Even under normal circumstances, I am not the type to show up to a date with asymmetrical papillae of any kind. So you can only imagine how I have to flick my left nipple all the way down Mulberry Street; the right having decided to be randomly rock- hard, meanwhile, the left? Exactly.

My goal is to get my left nipple to ascend areola before I pass D.S. & Durga’s Prince Street location. This should put me on track to being uniformly erect by the time I get to Rintintin, an airy bistro with an eclectic Mediterranean slant.

●

Initially, I had no intention to send Brunello Cucinelli’s Global Operations Coordinator a picture of my “hole” but I’m trying, lately, to, and not to be like “be open” and “loosen up,” but, you know, not to be like “ice cream tastes better melted” and not to be like “interested in reframing negative space” or to say “voids are portals” and “emptiness is a gateway” and “God vacuums by dividing by zero” but it’s like Aristotle says about the epiglottis, the flap of cartilage at the back of the throat that flits between the respiratory and digestive tracts, being nature’s remedy “to the vicious position of the windpipe in front of the esophagus” and that being why we cannot breathe and swallow at the same time, if you know what I mean, like how in her 4-Minute No-Equipment Arm Dancing Workout, Marnie—whose pilates clients include Kate Hudson, et al.—says around 3:40, “Centrifugal force. The power of circles in nature.”

●

I’m in my kitchenette in my Girlfriend Collective leggings and jade bangle. My thong is 97% bamboo. My bralette is the Xueli by Are You Am I in the shade Alabaster.

Needless to say, I am boiling water, feeling typically peckish and totally nebulous, when my phone arpeggios with news of a “New Connection”:

Nikolaj, 37, Brooklyn, NY. Industry: Business & Fashion Saved Places: IFC Center in Manhattan, Elf Cafe in Los Angeles, Kebab in Milano Interests: Stockholm, Rihanna, Ta-Nihisi Coates, Fine Art, Sustainability, UX Design, The Atlantic, Highsnobiety, Soccer, Spaghetti, Dover Street Market, Charity and Causes, Vietnamese Food, Piano, Anderson.Paak

I sprinkle nutritional yeast on steamed yam. Nikolaj messages “hi” and a shaka emoji.

By the way, I’m standing on a Turkish rug. 2 x 3. Nothing crazy. I only mention it to say this: Doritos, for example, are, as you know, designed to dissolve on the tongue. This is so people don’t register the Doritos as having happened. Now, I could have said Doritos “melt in your mouth.” I could have said that instead of “dissolve on your tongue.” But “dissolve on your tongue” is stronger. Why? It’s sexier. Why? More percussive. Why?

One thing leads to another and basically Nikolaj asks for nudes.

When I worked at Free People, one of my coworkers—and this was back in college, just by the way—would disappear at 11 a.m. every day to eat a hard-boiled egg in the bathroom.

Nikolaj: “Wanna know my favorite type of pic?”

I don’t know how to explain my bangs to you. Basically there’s this law student on TikTok who showed me how to do this thing where it almost always looks like I just flipped my hair. Do you know what I mean? Like as if my hair was in my eyes and I just flipped it. I’m not sure if you understand how powerful that is. Like, period. Like a period is erotic not because it confers stillness but because it makes a splash. Two Segments and a Sphere (1936) by Barbara Hepworth. This is a marble sculpture. It is a plinth with a ball balancing on a semicircular wedge on a slanted chunk.

Me: “I do.”

I can be quite simple-sexy. Jane Birkin, say. I love a clean line. 100% cotton. This kind of thing.

Nikolaj: “I wanna see your tits and pussy and asshole in one pic and your smile too.”

Diluting a walnut pesto from Eataly with coconut aminos.

Me: “Is that physically possible?”

