It’s Tuesday morning.

I’m in Edinburgh Gardens, not really doing anything before work.

There are no dogs or mothers or babies.

It’s just me.

The sun is out.

I wonder what Lisa is doing.

I message her and say, ‘I can’t wait for you to meet Bear tomorrow.’

The grass presses against my lower back and arse, and the itchiness feels familiar.

It reminds me of something.

It reminds me of this:

When I was nineteen I had sex in a park.

It was maybe one a.m. when it happened.

Just before I came, an ant bit my arse and I said, ‘Oh, fuck.’

My girlfriend at the time said ‘oh, fuck’ too.

She dug her nails into my back and started having sex with me in a more enthusiastic manner.

How cool is it when two people misunderstand each other and nothing that bad happens?

I remember feeling two distinct feelings at once.

The arse-antbite pain.

And the ‘mmm’ feeling when the cum came out.

We lay for a while under a tree.

I liked the feeling of my dick becoming a smaller version of itself.

Retreating.

Disappearing.

After the ‘mmm’ feeling went away, all I could feel was the arse-antbite pain.

My girlfriend said, ‘Some old man watched us the whole time through a pair of binoculars.’

At home I put an ice pack on my arse and listened to cars on the street while staring at the wall.

I kept thinking about arses and antbites and dying.

I kept thinking about the old man and getting old.

I kept thinking about sex and my fingers and the sex on my fingers.

And I did this big grin: this big, super wide grin because I knew then that things changed.

The relationship ended because time passed and things happened.

The relationship ended because I got bored.

And, sitting on the grass, I don’t know why I’m thinking about this now.

I don’t know why sometimes I think about the past: about past relationships, specific points within them, and the things that happened afterwards.

I don’t know why sometimes I compare my current self and how I am feeling to my past self and how I felt.

Maybe it’s to learn something.

I don’t know.

I really don’t.

I do know that, right now, I’m happy.

But I also know that the progression between our future and current selves isn’t linear.

Because we are alive, things happen and we change into similar or not-similar versions of ourselves.

And, I don’t know, maybe that’s how you win: by changing at the same rate as someone else and continuing to do that over and over until there is nothing left to do except hold hands and die.

I open my eyes.

I feel myself smiling.

Lisa messages, ‘I can’t wait.’

And I continue doing that.

I itch around my lower back and arse, and the itch goes away but not completely.

And I close my eyes and think how everything goes away.

(But never completely.)