Post Nut Clarity on the J Train

A vignette about sex and New York

It was electric to hear Annalisa read this confessional live at the launch party. One hundred people gathered around on a cold night in New York, the explosion of applause at the end—it was closer to a rock concert than a reading.

Annalisa deserves all of it and more. Her vignette on sex and New York is beautifully-written and courageous, the kind of high-quality writing that “esteemed” magazines, like The New Yorker, would publish in spades had they any taste or valor.

If you’d like to support our mission of getting real, honest voices back into PRINT, consider purchasing the first issue of Non Grata. You can subscribe here on Substack, or buy a copy from our website, and we’ll mail it to you (shipping is included in all prices). This is a story that belongs in apartments across the country: For the owner to return to, and for visitors to pick up off the coffee table and read.

The spread from the print magazine

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The man on the J train platform at 3:47 AM asked if I was okay and I said yes, though we both knew I was holding someone else’s semen inside me like a secret I’d already forgotten the point of keeping. New Yorkers fuck the same way we take the subway: eyes averted, bodies pressed against strangers, hoping our stop comes soon but not too soon, always engaging in some performative act or another (mewing when a 7.5/10 enters the car, or else holding your ex girlfriend’s copy of The Body Keeps The Score up high enough that other people can see what you’re reading). The glitter from Nowadays still nested in my hair like dead stars when the man I had sex with last night said I reminded him of his ex. We were both masturbating with each other’s bodies—this was understood. Efficient. Metropolitan.

When I came to New York, I was a virgin. Not in the way that matters to gynecologists, but in the way that matters to girls who still believe their hymens hold moral weight. I was desperate to cling to it and desperate to lose it, but only to someone who would make the losing mean something. The loss came draped in abundance—in the arms of the man I loved then, on top of his guest bedroom sheets in his parents’ expensive New Jersey colonial, 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. Natural light poured through expensive linen curtains that hung from crown molding like surrendered flags. The suburbs peering at us voyeuristically through the window. I bled a little. He said it was normal. We never really talked about it again.

And once I lost it, I gained everything. The freedom I’d come hunting for in Manhattan’s electric maze. Because now I had the freedom of hiding in plain sight. The freedom to fuck—not make love, not have sex, but fuck—as both social currency and camouflage. Sex became my passport to rooms I’d only read about in magazines, my skeleton key to people I hated but needed to become. I learned to use my body like a business card, networking horizontally. If I could make them want my body, I could make them want my mind.

The thing about fucking strangers is that you never have to be yourself. That’s the whole point. To be touched by a city that touches nothing gently, by its sweaty and coked-up inhabitants who I would pass on South 4th outside the café and never acknowledge, though they’d been inside me forty days ago, though I could still map the terrain of their apartment ceilings.

I fucked everyone. I collected lovers the way other women collect perfumes—each one a different way to smell like someone else, to cover the stench of my own emptiness. Brazilian, bitter. American, cloying. Dutch, impossible. All of them evaporating by morning. Women who tasted like gin and ambition. Men who fucked like they were trying to win a prize they’d never accept. People who didn’t know which they were and liked it that way. I fucked them in Bushwick lofts with exposed brick that scraped my back, in Financial District high-rises where the windows rattled with possibility, in Queens apartments that smelled like their mothers’ cooking that I could never eat.

Against the sweat-riddled navy sheets of Jacob from college (who only mentioned his dead father when we were drunk, who never asked me anything that mattered) I thought of my own father. Italian immigrant, raised Roman Catholic in a village where his uncle built the church by hand after promising god that if He brought him back from the war alive, he’d build the only church in the town by hand. My father, the man who wouldn’t let me sleep at friends’ houses because boys might climb through windows and impregnate me before I’d even begun bleeding. If he could see his daughter now: spreading herself across Manhattan like spilled wine, staining everything. He would crawl to the Pope on his knees, not praying for my salvation but for his own reputation, begging forgiveness for raising such a spectacular slut.

I had sex with Matthew from the internet (rape kink, breeding kink, a collection of damage masquerading as desire).

I fucked Tyler and Julianna, a practiced couple I met fittingly at 169 bar in the Lower East Side, on their shared private rooftop, and I lectured them both on the differences between ideological Marxism and practiced communism while Tyler ate me out underneath the oversized American flag blowing above us as Julianna watched from the couch, masturbating absentmindedly.

