This is the story I’ve only told my therapist. And now, you.

The absurd hilarity of desire showing up at the wrong time.

In May of this year, a snake entered my studio. This is the second part of the story. If you want to read the intro, it’s here. Summary of this post: we underestimate how many pet snakes escape, we have very little, if any, control over who we desire and when (this post is juicy and embarrassing).

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When the snake slithered over my Dansko while I was drawing last month, something inside of me changed. I didn’t prepare for a milk snake, I live in urban California, not rural Florida, where I think maybe these things happen more? I have no facts to support this. But I imagine places where this might be a commonplace thing that people just coexist with. It’s not where I live. A mouse, maybe. A black widow crawling into your mouth while you are napping? Totally possible. A 4-foot-long red and black reptile? Never heard of it.

I wrote about the snakes as signs, and the internet says they are good and bad, depending on how you want to see them. So I coeiresd myself into believing it was good luck. I had been touched by a snake and as far as I could tell I was still living.

(above video trying to make a snake nest in my studio.)

Romantic relationships take work. I’ve been working on mine for 15 years. The flow is up and down. Being close has become a job. Something that, if we don’t work at it, falls to the back burner. Things like eating, and lawn maintenance take the main stage. And then one day, you look across the table while eating a dinner that is painfully tense because of kid screaming and running, stress at work, and you have no idea what it was that attracted you to the miserable person across from you chewing their carrots.

I am the miserable person. You are the miserable person.
Prolonged misery is so infectious. It is impossible to really know the origins. It’s easy to blame the other person, making up some story in your head to absolve you of your thoughtless actions and your inherent laziness.

Over time, without intending to, my partner and I became passing ships in our home. Once, the person I laughed myself to sleep with over the day’s ironies, now we avoid each other because we might say or do something that would upset the other.

The day after the snake arrived, I became obsessed with my husband.
This attraction was not my intention.

The spike in hormones (what I am calling my rapid desire), perhaps brought on by the magic of the snake, or ovulation during perimenopause, came while I was driving and some 311 from my high school days came on the radio. I gripped the wheel, my body morphing in anticipation. I felt the weird urge to drive home and read erotic fiction. This was not the time. I was supposed to be picking up kids from pre-school. I crossed my legs. Or tried to while waiting for a green light.

The car drove while my mind rested in the desire to be held, to be touched by this person who, the night before, had fallen asleep in the adjacent room at an unknown time, listening to 432 Hz in his headphones. Did I mention that I have been in 4 car accidents this year? All while I was driving?

Daydreaming about moments of closeness, I scanned the radio for more of this feeling.
The Cranberries came on, Zombie, a song I never really related to, but in that moment, it was the sexiest song I had ever heard. It made me think about being in someone’s parents’ Honda sedan in high school, reaching for a lover, parked in the school parking lot. Life felt so complicated and yet black and white.

Later that night, when we were both home, he was telling me how M was annoying him at the grocery store because she was hanging on him while he was picking out apples and almost pulled his pants down.

Josh is a focused guy, and picking out which apples to get is serious business. It’s legitimately annoying to have someone pulling on you all the time and potentially de-robing you in public. But it got me excited. I don’t think it was the embarrassment he would have felt by not being dressed properly that got to me.

It was the idea of his body. His body just being there close to mine. Without clothes. There was no sense in this.

I was grossed out by myself.
That is disgusting.
No one fantasizes about having sex in a grocery store.
Or at least, this feeling was new to me. Maybe people do? Maybe there is a whole genre of erotic fiction based in the middle of big box stores where the aisles are so wide that you can really have space to explore the way bodies can come together.

Normally, I would have responded to Josh’s complant about shopping with a 5 year old with, “Oh, that sounds hard. Seems like you made it home in one piece with the apples.” We would then move on with our med schedules and dinner prep. There would be something else that would annoy us, that would be cause for communication. Commiserating as a form of connection. Can you relate?

But today, and I’m embarrassed to say this, hence why I’ve only really talked about this with my therapist, my body was aroused. as he continued along his list of annoyances of the day, I couldn’t focus on his words. Only how there was this magnetic pull I was feeling to grab his butt in the kitchen! Who even does that? No one even likes having their butt grabbed. Or slapped. Or tapped. No one (unless you do, in which case, I am wrong).

It felt like I was in a rap-pop song and we were tipsy, dancing at a club, about to take shots out of each other’s belly buttons.
I’m 42 years old. I go to bed at 8pm.
I don’t go to clubs. I don’t drink (Zoloft is my drug of choice).

I told myself I was lucky to feel this way for someone I was legally bound to love. Like what if I had had these feelings brought on by a network of unknowable forces for someone like my neighbor? What then? I guess stranger things have happened. I just felt lucky that it wasn’t a cucumber I was getting hot and bothered by.

I don’t think we can control who we love and when we love them.
Or maybe we can, a little. My jury is out.

For me, this points to a complex equation for enduring love that has variables beyond my control and understanding.

That, in some ways, this was very convenient. And within the realm of pro-social norms in the culture I exist within.

The inconvenient bit was that Josh was having a hard time managing his stress levels. and had like zero interest in pretending we had just met and he was again my orientation leader in grad school.

If I could have predicted a surge in desire brought on by the strangeness of having a snake take up residence in my studio, I might have invited one sooner. The problem with life is it is really hard to know how your future self will feel. What they will want. Who they will be.

I am relishing the forces that brought me back to that version of my self that felt deep feelings of lust and sensual longing. She is like a delightful old friend who reminds me what it feels like to be alive.

Sending uncontrollable love and aliveness, Carissa

PS This Saturday, I am co-hosting a FREE Workshop at SFMOMA

Still Together: A Collective Breath + Reflection Experience

Saturday, Sep 13, 2025
11 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Floor 4, Gina and Stuart Peterson White Box - RSVP here.

We will have Ashley Neese doing breathwork, sound baths by Danny Paul Grody, and a creative confidence journaling exercise with me.

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