It’s a large room – I’ve been reading, and at thoughtful halts, speaking to myself, for a good while now, as I couldn’t sleep without exhausting my mind, while the silence of the city at three, my animated pacing about, smoking, my theatrical voice resonating in the vacuity of the room, the incidental mirror reflections of what I resembled, and my unbridled, effectual words encouraging me to speak more, in a mild self embrace. I thought I’d write.

I discover that it is one thing to be lost in speech, and a discernible other to remember the words which just flew past in the warming, gentle admiration of self

I was thinking about what it meant to be man. That came about as I slipped into the shoes of Patrice Mersault, while he thought of an uncouth man whose manhood he affirmed through the man’s infrequent visits to brothels. I shut the book and glanced at the clean, upper portion of the apple green wall that stood implacably before my eyes.

Then I spoke aloud this line – it’s an old, convenient idea that one is a man if one has exercised his muscle in a woman. This was easy to accept. It’s an idea that I find is simple to live by mindlessly. It’s something that I have felt – pride rising in me, as the woman, in all her freedom and pleasure, allows herself to possess inside her a visceral part of my body, and as our bodies – our bodies alone – suggest that I am a man, and she, a woman, with satisfaction in the pleasure and exhaustion.

I don’t think, however, that manhood felt in a way, a temporal act such as that is any enduring a feeling. In the permanent, familiar chaos of our living, we, at times, forget the fact that we are men, or women, while we forget our very existences, only to be reminded of our being men, or women, by the facades and animations of other such men, and women, a scrubbing of one’s beard, a passing of one’s hands through one’s hair, the fairly common touching of genitals and adjusting our clothes. At other times, we are conscious of our being men, or women, and in some of those times, act upon it. In the times we are blanched unconscious of the feeling of being men, or women, and just conscious of being our purposeful selves, lost in doing, we are, perhaps, our most critical selves, not so much men, not so much women, but more ourselves, merely ourselves.