you find yourself unable to stop seeing a specific person even though you know that seeing this person is destructive to you?

I’ve counted every time. My body, each morning, awaiting its eventual plunder. You liked to watch the flames run blue in my eyes. Slapping my face—Harder—you’d dribble spit onto my parted lips. I thought this was love. I swore it was my forever.

4.) Do you get “high” from sex and/or romance? Do you crash?

Everything seemed weightless those three months. My fatigue, an artifact; scar tissue, blanketed by your penumbra. I lost count of the cigarettes I smoked then. I was a demigod—you, my progenitor—our skin the prism through which light bursts. I said I love you during late-night drags, your semen escaping onto my thighs. You’d kiss the smoke back into my lungs. I needed this. Apart was too much, no salt to drown neuroreceptors undone.

5.) Have you had sex at inappropriate times, in inappropriate places, and/or with inappropriate people?

I still brag about that alleyway. What bends the tongue can make. Together drunk, my half-Asian face flushed, your smirk subducting lithologies unknown beneath our feet. I hope someone saw your teeth ravenous under my cheeks—a monster of the night—proof depravity could be a mirror, us packets of reflected heat. You burnt the sacred out of me.

11.) Do you keep a list, written or otherwise, of the number of partners you’ve had?

You were No. 24—the year I started my PhD, the year my first book was accepted for publication, the year I realized love was a choice. Auspicious, I told myself. Reality didn’t matter: your inevitable, ignored departure from this continent; my addiction some elaborate masquerade ball; the only glue sex, you-in-me and me-in-you until the blood under our fingertips was no longer discernible. I visited my PCP because of the hematoma on my anus. I wept the day I no longer felt it.

15.) Have you or do you have sex regardless of the consequences (e.g., the threat of being caught, the risk of contracting herpes, gonorrhea, AIDS, etc.)?

It was always raw, but I let it be. For you. For the future I could taste. I compartmentalized, each of your other (contemporaneous) lovers a neatly labeled box in the archives of my amygdala. Yet that was immaterial—you chose me, promised you wanted to grow with me, said I love you just to me. Any disease we’d share, hand in unlovable hand.

21.) Have you ever threatened your financial stability or standing in the community by pursuing a sexual partner?

Afraid of losing you, I offered so many gifts. King Krule’s best record on vinyl because you went to school with him. Your favorite wine, Barolo, for the birthday dinner at world’s end, our fingers interlocked across the table. Matching scorpion keychains to remind us of the poison preparing the way for this suspended cadence. How lucky to find each other, I said and you agreed. You gave me nothing except a regift from another lover, but it was okay; your words were the most sumptuous honey I’d gulped.

24.) Do you feel that life would have no meaning without a love relationship or without sex? Do you feel that you would have no identity if you were not someone’s lover?

I was raped and thought I deserved it. Two months later, you were my savior, any embodied score reduced to zero through the kink we created. Like a mama bird, I kissed water into your dry mouth—ankles and wrists locked to my bed, ersatz blindfold over your eyelids, the transcendence of self in consensual helplessness. You taught me to butcher Dover sole while sliding into me, survivalists we were in your kitchen, our bodies simultaneously vernacular and god-touched. This is the moment I fell for you. I’ll never eat a bottom feeder again.

28.) Do you feel uncomfortable about your masturbation because of the frequency with which you masturbate, the fantasies you engage in, the props you use, and/or the places in which you do it?

Aftermath is filled with the permanence of you: the neighbor walking his dog down the street; the bartender shaking my dirty martini; the porn stars with your body shape, beard, gaze wrought at the intersection of destruction and ecstasy. I sometimes cry when I masturbate. I know humans are resilient, our lives grand testament to triumph, but an addict of touch is a connoisseur of the pyrrhic. Your memory, an impassable ford; my bones, whitewashed.

31.) Do you need to have sex, or “fall in love,” in order to feel like a “real man” or a “real woman”?

For the first time, I felt I could shimmer in my kaleidoscopic gender, embrace the liminal of selfhood. You said you were most attracted to androgyny, a flag I initially miscolored because nobody had found that part of me—gossamer and all—beautiful. I acquiesced to your requests of full-body fishnets and Leave it on when unzipping my dress, secure in your desire. Only later would I excavate buried discomfort, lies ventriloquized to land another dopamine rush, the self I lost in loving you.

36.) Do you find the pain in your life increasing no matter what you do? Are you afraid that deep down you are unacceptable?

I listen to “The Hanging Tree” on repeat and remember: this was supposed to be it. A flight in daylight, any trauma covered in sand. How I craved escape—from me, with you. How I imagined our fused life would blossom atop south-of-London soil. But you left with too many traces. And I’m left with numbers unforgettable, a sliver of heart that won’t stop yearning for impossible obliteration.

37.) Do you feel that you lack dignity and wholeness?

Yes.

Numbered, italicized questions are taken from Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous’ “The 40 Questions for Self-Diagnosis.”