[...] David doesn’t know anything, and I’m not going to tell him, it would be an act of selfishness. But do I want him to guess, do I want to be found out, do I want to scare him? These are the things I would suspect of a client. But of myself? Am I hiding from myself? I look back through my journals, I see anxiety, strange dream imagery, I can’t self-read, it all goes sideways. Journal, Esther would say. I journal. Am I trying to escape my own fear that David will leave me by leaving him? Am I thwarting him, Lacan, my own father, patriarchy? What is it exactly all this is tending toward? The way we accept certain ways of being with people in the world and can’t accept others. About trying to break the bounds that society has woven between sex and ethics. About desire, trying to understand it and live it out, rejecting the ways in which it is monitored and moralised and contained. Asking what happens if we dive in to it, knowing that it will always leave us wanting more. How can we live with each other, and enjoy our bodies, and each other’s bodies, when we know that desire is part of an endless chain? And that it is being in this chain that makes us alive? How do we live out our desire without hurting other people? What do other people need to know about our desire?

Where we run into trouble is the idea of futurity. As long as it’s one day after the next, a perennial present, all is well, but when it comes to looking down the road a little bit, there things fray.

On Clémentine’s last night we go to see a French band we both like play at a little venue near Old Street, dark with people smoking the occasional illicit cigarette, the kind of place where the owners don’t care, and everyone misses the days before the ban, when we couldn’t see each other clearly through the smoke, but perhaps we felt things more intensely as a result. It is a sit-down-and-listen kind of place, and we grab a table not too far from the front and drink our beers in the close, companionable heat. The lead singer has a voice like a woodwind, a warmly timbred alto, and when the band begins to play a Cowboy Junkies cover of a Velvet Underground song I dissolve into some liquid version of myself mixed with world, with the warm bentwood chair I’m sitting in, with the scuffed mosaic floor, with the French singer who is slightly out of place in London, dépaysée, with the husky insistent bass guitar, with Clémentine, who slips an arm around the back of my chair. Her arm isn’t touching me, but I am encircled by her, by the music.

By the time the singer reaches that heart-healing end of the song, as the guitarist slides through the never not surprising chords of the bridge, notes of bright acidity in the otherwise warm liquid of the music, I have, quite simply, arrived elsewhere, gone further than Old Street, been transported back to a place I haven’t been in a very long time, felt feelings of safety and origin I thought had escaped me forever. Or maybe, in fact, I am somewhere I have never, ever been.

Clémentine comes over every day, and some days we sleep together, and some days we try not to but end up fucking anyway. It has happened; we need each other now. I need her, I am able to say, but I don’t understand this need, I have never been with a girl before, never knew I wanted a girl, until I wanted her, her body in her mesh bra, her mesh panties, my fingers on her, in her, learning what to do, afraid of being wrong, letting myself be led, it feels right, we keep going. Her hipbone in the morning light. Her body contracting under mine. My body one muscle that contracts and releases and contracts again, under her tongue, her fingers, her thighs. I think fleetingly of Jonathan, wonder is this a way to be close to him again, or was it always about Clémentine, this whole time? I try to turn my questions off. No what does this mean. It means in and of itself; alone it has meaning.

We don’t say things like I am yours and you are mine, we don’t make plans beyond the following weekend, where we’ll eat, where we’ll walk. We are each pinned in our situations; we couldn’t afford to run away together and we know it without discussing it. All her radical politics, her Deleuzian critique of psychoanalysis, can’t spring us free.

[...] all of these things at once, made me say, as she was putting her shoes on, all your radical politics and he’s the person you go home to?

She shrugs. The heart wants what it wants.

It does, sure, but it’s our responsibility to think about what we want and why we want it, we can’t just close our eyes to our desires.

Yes, we can, she says, and I think you should try it sometime, she says, bristling. Why do you have to explain everything to yourself? Or demand that other people do the same thing? Why can’t something just be?

The compulsion to repeat, I begin, it has a hold on us that we can try to break—

Oh fuck off with your Freud, Anna, seriously, she says. I’m not your fucking student. Just fuck off for once.

She starts to leave, and turns back, and puts her arms around me.

Maybe I like the way it holds me, she says.

Towards the end of the day there is Clémentine at the door. Anna! she says, rummaging in her tote bag. Lamia gave me this book and it’s incredible and I wanted to tell you about it right away. It’s about this woman – fuck that’s not it – she’s in love with this guy and so much so – ah there it is, and she pulls out a copy of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick – so much so that she is willing to debase herself by writing him all these letters! And so it isn’t really about him at all, it’s really about desire and daring to make art, and the importance, for a woman artist, of being blatantly narcissist in order to actually become who she is. But! she says, flipping through the dog-eared pages, this is what I wanted to tell you about. She finds the passage, reads aloud in her accented English. Desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy – a claustrophobia inside your skin.

That’s it, she says. That’s why I can’t get on with Lacan. I don’t see my desire as a lack of something. Not a phallus, not some substitute for it, but like – it’s like some people plant this seed of energy in you, that loads of other people don’t. And as it takes root I feel like I’m shimmering with excitement, and need to get physically close to them, to share it, to feel their shimmer. Do you know what I mean? And I think I know what she means, I think I have been trying to share Clémentine’s shimmer this whole time, and I pull her closer, and then she says something that makes me wonder what exactly we’ve been doing this whole time.

I have to go for a walk after that. In a second she has gone from being someone I love, or think I could love, to someone who’s playing a role, and watching herself do it. I love Clémentine’s shimmer but it seems to me for the first time constructed, not natural; willed, not produced. She read the giddy parts of I Love Dick without the heavy stuff, the feelings of shame and failure, the marital estrangement. She missed the parts about what it takes to live with other people, the unsolvable problem of alienation between the self and the other, the constraints they place on you, the small spaces you have to occupy together. Kraus calls desire a claustrophobia inside your own skin – a need to get out of the body house, to jump inside someone else’s for a change. How does she account for that? She didn’t, she left that part out. There was still so much to talk about. I was left frustrated, as if there were soap left on my skin and the hot water had gone.