I made love to my ex-girlfriend Emily as I subconsciously started listing in my mind all the reasons we could never be together.

As I bruised my body against a Brazilian stranger (Lucas, whose name I may have invented, who I had met on Feeld, and about whom I knew little and cared even less about), I smiled gleefully against the teachings of my conservative seventh grade sham of a “sex ed” teacher who made us sign forms promising we’d all practice abstinence until marriage. If we signed the form, we were gifted a gift card for a small, $10 personal pizza from the local Dominoes. I picked up my Tacandoroga #2 pencil, freshly sharpened, my twelve year-old hands wrapped around it like a sword. The pizza tasted stale and hot, like it knew I’d acquired it through deception. Like it was punishing me for what was to come.

The first time I went down on a woman from my poetry workshop, I thought of every Florida classmate who’d spit “lesbian” at me like a slur. She wrote terrible poems about moon cycles. I let her read them to me afterward.

Each encounter was a small death, practice for the grander disappearing act I was perfecting. Nine years of revolving doors and borrowed beds, of lying about love and loving the lying. In the velvet-dark rooms of Manhattan, I became an expert at being whoever they needed me to be for exactly as long as it took.

But the last time—the last time was different.

We drank negronis and spoke of real things until the air between us grew thick with something dangerously close to honesty. His gray polyester couch held us like a confessional. I wondered how many women had received this exact choreography—the negronis mixed just so, the jazz playlist titled “Mood,” the practiced lean-in after the third drink.

It didn’t work. Despite what our souls wanted, our bodies staged a rebellion. The sex collapsed like a failed soufflé. He was embarrassed for all the obvious reasons: here was a woman at her physical peak, breasts still winning their war with gravity, and he couldn’t perform the one act men measure themselves by. But my shame cut deeper: I feared that nine years of fucking had corroded my capacity for true communion. How could it not? I had spent a decade hiding in New York’s most beautiful hiding places—clubs that promised transformation but delivered only hangovers, dark rooms where identity dissolved into strobe lights, rooftop parties where you could float above your own life until the drugs wore off.

The city taught me early: there are only seven good places to cry in public. My friends kept lists in their phones. The infrastructure itself supports emotional avoidance—turnstiles that won’t wait for your breakdown, subway cars where you must hold it together for forty minutes underground while advertisements for better lives flash above your head.

After the man I couldn’t fuck falls asleep, I lie on his gray couch listening to the fake fireplace loop. I search for my underwear in the dark, a scavenger hunt for dignity. On the 4 AM subway home, I watch my reflection in the black window and realize I’m wearing the same expression I use when strangers watch me cum.

The next weekend I stand before my mirror, applying lipstick in the shade of red I was always told was befitting of a woman. The ritual feels like preparing a corpse. I can’t remember the last time I had sex sober. Can’t remember the last time I cried during it. Can’t remember the last time I said someone’s real name in bed without it sounding like it was coming from someone else’s mouth.

I realize I haven’t said my own name during sex in nine years.

In the fluorescent bathroom light, I look exactly like what I am: a woman who fucked her way through Manhattan looking for freedom and found only more elaborate cages. My father was right to fear for me, but for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t the boys sneaking through windows he should have worried about. It was his daughter sneaking out of her own life, one orgasm at a time.

The virgin I was when I came to New York—she’s still in there somewhere, preserved in amber, watching me through the mirror with those same desperate eyes. Still believing that somewhere between the leather banquettes and the bathroom stalls, between the rooftop views and the morning shame, she might find what she came here looking for.

In New York, we learn to call our emptiness freedom. We learn to mistake movement for progress, fucking for intimacy, being seen for being known. We learn that the city will let you be anyone, which means you never have to be yourself. This is what we call making it. What do we think we’re making?

Tonight I’ll go out again, to some new place that’s exactly like all the old places, and I’ll meet someone who reminds someone else of someone they used to know. We’ll perform our little death in the dark, and, afterward, I’ll take the train home alone, counting the stops like rosary beads, praying to no one in particular that this time… this time…I’ll remember my own name when I come. That was the deal. You gave your body to the night, and in return you got one pure moment where everyone seemed beauteous.

Of course it doesn’t work.

I try again tomorrow,

and tomorrow,

and tomorrow…

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