Desire Paths: A Speculative Bricolage of Autofictional Intimacies

I might not feel sexual attraction but I do
live in a world where everyone else
does

I know how important it is to people

I know how important it is to me to be
desired by the person I’m with, sexual or
otherwise

And I like sex, no matter how asexual I
am

Read 11/09/2029 1:24 AM

May: gemini season

I have saturn returned
I have jesus yeared

I yearn
more
so deeply
each year

most of these poems
are about men I’ve made holy
and the women
who always have been

April 29, 2018

Dear W,

I’ll take this opportunity to also acknowledge a fact about myself I’ve been…scared of? It's hard to come to conclusions and realizations about yourself when you live in a rigid society that will only let you (literally) survive if you look and act a certain way. I’ve always known I was queer. Or that some part of me was. Straight never really seemed to fit and queer was just the right kind of umbrella to be under till I figured it out. I don't believe in gender, have never felt like a “girl” or “boy” – that's still something I’m parsing through and won't be able to really separate in Egyptian society for a while. I realized during my queer writing workshop what I’d known for a while but needed to put down in words: that I’m asexual.

I had a hard time claiming this because I like sex. I have sex. Sex does not repulse me. I just feel no sexual attraction towards anyone. I remember you (and many others) asking me what my type was and I never had an answer. Perhaps the generic, straight-gauged “big, handsome guy” – which I realize now was just a cop-out for what was expected of a “straight woman.” I think, for a very long time, I tried to pretend to be this – even made myself believe it. But it was never true. I enjoyed sex. The person was irrelevant. I just couldn't fathom sex with a woman because I wasn't attracted to women (or men, but had conditioned myself to be) and I was afraid of losing my (women) friends, whose intimacy I craved more than anything else. I feel like I told you once I might be aromantic, and I’m not sure that's quite true, if at all. And perhaps at the time it was an easier placeholder for being ace, for not wanting what looked like traditional het-romantic relationships. I just couldn’t ever imagine myself in romantic love with men. But, my god, have I loved women!

Being aromantic means not wanting “romantic” relationships or romantic love… but I think I demand that intensity and vulnerability out of my “friends.” So, in a way, all my relationships are, have been, platonically romantic because of that demand. A and I are back on speaking terms and trying to work through some of our issues, some of which center around my demand for vulnerability and her past inability to give it to me, and my subsequent inability to do the same and to trust her. I’m working through a lot of things about myself, sorry if it looks a bit messy at the moment or hard to follow.

It makes me so happy to know you are in the world educating and inspiring people, because you are so gosh darn good at it. I’m sorry about Gran. Glad she is better but it's difficult when family members start to become less lucid. My dad keeps slipping, having more and more confused episodes, but we’re better at managing them and it isn't as emotionally overwhelming as it was a couple years ago.

I cannot wait to hear back from you soon, tell me: how is your heart?

Some music:

In My View, Young Fathers – I have been listening to this song since it came out and the video is just everything, I am a sucker for tender masculinity.
Los Ageless, St. Vincent – because she is magnificent and because you went to LA.
Territory, The Blaze – I loved this video more than the song honestly. It feels very important to me, that blend of soft and tough masculinity in an Arab/immigrant setting, and that feeling of returning to home and family.
Frontline, Kelela – because we love smooth sexy voices, and Kelela is that. Also loved the sims when I was younger obvs!!

Despite what you think, I’d have a really
hard time being with you like this. If you
want queer platonic let’s just be friends!

I haven’t taught myself all this love over
all these years for someone else not to
shower me with it, too

There are people who will love and be
attracted to me wholly, as there will be
for you. We don’t have to be that for
each other

 I just need to know, and I deserve to
figure things out from there

Read 11/10/2029 11:41 PM

June: before Before I Die by Candy Chang

you want to               twerk
and                 crush the patriarchy

chalked out on a new orleans wall
I want to                     fall in love <3
        I want to let you love             

me or nothing at all
        naked bodies in a bathroom
                                                    stall

trying to escape the thing that worms through our hearts

say I’m
                        fucking the patriarchy

white boys I didn’t give my sound to name me sex monster

sorry I’m
                        shaming the wetness

coming with the image of a body that mimics mine too much

the worm                    that keeps dancing around my pit

                        tells me it's true

with a softshoe taptap
                        all the way down…

I leave you waiting for a year habibi

I leave you waiting
                        to twerk a crimson beat –
to dance our words with her.

