sunyata courie

i have this image, in my head, of what it is like to be a man in a relationship. this appears to me when it is 10:09pm on a saturday night in late february and i am lonely in a city that i hate. i take my cbd. tears stream down my face. i imagine going to pick flowers up at a farmers market, thinking how bourgeois this is, how i lack a developed theory of aesthetics. i rush violently between feeling like the most attractive person on this planet and knowing deep in my soul that i am horribly ugly to every person who looks at me.

i have this image in my head of being a man, of being at a bar at 7pm when the night has just begun. i am taking shots with my other male friends. i am tall, i’m wearing a flight jacket and i have a beard. i’m looking at the bartender, who already knows me, so he lets me smoke my cigarettes inside. i glance at the group of women that has been looking back at me, trying to catch my eye. i know everyone and no one knows me.

i have this image in my head of myself if i were born a man. i get a text from my female self and i glance around, check the text, and put my phone back in my pocket next to my non-latex condoms and wallet filled with cash. i order another round. it is 11pm and i am a man and i think of her and i wonder if she’s home and i hope she is. i wonder if she is out dancing with someone else but i wait to text her till 1 in the morning. i know she does not deserve this but i do it anyway because i know she will let me. and then i am just another man, throwing up in a bar in the middle of february with no unified idea of aesthetics.