When I am on the hunt, I hunt.

It is a Saturday night in Manhattan and I am roaming Midtown for a sports bar and a plate of French fries. I tell myself I’m also looking to get hit on. One could say I’m looking to fuck.

I leave my phone in my mother’s hotel room. She’s here for work. I want a charged phone when I get back, along with the liberating stench of feeling like a tourist in my own home. No Google. No Yelp. No default humans on the other side when I feel too vulnerably alone.

I Googled “sports bars” before I left. I head to one on 50th Street and Third Avenue. I take a seat at the bar, two seats away from a relatively good-looking guy. We nod hello, the mating acknowledgement of two animals that probably want to fuck. Fuck anyone. Or anything. At least that’s how I feel. There’s a certain timbre of desperation fuming from my skin.

The sports bar’s kitchen appears to be closed, though I wait long enough to ask the bartender, just in case. While I wait, the guy two seats to over tells me I look like the girl from Broad City – has anyone ever asked me that? All the time, I say. He makes sure I know it’s a compliment. I do. Minutes later, I ask the bartender about the kitchen, which is, in fact, closed. There’s a grill and a diner around the corner, the bartender says. A diner is my last resort before McDonald’s, I tell myself. I feel like sex. Not necessarily having sex. Just like—sex. A diner means I acquiesce.

I try one more bar. The music is too loud. I acquiesce. Head to the diner. Sit on a stool at the counter.

I ask the server for a stack of napkins, and I start writing all of this. And as I start writing all of these words, I realize: I am literally never alone. I always have my art. I always have my words and my stories and my pen. My art is unequivocally always here to be my friend or my fuck.

There is nothing like a fresh sentence, which is the same way I feel about a really good sex. Sometimes the horniness is indistinguishable, sometimes I can’t tell the difference between the urge—whether I need someone to cum inside of me, or I need something inside me to come out.

I remember feeling this so clearly after I saw the movie La La Land. I got home from the theater and sequestered myself in my bedroom. I needed jazz. As I wrote a thank you note to another artist friend, who’d just taken me to see a play, I realized—Coltrane humping my ears—that my art—my love affair with my art—is to be one of the great relationships of my life.

We know each other intimately, my art and me. We have held each other weeping on airplanes, bloodshot, shaking in the middle of the night. We have carved our fingers post-coital into one another’s backs and always lied. It’s causal, we used to say, it won’t ever happen again. Even though everyone looking in from the outside knew we were completely, wildly in love.

My art mirrors my life. As I write this (2018), I haven’t had penetrative sex in over three years. This isn’t to say I haven’t been making art. I have. But have I been fucking out its brains? Have I really been letting it come inside, deep, deep within? Like what would it mean to be even more vulnerable with my art? Would it mean canceling plans? Saying “no” to shit I don’t really want to do in the first place? Making space to put my art—self—first, before other things in my life?

I am a very sexual person. To have not expressed myself with a partner through penetrative sex in over three years is significant. And this isn’t a self-imposed celibacy. I’ve done that before, in college, for a year and a half, to heal from being a survivor of sexual assault. And that whole time I made some really incredible art. Some of my best, at least to this day. I was recalibrating back to my core. And in many ways, part of these last many years has been some of that too.

Mostly, I think I’ve closed myself off. From the outside it may not look like that. What with the magazine articles. Or the international performance poetry tours. Except I know what it feels like inside when I am truly making love to my art. I know what it feels like inside myself when I am thriving from the unmitigated climax of surrendering to creating work. I suppose there is a metaphor that this pen I’m using right now at this diner, as I write these words vertically on folded white napkins, is running out of ink. I am myself, quite literally, running out of ink.

My last push and thrust before I expire.

Before I pass out.

Before I climax.

Before I scream.

Before I scream at the top of my lungs.

Before I come.

Cum.

Come.

I pay for my French fries and leave a tip.

I walk back to my mother’s hotel.

I can always get laid, I tell myself.

I can always use my pen.