If soluble fiber is two calories per gram, and oat fiber is at most 33% soluble fiber, assuming it’s made from the bran and not the hull (even less if made from the hull, though most likely it’s from the bran), r/volumeeating’s Alternatives to oat fiber that don’t taste like I’m stuck in a carpenter’s workshop during a tornado and my throat is on fire?'s u/sleak89 says: “Let’s be honest.... xanthan gum, psyllium husk, etc...Hubby’s idea of adventurous: smoothies and tofu -_-”

Pam Cooking Spray is Not Negligible.

●

I am trying to open my mouth to eat a piece of roasted cauliflower. I wouldn’t say it “hurts” but there is acute tightness in the orbicularis oris to be sure. It doesn’t sting per se but I can’t comfortably accommodate the girth of a floret.

I always try to pop into Butterfield Market after I get lip filler. I like to peruse. Needless to say, I picked up roasted cauliflower with parmesan from the hot bar, eight ounces. Random, I realize.

Anyway, I am sitting on the ledge of a planter. Perched, more like. I’m wearing, and I mean absolutely nothing by this, a mohair beret by the Danish brand GANNI.

As I said, it’s not painful per se to wrap my lips around the girth of the floret. What it is is pent up pressure from plasma leaking into interstitial spaces of the submucosal layer of my vermilion border causing vasodilated labial capillaries to press on adipose tissue in the extracellular matrix of my perioral region.

Anyway, I feel very on-the-brink-of.

I am too capillarily dilated, clearly, to engage with cruciferae at this moment. No worries. It’s fall. It’s gorgeous. It’s Madison Avenue. Carbon-fiber strollers crunch empty bags of lightly-salted Harvest Snap green pea puffs. Jews in light jackets lick gelato. One has to play with a Tesla’s clit to open its door.

With a subtle shift in consciousness, we remember we are not awareness but merely the space it occupies. That’s Eckhart Tolle.

There is a Getty Image from 2003 titled “Prince Harry Holds A Bottle Of Water After Competing In The Field Game And The Wall Game Against A Team Of Old Boys On College Field At Eton” that my mind flits to whenever I see one such one liter bottle of Evian. Fine. But now, since Nikolaj followed me on Instagram this morning, I find the sight sends my mind straddling this question: were I to “story,” randomly, that archival photo of Harry on the field at Eton, might that make Nikolaj think her mind?

No system of thought can give us access to the source of thought. – Eckhart Tolle

I meander; across 85th, down 3rd.

In Citarella, I tap my clavicle in front of kefir.

In Lululemon, legs a touch wider than shoulder width, toes pointed to the changing room door, I am bent over, head between my knees, naked but for my mohair beret from the Danish brand GANNI, trying to look at—to see, really—my asshole from an outsider’s perspective.

“Obviously the murder discussed in the article is real and incredibly sad, but is it true ‘Ocean’ is your ideal customer and the description in the article is accurate?” This is something someone said on r/lululemon in a post titled “Educators...PLEASE tell me the ‘Ocean’ and ‘Mountain’ thing is made up?” that links to an article published on Salon.com in 2013 titled “Yoga, Spinning and a Murder” with the subtitle “I worked at Lululemon the year an employee at another store was murdered by a coworker. Here’s what it was like.”

In my Bless poncho pocket there are, for lack of a better term, homemade pumpkin balls.

Calmly, I part my cheeks.

The Besant-Rayleigh-Plesset formula plots the evolution of a single bubble in an infinite body of water by calculating time-varying radius using gaseous heat, pressure, and density. This is a nonlinear differential equation that only applies to incompressible fluids wherein the realm is boundless and devoid of other bubbles.

The problem with “pubes” is not that they exist. It’s their attitude. Studies show parents are more likely to strap their children into shopping carts if the children have attractive faces.

