warning girls about men

any time i write anything i feel like i’m bleeding out. and i explicitly try not to write this thing that i’m about to write because it’s so easy to get bitter. but it’s fun to talk about and to lay down without uncovering any cosmic truth and i know you all will pass it around.

and even an attempt to omit it speaks to it.

note to self: everything has already been said.

there was someone i dated once called b. i hesitate to bring him up because our encounter was pretty insubstantial and i do not feel vengeful. he was more of a muse to me. he had a shopping and porn addiction. he embodied a lot of the downfall of the american empire and he let me go pretty easily. i will probably write him later, in another novel, in the novel that will come after i finish this first novel, and get through the door i’m trying to, and consequentially explode into a million pieces.

b had had a girlfriend before me. she was very young. she was that age of girl that is all about the time beyond it, the future that stretches out from there and goes on forever. before the patterns begin to reveal themselves and the promises are not always kept, haha. which is to say she was three years below us. but how things change.

she was beautiful and tiny. she had big round eyes like a doll. and she was tortured in a way that nobody could make right. yes, she was crazy. he spoke about this part of her carefully. it was the reason that he left her, in the end. it was sad, so sad, but some people, you just can’t make them right. it was the reason that he had come here, to me. because she was weak and fragile and i was strong like a horse.

b asked me four or five times if i had bpd. i told him i didn’t but i liked that he kept asking me, if i had it. because it meant that in some way i was edging on the club that we both held reverent. there is a certain nobility to being completely subsumed w a flame that only you can see. it is like putting the body of a god in a child.

i told him that i could probably convince some doctors that i had it, if i decided that i did.

note to self: you keep mentioning not wanting to say things, for this or that reason. but you say them anyway and you don’t stop saying them

before i was this age, i was that age of girl. and the whole time i was that age of girl, women would warn me about men. women in bars and women at work. they used to say things like, be with someone your own age. just trust me. be sweet and grow up together. you don’t need to run with the dogs. trust me you don’t know the game they are playing. they are not going to let you win. that is why they are trying with you.

note to self: you are no longer at the age that qualifies this because you have a credit card

my big question back then was why did the men not go with the women. why did they want to go with me, and my friends. when i asked the older men this, they said it was because the women were ugly. when i asked the women this, they said it was because they didn’t care for the men anymore, didn’t need them. i knew that both of them were lying.

i remember being too young and leaving my friends to sit in a man’s apartment. i remember doing this again and again. and it was not because i liked him exactly, but because it was the farthest i could get from myself. it was the way of learning who i was when nobody knew me. which was a kind of intimacy with myself, where I could already feel the weight of the memory settling in. he thought i was so cute and i was. i never broke my heart and i never traumatized myself. because i knew that somehow, somewhere, i would be all of me and loved perfectly for it.

i still like men. they like me best when i pretend. i do like to pretend. but i don’t disappear into any one anymore, just to see what will happen. i no longer find it avant garde or erotic because i know what will happen. i guess i feel committed to my own experience. i like to sleep in my bed and talk to my friends. and you and i don’t have the kind of relationship anymore where who i am can embarrass or disappoint you. i just won’t allow it. i’m not a concept or a feeling. and i can’t be bothered to be.

i now know why they went with me. i only realized this today actually, going down a street in paris, listening to voice memos from my friend whose bf left her for the waitress at her catering event (lol).

i have been walking this path long enough that i know something of myself. i know what i like, and what i want, and maybe not all the way, but enough that when random horny men approach me on the street, as they did, and do, and will, i don’t take my headphones out. because i am not a paper doll. i am listening to my friend, and i do not care that you like me.

anyway this is all to say i was there and now i’m here. and im glad to be even tho when i wasn’t i thought it might be something bad, or unfortunate. so have no fear about that. just go through what you have to go through, and understand everything in the way that you do.

when i asked b what he didn’t like about women, he thought for a long time, and then he said “brunch.”

x sotce