I don’t remember how old I was when sex stopped being real. I had had it before, in real life, some ecstatic moments and many I’d rather forget on dirty uncovered mattresses in near empty apartments with drunks way older than me. It felt better online.

@dogbreath: how does it feel when i do this

@deadgf88: amazingggg fuck don’t sto p p p

I have long blonde hair in two braids. My skin is the whitest white you can choose. My abs are subtly visible through the white tank top I wear at all times. As are my hard nipples, which @dogbreath loves. He picks me up and whisks me to this other room. It’s sort of a cave, like a real one I visited when I was little in real Mexico with my family. The stalagmites hanging from the ceiling remind me of my childhood dreams.

@dogbreath has long black hair and a deep widow’s peak. He throws me down on the hard stone ground but nothing hurts me. I moan as he sticks his hand down my leather shorts.

We’ve been doing this for almost two years now. @dogbreath can make me come in seconds. The sounds I make are vaguely Japanese. One day he messages me while our angular forms are fucking in a grassy field.

@dogbreath: do you want to try this fr sometime

@deadgf88: where do u even live

@dogbreath: arizona lol

The invocation of an actual geographical place makes me nauseous. I went to real Arizona as a kid. I had a grandpa and aunts and uncles who lived there. My grandpa had gold teeth and a big nose. He wore big, thick aviator glasses and a heavy sterling silver belt buckle with words or a picture on it. Something happened to his knee when he was a young man, so that was metal, too. He could never resist adopting any wayward dog he found so there were always lots of fleas at the ranch. I remember my dad being furious and embarrassed at having to sleep on a cot that was riddled with them. You could see the little fleas jumping up and down in the air like popcorn in the microwave.

It’s been a few minutes and I haven’t responded.

@dogbreath: hbu lol

@deadgf88: california........:O

Revealing my location makes me feel sicker and more exposed, like by saything the name of a place he can somehow see me. It occurs to me for the first time that whoever @dogbreath is, he probably doesn’t have long black dreads and a widow’s peak. My avatar squirms on the ground as he fists me a little deeper. We’ve left the cornfield and are now sandwiched between two brick buildings in 18th century Paris. Pedestrians pass as @dogbreath punishes me. He always chooses public locations. He gets off on the rush.

@dogbreath: i been tryin to go there

@dogbreath: we should link

@dogbreath: whats ur email lol

I can see all of LA through my window, clear to the ocean. I used to climb this tree in an empty high school parking lot on Western. I would straddle the fattest branch and look out, sipping blue Gatorade. No real seasons, people always say that, and yet it’s impossible to tell when there’ll be a biting wind on the sunniest day. The bluest skies when you’d resolved to feel like shit all day first thing in the morning. Same. Same again, and probably changing in a million inconceivable ways between sips of green juice, shifting beneath us always, slyly, like the tectonic plates way below. You could wake up with everything in its place and never know there was an earthquake.

@dogbreath is typing and then he stops. He starts kicking the ground and little flecks of dirt float around his shiny combat boot like snow.

My window overlooks Hollywood Forever Cemetery and I can see a man and his probable wife standing over a grave. He looks off in the direction of the Hollywood Sign, hanging over us like a mobile over a crib. I wonder if I am high right now. I am always wondering if I am high, and if this could be real, and what if I was, and what would that mean.

@dogbreath: ... . lol

I go for a walk in the courtyard. I get a Diet Coke from the vending machine. I feel kind of happy, and I look at the pavement flying under my feet and imagine bashing my head and body into it. Like this dance in Singin’ in the Rain where Donald O’Connor throws his body into drywall until he goes straight through. For the first time I can sense what it would feel like to bash my head in but the other knows the mind comes factory-fresh with these kinds of ideas. And here I am thinking them and maybe even using them later to make other people laugh or shudder or cringe.

@deadgf88: why so u can chop me up into little pieces?

@dogbreath: u wish

We’re on the beach now. @dogbreath starts strangling his horse. He always does this when he’s bored. He told me it’s harder than it looks. When the horse’s body falls it makes a thump sound with real weight to it.

Last time I went to the real beach, I sat at Topanga across from Cholada Thai and the Reel Inn, a part of Malibu I don’t usually visit because it’s too populated and close to the highway. I sat alone by a campfire in the sand watching the surfers and the waves until it got dark. A bunch of kids were gathered at a fire near me, except theirs was lit and mine was not, and they were passing around not one but two bongs. I wasn’t embarrassed to be alone, although if I were younger and still haunted by this man I loved – who I feared and hoped was watching me at all times – I might’ve been. Everything I thought or did for 5 years, it felt like he was up there with God aiming one of those little red laser pointers down at me, just laughing. I kept looking over at this couple on a date. The man was very good-looking. I knew he was an actor before I listened in on their conversation. I felt like I could fall off if the earth was really flat.

@deadgf88: u can’t come anywhere near me. my daddy will kill u

@dogbreath: hot

I listen to this girl named GENTLEWHISPER spit sweetly into a Blue Yeti microphone on YouTube to relax. I have hunched shoulders from shuddering constantly as if coiling inward, girding for some coming impact to the balls I don’t have. The ASMR helps with that feeling. If someone were to sleep next to me I couldn’t take it. I’d probably lie there staring at the wall and eventually ask him to leave.

I think I am in love with @dogbreath. He thinks I am a genius. Tomorrow, I am going to leave my apartment. I am going to stand in front of my old paintings and cry into my mask.

For the first time in forever, I have sex with a real boy. He reminds me of my mom. He has this blue poster of a Jasper Johns drawing hanging across from his toilet. I like to look up at it and pray when I pee. He doesn’t try to scare me and I don’t know what to make of that. Boys love to make you scared. My dad used to pretend to drive off the road on family road trips to make my mom scream.

When he falls asleep I eat half a mushroom in his living room. I put on this VHS tape called Crusty Demons of Dirt by Fleshwound Film and it starts to snow. The Dirt Devils hurl themselves against this concrete wall and then crumble like something fired from a cannon. Girls scream on the sidelines, so happy they could die. They do it to feel more than pain. They have to feel the wall to believe it’s there at all. It starts to snow harder and I realize that cats have no loyalty to humans or the human realm, but dogs do. Only because dogs are docile and dependent, while cats are powerful and indifferent. I want my own wall to hurl at, on one level. But on another I’m just as desperate as any girl for the sideline kiss. It won’t be until later that I’ll be the mess for him to clean up on hands and knees, quiet as a mouse, feeling what it’s like to be the bitch for once.

@dogbreath wants to FaceTime tonight so I’m waiting for the sun to set. I’m only pretty in the nighttime, but then I’m beautiful.