When I was in college, I met my longing.
I went on a date with a man named Adam, and something happened that I am still, decades later, not entirely sure how to describe.
We were in bed together, early enough in the relationship that everything was still new and slightly astonishing, and I had gone somewhere. Drifted, the way I sometimes did without quite knowing it, present in body but absent in some harder-to-name way. Dissociation is the clinical term, and I knew the term, because I was studying it. What I didn’t know, until that moment, was that someone could notice.
He asked me to open my eyes.