December 11, 2022

Dearest W,

Grief is a weird one. It has been far from a straight line, far from predictable at all. Life, though, keeps going as normal – I find this the most jarring when, yes, there is a hole where a whole person once was. It remains gaping and palpable two years later.

I think we've both gone through so much, and there has been so much time in between filled with stuff, it's hard to wrap my head around. But I never for a moment considered you a “bad” friend, just that you were my friend who was going through so so much. And I knew you understood I was too. I've come to the conclusion that love requires very little when it's true and given freely, please don't ever feel like I expect anything of you but to know I am loved in return (which I do!).

I hope you are well my darling, I hope you are loved and warm and fed and healthy.

Let's gently find our way back to each other, I want to hear everything and want to share too.

Aaaaaand some music I have on repeat:

Jazmine Sullivan – Pick Up Your Feelings
NAO – Good Luck
Saint Mela – (Root)less

Yours lovingly and always,

August: all my parents

gifted me
with a profound fear
of romantic love

I did not want it
to do to me
what it did to them

what it did to us
how it was the most
beautiful, brutal thing

that was ever did

We can hook up or not hook up and
remain on the fringes of each other’s
life. I dunno if I can be anything else
right now. Or that you deserve that kind
of emotional labor from me while you go
figure out what’s on the other side of the
fence

There is no fence tbh, just open space
before you. Go explore. I may not be
here waiting when you return. My shape
may have changed. My body, my mind,
and who resides there now with me

But I will not change myself for you

Read 11/11/2029 12:06 AM

February 27, 2023

Dear W,

I haven't really been able to write or feel this similarly connected to the universe and all its beauty and art, since my dad died. I get glimpses of it, shimmers of things and moments, inspiration for things I want to write about. I sit down to write, to expand, to worldbuild... and it all leads me back to a blank slate, or my dad. It's been hard watching every poem I try to write become about him. It's been a sisyphean effort to get back to it, the boulder keeps rolling down – but each time the climb up is faster, easier. And I'm thankful for it.

All this to say that, what you're going through with your odd shaped stone sounds a lot like my grief-tinted glasses. Thank you for choosing to move that stone with me. I know the task is behemoth. It hurts. It's raw. It is so rewarding.It's okay that you needed to harden your heart for a time.

How wild the universe is, and how odd and wonderful and lucky we were to be in the same space at the same time. And not just that, but to connect and feel so kindred. I've come to the conclusion I don't know how to be anything but ferocious and vulnerable! And that I can't connect with others unless they're willing to meet me in this place, and look at it with love, carefully and fully.

Know that I am able to move through this world in this way, because you allowed me to. You never asked me to not speak true. To minimize. To accommodate anything else. It is pleasure, comfort, care. It is openness and absolute acceptance. It is love. Not hard earned, or transactional, or based in anything other than love. I have loved you since I met you, and felt you loving me too. For no reason. For kindness, and wholeness, and acceptance even of our perceived broken parts. I don't know if I ever told you the depths of how lost I was that year in Mississippi (I know your time there was also... awful to say the least), but I really almost lost my faith in people and how I wanted to be in communion with them. You were so essential in pulling me back into myself, and showed me that how I wanted to move through the world and what I deserved from those around me was possible.

So much has happened, including a really bad breakup that left me in a horrible place emotionally and mentally. I'm actually really, deeply okay now about it, and don't regret anything – I learnt so much about myself and my capacity to love, and about love. How much I love love (even when it’s so full of and juxtaposed with that fear of losing it)!

I have however settled very happily into my queerness, my aceness, and my panromantic tendencies (as well as growing notions of love and relationships in general), and a feeling of gender fluidity re having a body in general. I don't think anyone who knows me is particularly surprised by any of this, but having the words has been helpful as much as it's been painstaking to figure them and myself out. I'm doing my best to grow in the ways that take me where I wanna go, who I want to be without the pressure to name or feel labelled.

