[...] 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.