you tell J that it's time for you to leave.
things are being swapped out for one another. interchange, hands hovering over wooden blocks, rotated around indefinitely. each time they swap somebody is dying, a dance that can only go on for so long, swapping and swapping until the pieces run out. you might need to go before it happens.
you know that there's some parallel world of true experience, where the two of you are really at the bar together eating devilled eggs. but you're not there, you're behind a wall, looking in. at the bar you try to talk to her about overwhelming misery, about fear, about the people who used to love you and why they don't anymore. why that's about fear.
she tells you she knows an old friend of yours, and in your mind you see this cloistered throughline of people you wish you were, that at times you can make contact with something better than yourself. you tell her to say hi for you. she says having sex with you is like being on acid, kept giggling and rolling around, hiding her face in the blankets. says that it was just how you looked.
you talk to S about symbols. obedience, and what it means when it rains. she also wants to have sex with you, but in a more abstracted way. there was a time long ago when it felt more real than anything else, but now it's less, it's not even there anymore, except as a substrate through which everything else happens. you have to study the emanations, like kabbalah. the other S says you're always calling things evil, and that's important to you, seeing the world as good and evil, but you aren't sure why. maybe it gives you a framework for the emanations, or makes it more real. you don't know how to say no to people. or how to say yes. S calls you comfortable with silence.
the whole day you remember the wounded animal. it's looking around for a place to die.