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date: 2020-01-15
weight: 5
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I can't let this go.

> Why not?

I just can't. I doubt it's possible, but I need to somehow get this off my chest. I need to be able to throw enough words at it that it leaves me alone. I need...not a solution, but perhaps some sense of closure, of having explained it well enough that I may be forgiven.

> Forgiven what? Your trespasses? Your sins?

Perhaps. Perhaps I need to be forgiven my inadequacies.

> Explain away, then.

I spend a lot of time walking circles around the concept of asexuality. It's an uncomfortable thought, an identity that itches for someone who feels attraction, who otherwise enjoys the idea of sex, is capable of even enjoying the act.

> So long as it doesn't actually involve you.

Yes.

Autochorissexualism, they call it, though the word is clunky to the point of inoperable. The feeling of being generally positive on sex to the point of getting turned on, so long as it doesn't actually involve oneself. Fictional characters, visual art, and text-based role-play seem to be the bailiwick of such.

I suppose, if you spend so much time feeling a fundamental disconnect from your body, such an identity is almost bound to form. Even before I felt so plagued by dysphoria that interacting sexually was problematic in its own right, even before I was able to engage with another person sexually in, as it were, the flesh, I was embedded in long distance relationships where sexual interaction was based on the idea of sex rather than the actual practice of it.

> Was that a choice?

I don't know. I suppose, on some level, it was. Could I have dated someone local instead of Danny? Instead of Marek or Andrew? Sure, I guess.

> But you didn't.

No.

> Why not?

I suppose that would have required me coming out to my parents more formally. Or, perhaps, it would've required me gaining a level of sneakiness in my social interactions that I don't think I'm really capable of.

Not only that, but I dove into furry halfway through puberty, and I dove in *hard*. It was my distraction from a shitty few years of life, from a shitty entry into puberty. And, with the whole running away fiasco, the sudden moving of schools, it was my whole social circle.

And hey, one dates within one's social circle, right? That would require having a local furry scene.

> You had Shannon and Ash.

Well, yes, but Ash and I had known each other since second grade. Something about it didn't feel right. And this is back when I was very, very gay. For better or for worse, Shannon and I were not relationship material.

> Had you been more open to dating women, do you think you would have been?

Perhaps. I don't know how long that would have lasted, though, had we gone in that direction. After a time, we simply became better friends material than we would have made relationship material.

> There was Pilot.

We were in no way compatible.

> There was Michael.

I *knew* it. I knew that was coming. I could feel you winding up to throw that in my face.
