I just made my 4,000th post on this forum.

If that were one post per day, it would equal almost eleven years’ worth of posts (I’ve only been here for six). By my reckoning, that still leaves me about 400 short of having the equivalent of one post for every day that I’ve been HIV+. By the time I reach 4,500 I’ll probably hit that equivalency.

I wouldn’t have thought I had that much to say about sex. I never thought that sex played a significant role in defining me - I live alone, have no social circle, reside in a place where casual sex is practically unobtainable. What’s more, I hate the fact that I exist in an animal body with sexual demands. I haven’t been happy since puberty, when these unwelcome urges were forced upon me. I was perfectly content without them.

Yet fast-forward to today and I find myself looking backward at a sexual past that has been, shall we say, colorful by most any standard, with choices made that only caused it to become ever more so.

4,000 - roughly four posts for every man who’s cunted me. I’ve been very (very) open about my sexual life in these posts, possibly oversharing, but if I have it’s been out of a desperate sense that no one would believe that such things actually happened to me. I’ve never told anything that didn’t happen, was always careful not to exaggerate or embellish, because if I ever did, even once, no one could trust any post of mine to be true after that.

I’ve never been inspired to write erotic fiction, which is ironic because I’m actually a published novelist. God knows I have enough personal experience to write something, but it’s all too real to me, too personal, too intense. There’s no need to fictionalize it. Possibly part of the reason I’ve never thought to compile it all into a book is because I’ve gotten it all out of my system here, in posts, like Scheherzade telling a story for a thousand and one nights until she ran out of things to say.

I do feel as though I’m running out of anything new and meaningful to say. When I do, I’ll stop, because I hate repeating myself. Every time I’ve done so in these posts I’ve felt like I was begging to be believed.

4,000 posts. 1,000 fucks. Pity - I’d much rather it had been the other way around. The posts would have been much more interesting.