I want a boyfriend

This email is 10 sentences long + paintings I've been liking lately

It’s not just the wanting but the waiting, the long pull of days that stack upon one another like the dull, sweating hours of summer afternoons when the cicadas scream out their endless lament and the trees stand perfectly still in the heat, heavy with the weight of their own shadows. It’s in the knowing that the day will stretch on regardless, like gray ocean waves too sluggish to break into foam, with or without the company of someone who might sit beside me in the quiet of it all, who might lean back against the same bench and look out at the same parkscape and say something—anything—that would make the unbearably vast openness of the day feel less like a mystery and more like a ritual.

It’s not loneliness, not exactly, not the kind that rips or rages or tears but the kind that settles, humid and low, into the bones, so that you do not even notice it until one day you find yourself sitting alone at a patio and someone who looks your age asks, “Excuse me, may I take this chair?” before transplanting the seat of your invisible beau to her table where it becomes of better use, making you feel like an amputee shopping for gloves in a world where gloves are sold in pairs, as something in your chest caves inward, small and sharp and silvery purple, a place you didn’t even know was empty until you knew how full it could be.

Me and who (Martinis, Lemons, and Cigarettes, Tom Gregg)

I wonder if the shape of my wanting is a result of someone who wants me back, a Galatea brought to life by sheer telepathic yearning from an oblivious and anonymous Pygmalion, left pondering with a blood-ripe restlessness or powerlessness that tortures the heart with the vain need to seek something even though it does not know what that something is, like being existentially infertile—wanting yet never getting.

Details from Venus playing with two doves, Francesco Hayez

In the velvet of a winter night, when insomnia drowns my lungs in its own ribcage, my mind wanders like an old gypsy with skin as yellow as church wax, inquiring from one memory of a crush to another with fraudulent amity and sly hopes of diddling some kind of shining delight from the salt-pillared stories that buttress that theater in my head where all bedtime fantasies play out—salt all because I looked back too many times.

I wanna be gently psychoanalyzed here so bad (Le Chaise Le Corbusier, Claudio Bravo)

I wonder if my wanting is an accusation of my character—what if there’s something wrong with me and what if I’m not a good person and what if I’m the secret recipient of some coupled people’s pity?