Before I stop coming, I start sobbing. This has been happening a lot lately. Tears gush before my orgasm can finish gushing through me. Out of me. I know this is about release. About grief. About how I’m alone when this happens because it’s after my divorce and before the other one I love will love me back like that. She never will. And yet, I wait. Hold out hope. Hold images of her in my mind to block him out. I come and I cry and I finish coming so I can finish crying.

Alone.

Within the first four months after my divorce, I broke two vibrators. I hadn’t known how sexy freedom could feel. In my marriage’s absence and the subsequent release from the stress of mutual spousal mistreatment, I am now able to have four orgasms in one sitting. Frequently.

But that was before I started co-sobbing and climaxing.

Like right now.

I flop to my side, my only company still whirring inside me. I hold it, keep it there. Steady. I hold myself as I sob. As I come. Come undone by those teenage fantasies of her that will never come to fruition and by the other ones of him that did but will never come back again.

He loves me and I love her and I don’t know if I’m grieving my ex-husband or pre-grieving what I know will never be.

Either way, I have come to understand love’s inequality—its imbalance.

This isn’t about loneliness—but impossibility.

And not knowing how to surrender to its inherency.

———

Chelsey Clammer is the author of BodyHome, and won the 2015 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award for her essay collection, Circadian. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Essay Daily, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Normal School andBlack Warrior Review. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing. www.chelseyclammer.com

Image:
Disassociation
Reid Arowood
digital image taken with Dysmorphiscope, 2018