I'd like to think I'm the same person you met in Mississippi... but I realise as I do the math now, we're coming up on a decade of friendship. That we found and loved each other in such a small physical window. That that love has grown in a decade spent apart. Your existence is magic to me. I feel the same in a lot of ways, and in so, so many ways I've become (and am still becoming) myself. I think my heart, though, is wholly the same (albeit some turbulence there for a bit, but generally same ol' heart).

Please I want to know everything, the big and small, the inbetween, the mundane, the what did you have for dinner this week that made you wanna sing about it. Tell me about your job and what you're researching for big bucks (love to see it!!).

I'm sorry if I've glossed over or rushed parts, I didn't wanna keep you waiting any longer. I know we'll have time to fill in the gaps.

Music ofc:

In a sentimental mood – Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (I haven't been able to shake this tune, it's been following me around and so now I'm giving it to you)
Dance Like U – Okay Kaya (this one is fun, and I love all her lyrics cause they're just so awkward and real)
Who is She? – Centaurworld (this show is... so good. And I wanted to show you the range of things I listen to also includes very, very silly)
Ocean of Love – Kipo and the Wonderbeasts (also a cartoon, but this song legit made me go down a kpop hole for a bit)
I Can't Help Myself – The Four Tops (bringing it back to upbeat dancey, also an earworm that has been the other side of sentimental mood)

I love you dearly,

March: desire paths

         how do you know the difference

between when I want you
and when I don’t
in my bed

         how will you know when you are in love

tell her I have often
relied on the generosity
of undecadent rooms

to hold the friction or ease
of bodies that love
each other in fractal ways

         but you still haven't answered the question

she wants to know that
the chaotic phenomena
of loving is about

the body, wanting
to decorate unburnished rooms
with each other’s insides

rather than
finding god
in any one

         but you

         still

         haven't answered

         the question

         ?

You know my body is a love letter to
myself, but I might change the
calligraphy for someone I loved

Small things for love

A body is but a thing to be desired and
dies

What difference does a (leg, pit, pube)
hair make to me, but your happiness?

Read 11/13/2029 02:49 AM

November 23, 2023

Hello love,

Yes, here is still good for me (as far as I know).

If there's somewhere else you'd prefer we send our private letters/communicate I'm open to suggestions.

So much love,

October: جدران اللحم والحب
after Ghassan Kanafani

I saw hoopoes
everywhere
before I met you
they kept flitting from me

that september
skin still suffered
through summer
but bone
remembered fall

I made you laugh
just
to make you laugh

we weave these walls
of flesh and love
together

once
I threw a ring into the red sea
completely
by accident
I yearn for the weight of it constantly

I will never stop missing

everything

This is exactly what I mean

Your happiness means the world to me
but my body will always be an
insufficient/wanting world to you

All I want is you! I’ve broken every rule,
meticulously and painfully carved into
my bones to say this

I’ve chosen you too many times, and
come back to a broken want that doesn’t
match the wanting I have for myself

Read 11/13/2029 03:01 AM

September 19, 2024

Dear W,

I'm sorry I haven't replied sooner, I don't know how the months have flown by (hecticly if I'm honest) but I've had you and C on my mind all the while. Married!!!!

I'm very heartbroken to say that I can't make it. I so badly wanted to be there and be witness to you and C’s union – I love your love and wish I could celebrate it with you! BUT I saw on your registry that y'all are planning to honeymoon in Europe, so when that happens I hope you'll let me know. I would love to try and see you both then, when we're all a bit geographically closer to each other and hopefully life things are a bit calmer.

I'll keep this email short because there's so much I want to say and respond to you, and so much I want to share with you also but don't wanna get sidetracked with writing and end up not sending this till after the wedding!

I love you very much and will be emailing you (hopefully!) soon,

PS please send wedding and celebration photos :')

PPS Tracy Chapman – Wedding Song

July: three queers in Cairo

put together an ikea bed
without a screwdriver
between them, but three
whole utility knives

what could be more lesbian than that?

one, buys the bed
two, plans the unpacking
three, is there for love of the former two

and of putting things lovingly together

sometimes you love your friends so much

you want to kiss them on the mouth
passionately, platonically

and continue putting a bed together
no bawab would ever imagine
all that you could do with your bodies

the possibilities
of breaking it back down
into separate
loving
parts

January 11th, 2025

Love,

I hate that I missed your wedding and some semblance of celebrating your love and joy. I hate that things have been nothing short of catastrophic for what feels like almost two years. I hate that, now, when you should be starting a new chapter of life with C you are getting ready to leave, instead. Growing your own food. Becoming a safe haven for your queer community. Buying a gun.

