The Patient

On Monday I wake and hear a gurney roll beyond my curtain. A nurse asks if I feel pain.

Welcome to my circumcision.

I am thirty-four years old.

Am I being ghosted?

I get this message from Stephanie that night. She is a doctor, but I didn’t tell her about my surgery. We have been loosely “dating” for three months.

…

On our last date, it rains. I unsheathe an umbrella like a sword in a video game.

This will — finally — win her over.

“I’m OK, I have a hood,” she says. Stephanie and I walk to my car in silence.

On the date before this one, she says:

I feel neither hot nor cold toward you — that’s a good thing. Maybe this is what secure attachment feels like.

On this date, I tell her:

I am, at the very least, uncomfortably warm toward you.

She says she prefers to live in the ambiguity.

It feels more like apathy.

…

Still, as I lay in bed, bleeding from the garden of Gethsemane, her ghost question intrigues me. We talk on the phone.

“You have everything I want in a partner. But I’m not attracted to you.”

This —

This feels like two circumcisions.

I don’t want to live ambiguously. We part ways.

A few days later I need my surgeon. There is swelling. I ready my phone in my left hand as I search the desk drawer with my right. Found his card. I turn to dial and —

I have FaceTime’d Stephanie. Its ringing.

FUCK.

I hang up and text:

Sorry, accident! (Facepalm…)

Stephanie replies:

all good

I sigh ambiguously.

This feels like three.