A riddle a businessman based in New Jersey with whom I once split a slice of almond cake at Pause told me, is this: three men are on death row. Tomorrow, one man will be pardoned. No men know which man that will be. Prisoner A leaves the cell to ask a guard. Which man will be saved? Prisoner A wants to know. The guard won’t say. They strike a deal: the guard will tell Prisoner A the name of one of the two men who are going to be executed. Ok. Prisoner B
is going to be executed. Now: what is Prisoner A’s chance of survival? People tend to think Prisoner A’s chances have gone up from 1⁄3 to 1⁄2 (the odds having been narrowed down to him and Prisoner C). But really Prisoner A’s )! chance of survival remains 1⁄3 while Prisoner C’s chance increases to 2⁄3! The businessman wanted to give me a key to his house in Long Island, he kept saying things like, “this is very awkward.”

It’s hard, what with light traveling in rays, to orient a phone at such an angle vis-à-vis a mirror so flash doesn’t strike with such a flair so as to accidentally eclipse a keynote gland and/or orifice.

This girl in my French immersion elementary school, Bobby, had to do first grade twice because, she explained, her brother played competitive hockey. If you saw Bobby, this would make sense. Basically it looked as if she had balayage but we were six (seven in her case #becauseofherbrother) so it was just natural highlights.

Perianal hair reminds me of Matisse’s Dance.

From Kay Ambrose’s The Ballet-Lover’s Companion: A Guide to Practical Aesthetics (1949): “The quality for which we all search subconsciously is subtlety.” This, Ambrose says, exists somewhere between “meticulous realism” and “heavy-handed symbolism.”

It does look like an exclamation point; the labia and anus, from a bird’s eye view. The diphthong of that.

I do like watching men on YouTube review protein bars in their parked cars. It relaxes me. Why?

I sit on the stool to review the photos.

“Was a Singaporean Woman Injured While )$ Photocopying Her Breasts?” (Snopes.com, 2017). “Claim: A woman was hospitalized with burns after photocopying her breasts in Bishan, Singapore. Rating: False.”
From such an angle, the way pubic hair spreads out on either side of the “crack,” so to speak, it has a wingedness like a Rorschach.

Are you being girl-next-door or are you dissociating?

For your consideration: the dialectical counter positioning of relational and absolute notions of space as space itself is created by interactions between matter and forces in the sense that there is no absolute reference frame but the frame itself being bent by the bodies that occupy it and measurements of space are measurements of events happening in space as space itself is the absence of anything.

On r/askgaybros, there’s talk of “the right amount of starfish.”

On Google, I write “what’s starfish for hole.”

On saltwaterfish.com forums > saltwater fish > reef tanks > help!!! holey starfish, a Member with the username shortstop says “my serpent starfish has a HUGE hole in its head. What do I do and what is it? april :/” and an Active Member with the username ophiura says: “A few things. How long have you had your star? Has it lost arms? Make sure nothing will pick at it, like shrimp. What sort of shrimp do you have? Moving it within the system, to a sump or refugium, is OK. If the arms start to drop off, this is a more critical situation. I had a brittle get a hole in the disk last week. He is still acting a bit shy. The ‘stuff’ you see is stomach and gonads.” Yikes.

●

Deborah Treisman sounds sad. I sprinkle parmesan on kelp noodles and listen to Ben Lerner narrate choking on steak and order Kiss My Keto sour watermelons and send Nikolaj my asshole.

Nikolaj: “Can I cum on your tits?”

I would love more specific feedback about my asshole.

Tonight I will have this dream: I’m barefoot at SoulCycle. My toes do not look good and Nikolaj is biking in baggy jeans and when class starts he takes out a hardcopy of Beowulf and a highlighter and starts reading aloud and the girl beside me asks Nikolaj to read in his head and I have a book too propped up on my bike and it’s Content which is a so-called “fuzzy amalgamation” by starchitect Rem Koolhaas in which Martha Stewart is quoted saying she’s in talks with Bill Gates’s crew about software that tells you what color you can make your curtains and also that she was in Nashville last week and there was a snowstorm and these 16-year-old kids, mostly black, were walking home from school and started to scream because “they all knew exactly who [Martha] was,” and I am struggling to balance a pack of mini Post-it notes on my handlebar and Nikolaj interrupts a back-and-forth between Hrothgar and Wulfgar to point to me and to say “hey” and “great job” and he’s pointing at the seat of my bike and I can only assume he’s referring to how I adjusted it all by myself at the beginning of class because I’ve ridden before so I know how to set it up.