I never thought I would type these words to you. I thought we would always share letters of love – ours to each other, ours with others we love(d). I, too, am so damn tired of the unprecedented. Feeling like all I can do often is just watch, incapacitated by the violence and scale and unendingness of it all.

I wanted to tell you before that asexuality is such a gift. This feels so small to write to you about now, but this is how we’ve grown and grow together still. These words, us, these gifts of each other’s selves. It has been such a gift to me and my queerness. How I show up for others and have the opportunity to be with them, love them, experience them – and when they are able to, and when I am able to fully let them, they experience me too. It's scary, lonely, wonderful, healing.

It's taken you this long with C to talk about it. It’s taken C this long to talk to you about it. To consider it, seriously. And it’s only because she has you there, holding her hand, telling her it's ok, you love her regardless. That, right there, is such relief, W. To know you can explore who you are and the people who love you will still love you for it. Will still love you while you don’t have the answers, and when you do, and when you look through yourself and still come back with more questions than answers. It’s always more questions, more to learn.

I don’t know if I ever told you about the school children clad in dark green in Myanmar when I was there. My favorite color. It feels like a moment I would share with you – but sometimes I only do in my head, and forget those conversations were not transferred over to you. I feel you with me all the time, your love. And during that trip you helped me see the emotional abuse I was enduring from a woman I loved so much I let her do what she wanted to me until even she couldn't take it and left. So, yeah, I don’t think I got around to telling you about the dark green longyis I saw every child wear! This I was told was the uniform of the student. You, the scholar, I felt, would appreciate this. I’ve always tried to stay a student. Of others, myself, my communities – it’s unhumble to say the world, but we try. I know you do. So, naturally, the only longyi I wanted was the dark green one. Custom made extra long to accommodate my large body, my soft protruding belly (which my nephew loves to poke still!).

All this to say, I wish I could just talk to you about love and sex. How one affects the other and whatever that means to people. How it all shifts and changes and is so important and so irrelevant. Everything is so overwhelming right now – but we’ve lived, are living still, through so much apocalypse and we find ways to keep going. Keep each other alive and loving despite it all.

I wish I knew who I was or am becoming in this moment but it all feels, for the first time in a long time, contingent on everything else and out of my hands – the ones that have often helped me write myself clear, write my self to you, to witness, when I felt so unsafe and unable to ask it of anyone else. Reading about you and C, your relationship, the soul-expanding work you do for each other – it is pure hope. Hope I see through you and your love, when I feel like I can’t ever be myself except with myself. That y’all are out there doing the damn thing – and never just for yourselves but for every single person who has the privilege of their lives crossing yours. I am so lucky (and luck truly is the word) to know you and know that hope when, right now, I feel so god damn hopeless I’m losing parts of myself to the abyss.

You and C are gifts to this world. To your community, to me. These letters, our words, as grave as they may seem still ground me when I feel unreal and unmoored. So don’t give up, yeah? I’m over here trying, too. These are, as per usual, terrifying times.

I love you. You are my family, always,

N

I love my self, whole, though. And you
don’t. That’s a hard thing. A slippery
slope of hating me

Not the me of me, but the inevitability of
body me. I can’t help that, and you
haven’t learnt how to help falling out of
love with bodies yet

I can’t make you crave a body you don’t,
any more than I can create a craving for
yours I never had outside of having you
whole

I don’t understand, but I’ve loved you

That’s enough for me

Delivered 11/17/2029 03:13 AM

A Note & Bibliography

This text is an excerpt from a larger body of work entitled Khaltabeeta Intimacies, which began during Kohl’s collective writing circle on “Queer Futures” (2023-24). Other excerpts from the work are forthcoming in Mizna and Sinister Wisdom.

Works cited, referenced, and lovingly read during the writing process include:

غسان كنفاني، أرض البرتقال الحزين

Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminists Lessons From Marine Mammals
Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Ela Przybylo, Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality
Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse and Shifting the Silence
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You
June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die
Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture
Victoria Chang, Obit and Dear Memory
Yanyi, The Year of Blue Water