There may have been a couple housewives after that. But mostly it was women I met at bars or met on the Internet. I stayed when they wanted and left when they wanted. I listened to their breakup stories and bad-marriage stories and childhood traumas. I could be the person who did that for others.

   I used to think I’d somehow escaped a sex cult without sexual hang-ups. I didn’t have an education, or a healthy mind, or healthy relationships. But I could have sex with women, and even when it wasn’t great, it was still usually fun. I thought it helped that I’m gay and didn’t have to sleep with men. I told myself I had no fear of women. But then, I never did say no. Still, my paying attention to every breath made me really fucking good in bed, whatever that means to you. You want to go slow and eventually, carefully, try oral, I can do that. It’s my favorite thing. You want someone to make you come with a strap-on, want to call it my cock, I’m all about it. And you’ll believe it. You want to be held down and choked, fisted, spanked, called names, I can do that too. Love it. You want to wear a dick to the club, I’ll suck it on the way home, then fuck you over the couch when we get there. You’ll think it was my idea. It’s that thing you call empathy. Maybe it is. Sometimes it’s enough just to make you feel. Sometimes, I’m still surprised by someone, and the sex is amazing, if only the sex. I still want more.

I dated a woman because she was sad and followed me home. I thought I could make one of us happy. But making her happy required I fill the role of a mother who enjoyed watching someone play video games after I’d cooked dinner. I dated a woman who said I was brilliant—she just couldn’t introduce me to her friends because I was blue-collar, just a cable guy.

* * *

—

   People describe falling in love as meeting someone who they feel like they’ve known all their lives. Someone who understands them immediately. To me, that seems more like a nightmare than a fantasy. I always thought love meant the process of discovery, the work to understand someone. I want to know what it feels like when someone tries to figure me out, and keeps trying. I want someone to ask the questions and listen to the answers. I want to be studied the way I study others and learned the way I learn them.

The closest I found was someone who played the perfect role, nearly. When she didn’t know the answer, she filled in the blank with an errant assumption, what she wanted me to be. She shared every interest of mine. Music. Movies. Books. Dolly Parton. Dogs. Cooking. Red Bull in the light blue can. American Spirits in the yellow box. Those little Nutella snacks with the dipping sticks. You’d think I’d have noticed she was playing my game—how to survive a world that cannot love you. In the end, she couldn’t keep up the act. But neither could I.

The funniest thing, to me, or maybe it’s sad—fine line, really—is that a lot of my story doesn’t even require much work. But no one, not one person in the history of my dating life, has ever googled it. The big story I don’t always want to explain, a whole lot of it’s on the Internet, websites, books, documentaries. No one has ever bothered to look it up.

Maybe if they knew the story they could forgive me too. Maybe then I wouldn’t be invisible. But then, all those times, trying to be enough for someone to love, I’d forgotten something I’d already learned.

* * *

—

   We’d broken up once before, Rhonda and me. I don’t remember who broke up with whom that time. She was fucking someone else, but I couldn’t tell you if that started before or after. I’d been living with her in a basement apartment in Logan Circle. But if we weren’t together, I had to find a new place to live. I spent a lot of nights on the upstairs neighbors’ couch. They’d smoke me up and tell me to leave her. And finally I did.

I was back where I began in D.C., looking at shared town houses where I couldn’t afford to rent a closet, much less a room. So when she wanted to get back together…I thought it was a good thing that I knew how to forgive. And by “forgive,” I mean shove all that shit, my hurt and anger, down, way down, and pretend everything was fine.

Forgiveness is, after all, the ultimate virtue; the only other option is becoming one of those people. You know the type. The bitter, angry, crazy shell of a human played by Kathy Bates on a quest for an Oscar.

Whether someone forgave or is still angry is the question we ask before we allow them empathy. We shame those who don’t forgive and treat their instincts of distrust, anger, and hurt as something shameful. Maybe it comes from Christianity. Never mind that Jesus is shit at forgiving. I mean, yeah, he died for our sins. But he passive-aggressively reminds you of them and punishes you anytime you disagree. Forgiveness is a sign of good moral character, maturity, good health and fortune, white teeth and a clear complexion. All this can be yours for the small price of existential pain. The person who forgives takes the higher ground; they’re the bigger person. And goddamn, if I didn’t want to be the bigger person. But what if I didn’t? What if forgiveness was a trick I played on myself so that I wouldn’t have an enemy or wouldn’t be alone?

   It took a few tries with Rhonda. But when I did finally leave, when I stopped letting her hurt me and stopped calling it forgiveness, when I accepted she was an asshole who’d never not be an asshole, that’s when I was safe. I was safe because I recognized she was my enemy. It helped that she sent me a bill.