In Alaska, my friend downloads dating apps to better survey the locals. I can’t tell if she can’t tell if we can’t tell if we’re lying about wanting to make new friends. Is “short term fun” a platitude or a euphemism? It’s hard to tell the difference, and these men don’t care to. My friend has a bad history with the apps, like everyone I know.

The key is to treat it like a game, I tell everyone I know, when they ask how I managed to find my partner, a single cacti sprouting amongst tumbleweeds, full of water I worry will someday run out. You play it like a game because once you take enough bullets you can pretend to respawn.

Victory tastes sweet but the texture blows, like tonguing the pulp of a gunshot. Bullet: Queer doesn’t count when I’m dating a man. Bullet: Queer doesn’t count because it’s my dick up his ass. When my partner tells me he never worked up the courage to come out to his father, he points to me. Not like it matters now. I smile even though the words hurt us both.

Listen, I’ve heard the joke about bisexuals being the new Italians, wearing leather jackets and pretending to be oppressed, and I still laugh. The only struggle in this love is finding a more comfortable strap. I’m not saying biphobia isn’t real, I’m saying girls were never all that into me anyway—too stubborn. A turn off, I’ve been told, mainly by Hinge lesbians: Venus in Virgo, oof, how do we feel about that?

Don’t know how you can stand the sight of a man from below, a girl once said before ghosting me. I wanted to tell her the bite force of the human jaw is 160 PSI. Since I already had the tickets, I brought a man in her place to the art museum—sometimes I think being bi is all about sunk costs.  At the museum there was no Botticelli, only Sommer’s somber photogravures. He kept whispering about the Roman Empire, but all I could think about was Venus’s other birth, the pearl flanked by Zephyr’s pursed lips and Thallos’s offered cloak, how they both had their own unique ways of calling her a whore.