Until

I discerned a blurry, indistinct figure coming my way through the fog with benign intentions, so I made myself presentable and waited. As the entity approached, I wondered who it could be. Most members of my peer support network were either nonexistent, deceased, or occupied with everyday life — and all of its quotidian details, so achingly human, which escape the grasping hands of narrative — so it couldn’t be any of them. So who the fuck was it?

My big undiseased body stood tall. Inside it, however, I was beginning to feel the first faint stirrings of social anxiety. On a fundamental level, I feared, all stories are about a harmful being inflicting lasting damage. But I reminded myself that this approaching entity had benign intentions, and that such intentions were usually harmless. Usually.

Sometimes even the best-laid plans of mice and men went awry. I’d lived enough to know that.

Several minutes later, the fog parted, and the blurry, indistinct figure revealed itself to be a love object. We began to flirt, an activity I’d always considered something of a dance. I felt this love interest was bringing out the best in me, and I even began to idealize it to some extent. After a while, we made a lifelong commitment to each other. But I still wasn’t positive who this person was.

“It’s Amy,” she finally said after many years. That was the beginning of the end.

After we severed our marriage bonds, the first thing I did was call the priest who’d asked me to kiss the bride in the first place. I thanked him, in my imperfect Latin, for formalizing the bond between man and wife back in the day, and I apologized for having wasted his time and energy on the ceremony.

You broke your promise, Matthew, he replied in English. I just don’t know what to say. You shouldn’t have dissolved the union. God, this keeps on happening to me…

He was quiet for a while. I asked if he was still there.

Yeah, I’m still here, said the priest. And please, you can speak English with me. I’m perfectly fluent.

I was a bit dismayed to hear that. It had been years since my study abroad trip to the Vatican. Back then, my Latin hadn’t been perfect, but the locals had appreciated it when I at least made attempts to speak it. But I could tell I had offended the worldly priest, who prided himself on speaking several vulgar tongues.

Resuming in English, I apologized, explaining that during those 6 months abroad I’d hung out in bars mostly, picking up exotic Latin women who were excited to sleep with an American just to see if all the rumors were true. I had done my best to meet their expectations, using massive amounts of energy and military might and segueing conversations to the subject of BBQ whenever possible. These spicy locals often told me that I had surprisingly precise Latin for a Yankee, but looking back, that was probably just pillow talk.

The priest giggled at the phrase “pillow talk,” explaining that, as a celibate man, he found any term having to do with s-e-x amusing, much as children do. While you may pathologize this as arrested development, he mused, the consequence is a net increase in my life’s potential for levity. Just because I condemn sexual depravity, doesn’t mean I’m not able to have some fun while contemplating it remotely within my cathedral — or while plowing my catamite.

Well, anyway, I said. I just wanted to call to apologize.

Look, man, he said. I’m genuinely sorry it didn’t work out. It probably just wasn’t part of God’s plan. There are plenty of fish in the sea. I know that’s a platitude, but there’s some truth in it.

I promised that next time I got married, I would stay the course until a disease or accident took one of us out. Or maybe I wouldn’t even kiss another bride at all, who knows, I said. It’s hard to even think about marriage right now. This last one is so fresh in my mind — and to be frank the whole institution of marriage is linked up in my mind with unhappiness, of which I’ve had my fair share.

The priest sighed. That’s what people keep saying to me. They keep undoing my work simply because they’re unhappy. I keep telling them, it’s a freaking knot — it’s supposed to be tight. Maybe I should get out of this business…

The conversation went on like this for several more minutes until I finally made an excuse to get off the phone.

My brother’s living room got a lot of natural light, but I managed to find a spot on the couch at an angle from the windows that offered some coverage from the potential prying eyes of neighbors, and I began to jack off. I cycled back and forth between Pornhub and my iPhone’s “hidden folder,” which contained selfies sent to me over the years by my ex-wife, most of them rather chaste. The anonymous eroticism of the porn snippets and the emotionally charged images of my ex formed a composite that was greater than the sum of its parts and allowed me, with minimal effort, to reach a swift conclusion: to wit, that with these two ingredients, I could probably tolerate being alone for quite a while.

Afterwards, pocketing my handkerchief, I took a walk around the neighborhood and stopped at a café, where I ogled younger women for a while, remembering the priest’s advice to consider all the “fish in the sea,” but also recognizing that I was currently in no shape to predate, due to my general filth and aura of unhappiness. I reassured myself that after a few weeks of therapy, the acquisition of a well-appointed new apartment, and a return to proper grooming habits, I would be able to enjoy this world, which, remaining, for a moment, in maritime terms, I considered my “oyster.”

By pure coincidence, one of the co-eds sitting near me in the café was waxing poetic about the destruction of the earth’s coral reefs. Her interlocutor, David Attenborough, kept nodding along eagerly, barely able to contain his desire to speak, but she hardly gave him a chance, and after a while she moved on to other less harrowing topics.

I wondered if perhaps it made sense to abandon the pursuit of love for something more meaningful, like the restoration of coral reefs or the correction of social injustices. But when I envisioned such futures, I couldn’t see how I could end up being involved except in some bureaucratic capacity — I would never be a hero. Perhaps there was some more direct way of rejecting worldly love, some other higher calling. The priesthood was an option. My Latin was, at the very least, salvageable, and I didn’t have any qualms about damning folks to eternal hell for their transgressions. I’d never really been a people person anyway. The only sticking point was my distaste for children.

That had been the sticking point between my ex-wife and me as well. She’d considered it a crime to bring children into this world, knowing that they’d face an ever-worsening climate catastrophe and little chance of prosperity, but I’d wanted to do it for propriety’s sake, being also of the firm opinion that the so-called apocalypse wouldn’t be the end of the world per se, and that it would just exacerbate the suffering of the already vulnerable, such as the working poor and denizens of Small Island Developing States, who, if they weren’t wiped out directly, would suffer for years as refugees and die from the associated deprivations.

Despite my logic, she’d remained unpregnant.