What remains is not so much something I can name, but it has to do with some idea of self from years ago, and with abandoning it, trading it in for the reality of their adult life. For one brief moment, they go back in time, they make different choices, they are different men. And my body is the time-travel machine that takes them there.

— Shelley Oria, “This Way I Don’t Have To Be”

Sometimes in midst of these jaded or bored moments, I come. It might not be during the sex. He might be rubbing me while I lie next to him without his dick inside me and I come with my legs split wide, one knee bent and one leg straight, muttering a generic internal monologue like you’re such a slut, you were just full of a stranger’s cock, you fuck for money, etc. etc. None of that actually turns me on

— Labor

I envied them their history, the plain and the frantic days, the simple length of years behind them.

—  Michael Chabon, Mysteries of PIttsburgh