WLW in wartime

having a sex life that is worth being had

It’s been quiet in Kyiv.

Keith Kellog and Prince Harry visited last week or so, gracing Kyiv residents with a breather until the next wave of rocket and drone attacks.

This entire year, I maybe had two genuinely boring and quiet weeks without external/global drama - or relational drama - or bad sleepless mass drone nights - or family drama - or the purely technical inconvenience of living without electricity due to russia targeting our energy infrastructure - or the internal drama of ‘have I done enough?’,

“Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I
come to any conclusions?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace?”

War simultaneously grants me the waiver on existential crises and accelerates them, pushing me to go through the next growth phase faster, see through the next layer of truth. War makes the meaning of life very clear - to continue to live, so as to spite my enemies. To do as much good as I can for my country and for myself as part of it, to take care of Ukraine within me, to represent, to take responsibility for holding the truth without averting my eyes.

At the same time, the proximity of death pushes me into unabashed YOLO/YODO exhilaration about life, an almost teenage-like recklessness. I speed up where I should slow down, bolstered by the high that follows rocket attacks, then suffering the crash and hangover, the weariness that catches up, the memories and feelings that haven’t found their respective space in my awareness.

I make space for it all.

Mornings have this shameless way of happening, again and again, without giving enough grace to process the days and nights before, the long nights. In the morning, I treat myself to a tasty bun from a nearby bakery. I want to treat myself, I crave pleasure - at this moment, I’d like something sweet. Some person woke up quite early and baked all this bread, so that at 8AM sharp I would have the option to enter the bakery and get myself a treat. The treat, the simple and animal pleasure and the reward of this delicious baked good return me to my body, this one and only body I’ve got, this highly strung and anxiety-prone nervous system.

And you know when it’s quiet, an anxiety-prone nervous system goes something like the Bjork song - it’s oh so quiet - it’s oh so still - you’re all alone - and it’s peaceful until…

Until - goddess help me - I reentered the Kyiv queer dating scene.

And goddess (and algorithms) did help me, as my very first Bumble date very quickly and unexpectedly turned into an affair. I never thought I could connect with someone this quickly, sexually, and viscerally - yet lo and behold, my first post-past-breakup venture into the horrors of the queer dating scene wasn’t - isn’t - so horrible at all.

Some time ago, I found myself listening to this video with Esther Perel speaking about sexuality, relationships, curiosity, aliveness in the digital age. Something strikes me about Esther, she’s such a mainstream influencer yet she’s also someone with unending vitality. She talks about making life interesting, about making connections worth having - and having a kind of sex life that is worth being had. And as I listened to this, I realized that I crave life and aliveness even as life feels like surgery with no anaesthesia.

I marvel at my ability to meet this horrible world with curiosity yet again. The crumbs and patches of goodness are increasingly scarce, but I am quite persistent in noticing them. I can also invent and create what I seek, and even a temporary affair is also a co-invention.

On the backdrop of explosions and mayhem, there’s me, wanting to relish this moment, have hot queer sex with a beautiful and interesting woman, start another big riot, enjoy it while it lasts.

I don’t think there’s a blueprint anywhere for how to live or love during a tech- and AI-powered, disinfo-riddled, vicious war of attrition, war of destruction, genocidal war meant to fragment this society and shatter our very consciousness and sense of self. On the backdrop of all this, I find myself having needs. I find myself having a body, having desires, wishes and dreams - delusions also perhaps - but the curiosity for what emerges next outweighs the dread of having it all gone, eventually.

Nobody has come out of this life alive, right?

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