At Electric Literature, poet and critic K. Thomas Khan walks through the unraveling of a relationship, deliberate isolation from online life, and the questions both raise in a lyrical, longform piece that pushes and pulls at the concepts of personal and professional connection. In-between 3 a.m. fights and fortune teller visits and literally and metaphorically going out of his skin, he wrestles with the idea of being recognized:
I’m not sure which is worse: the fact that I require a lover to read or at least try to comprehend me, or that I have been asking him to take on the role of audience or community on which I have willing turned my back? Is it wrong of me to desire what I have relinquished? Is it asking too much that the man with whom I sleep, the man who fucks me every night, the man whose skin has somehow tainted mine… is it so wrong that I want this man to be able to consume me, to know all the rancid depths in me?