●

So, Nolita, dusk; nipples, finally, on point.

By no means do I need to have the most exciting breasts at Rintintin, but given certain prior behavior on my part, expectations, insofar as me presenting nominally normal nipples, for example, feel particularly raised in terms of what I bring, body-wise, to tonight’s tapas.

Nikolaj is already seated but stands to greet me (vice versa, my nipples, him).

I don’t know how else to say this but Nikolaj, it quickly becomes clear, has a hoop earring with a sabertooth charm dangling from his right ear’s helix.

He’s ordered tomato soup already. It’s on its way. I have no idea what’s going on.

I sort of blindly order black mission figs crostini.

Nikolaj’s earring is nonstop. Every time he moves, the tooth goes haywire.

A Colombian chef with alopecia with whom I crossed paths at a weekend wellness retreat type of thing in Mont Tremblant, Québec comes to mind. We met in a geodesic dome. She showed me her eyelashes; she didn’t have any. They’d fallen out. She told me to make a circle of potatoes, any kind of potato, around a wifi router. Later, in a yurt, she led a cheeze bread seminar. Over vegan Pao de Queijo, she told me to put dulse in my smoothies and that there is guar gum in Ka’Chava.

I can’t hear Nikolaj well. He mumbles about global operations. The sabertooth is agitated. What did he think of my hole? He doesn’t say. He says a bot keeps commenting “🐸 bike” on a post of their new quilted nylon skirt with Thermore® padding.

●

Nikolaj’s condo is sad. He has a box of Carr’s crackers on the counter, unsalted. Matte black fixtures. “Murdered out.” Lever-style door handles. High-gloss cabinets evilly reflect recessed lights. On the floor in a corner, one pistachio shell.

I’m wearing an acrylic “blob” ring that makes it painful for me to make a fist. Nikolaj is breathing steadily. His breath smells like Montreal steak spice.

I know, with the overhead lighting such as it is and given the angle of my nasal tip, there’s a terrible triangular shadow being cast.

There is not a lot of “stuff” which means the stuff there is—a 3-in-1 charging cable (micro-USB,USB type-C, and lightning) splayed on a barstool, avocado pits suspended in water with toothpicks—feels ominous and autistic. Nikolaj offers me water. It tastes weird. I try to be positive. I appreciate Nikolaj’s shoulder blades have a nautical aspect, how they move, if that makes sense. Like oars?

My nasolabial folds, I know it, are accentuated.

Do I want a tour? Nikolaj asks, his arm hair practically translucently blond. You know raw chicken breast, how it’s see-through-y.

His bedroom overlooks a Chop’t.

Folliculitis is a common skin condition that can appear as a series of raised bumps along the crease of the gluteal cleft. These are not “pimples.” A positive reframe I would suggest is to think of birds on a wire.

Fifty-One Beautiful Buttholes on fapality.com

u/nakedpro9269: “How do you know if a butthole is aesthetically pleasing?”

Nikolaj has a tiny tattoo of a cantilever chair on his neck.

I think I’m going to head out. I open my arms to do a hug.

u/coeurlbeagle: “Was it a coinslot hole? Pretty and pert? Did it have the right amount of starfish?”

Nicolaj pats my back.

u/costconormcoreslut: “Maybe starfish. Low tide.”

He steps back and throws up a peace sign that excites his sabertooth.

In Brené Brown’s Max original series Atlas of the Heart, Brené wears ankle boots and shows a painting of a circle of crows surrounding a sheep standing over its baby’s dead body.

I love how Wikipedia puts it: “A distraught ewe bleating in grief.”