Two substantial firsts. I’m back from a two hour late-night walk around the city, and now stationed at my desk, with half of a petite, icy watermelon, bowl-up and sitting ready in front of me. It is officially summer. With the time spent trekking around, I felt the familiar and sharp pangs of summer yearnings. In that quiet time, I had little choice but to hone in on the absence of what summers usually hold for me, and that led me to reflecting on loneliness and how unusual being alone and un-partnered in the summer is for me.
This will be the first summer in (counting on fingers, then resorting to scratch paper) 5 years that I will be completely single. No prospects, no still living with an ex in a dignity-void codependent purgatory, completely free or uncomfortably alone, often one in the same. Where I won’t deny that I am still struggling with feeling that I may be wasting a portion of the minutes of life I have without someone to document them or share some of them with, I am also still reveling in relearning freedom that I never got to test out and unlearning all of the abusive, harmful rhetoric that were mainstays of all my periods of coupledom.
This will also be the first summer in 7 years where I will not be working in sex work (it’s now six days after my 26th birthday, G-d help me, you do the math). That’s a pretty big deal for me, even among all the other transition that has taken place this year that doesn’t make this a summer to remember solely for this reason. But it’s so oddly new, I will admit I feel a little lost.
For some people I suppose when the southern air grows thick and heavy, and nights of thunder, lightening and torrential down pour leave you stumbling through an overgrown, apt concrete jungle (thanks, Axel), maybe they just get an itch for bikinis, liquor, cut offs and porch swings. Maybe these folks are also haunted with the ritualistic yearning for sweaty faces pressed together by the river, and a sour, hot, unfamiliar tongue fishing around their mouths while intoxicating infatuation rots away their sensibility and rationality. I get those itches too, but almost like a craving, I get the deep itch after these years for bookings too hot for vinyl, the sounds of the few that were without air conditioning- the distinct sound made by my flogger slapping around on the upper crest of the back; more soggy than crisp (more of a basting, than a beating)-I savor these now. The engulfing heat and all of its sweat that made it so hard to be so serious. I miss that too. All while knowing how easy it is to romanticize in retrospect.
Part of this sense of loss is the onset of the loss of my youth; part of me would like to draw the type of clients I did forever, to keep the work, travel, rush of excitement, fast income, sense of expertise and power going for forever, to maintain that peak position that the trifecta of youth, ‘beauty’, and power let me feel once (even though worn as an outfit, only given by the typically older, white, rich man in scene that I would never be granted as privilege on the street). Maybe at the root of this is admitting some remorse, regret, and indecision in letting a year of my youth go by without exploiting it to its fullest advantage. It’s a tenuous pull and push between a future I don’t have yet, the fear that surrounds being an active sex worker for me, and the deep, known lure for all the aforementioned reasons and more.
