When bunnies want to hump someone, they hop around the person in circles, sometimes spraying piss, staining clothes and skin. I considered doing this with you, without the piss of course, but after completing one revolution around you like the moon around the sun, you said, “What the fuck are you doing?” It was in that ridiculing tone you often use, the kind a pet owner uses for a stupid pet, which I guess I should’ve expected. I said, “I don’t know.” We didn’t fuck that night. You wouldn’t permit it, I didn’t deserve it. Instead, we got really drunk off gin and took ketamine and dissociated together. I told myself this was more intimate than sex, the way we were lying beside each other on the floor, immobile and mute, face muscles too heavy to move. This was all I ever wanted—to be doomed beside you forever. I thought about how disgusting I was that you didn’t even want to use my body. I was small and young and full of heat. I was stupid and worthless and desperate. I was depressed in the morning when I could move again. I deserved to be cursed with paralysis, to be stuck in a wheelchair that you could push around proudly, feeling good about yourself. But I knew you would never feel good about yourself and you didn’t want to. You preferred the bad reputation you held, how girls who ran to you were blamed for getting involved with you, how you were so past redemption that you couldn’t even be blamed anymore.
I knew all about you before we met, knew that you were so hated that it made you a celebrity. How bad could you really be? I wanted to know. I hated myself and needed some kind of punishment. I was objectively pathetic. I’d wake up around eleven when my Lexapro alarm went off. After swallowing the tablet, I spent a half hour doing guided meditation through my app that cost me $13 a month as it encouraged me to repeat my self-constructed mantra: “I am good. I am alive. I am good. I am alive.” I couldn’t think of anything else. It often occurred to me that most of my life was spent fantasizing about death. But this didn’t seem like a bad thing to me. At least I wasn’t fantasizing about fame or love.
Around noon, I clocked in for my remote job writing clickbait articles. It’s Extreme Underboob Summer Thanks To Risqué A-Listers Like Katy Perry, Beyonce. Selena Gomez Turns Her Boyfriend's Cake Into A Seriously NSFW Moment. Why Kylie Jenner Crying Over ‘Nasty’ Comments About Her Looks Is Problematic. Megan Thee Stallion Claims She Has The Best Tits And Ass On Instagram In Latest Thirst Trap. My articles were littered with typos and casual misinformation but it’s not like anyone read them anyway. While I typed, I daydreamt about working a job that actually provided something useful for this world. I thought even flipping greasy patties at McDonald’s would be more fulfilling than the bullshit I was doing. I could fix the ice cream machine when it was broken, make children and undisciplined adults happy.
By the time my shift was over it was nearly nighttime and I climbed into bed. Under the sheets, I watched ASMR videos on my phone, where college girls whispered comforting words like, “You are safe.” Sometimes I picked the oddly specific ones, like ASMR Cranial Nerve Exam But Not Good Results. Shady Doctor Makes Top Secret Experiments on You. These girls were magicians of sorts, able to conjure a gaze that convinced me that we were having direct eye contact. Sometimes they snuck into my dreams, and we kissed innocently, and I’d wake up feeling heartbroken that it had all been fake. They were the only people I’d ever loved, but they were not people, they were mirages manufactured by my brain.
You, though—you were a mirage manufactured by whispers and Instagram posts and warnings. And then you appeared in my vision, materializing into just another person at the bar pretending to listen to a writer reading something boring off a piece of paper into a microphone, and you sipped your gin and tonic, met my eyes across the room, and mimed shooting yourself in the head. I laughed and the people around me laughed too, thinking I was laughing at what the writer had read, but I hadn’t listened past the first sentence. The writer looked caught off guard and continued reading, and it turned out we had been laughing during a part that described her father’s death.
Later that night, those very fingers with which you made into a pretend gun were in my mouth, and the metaphor was right there, how you could’ve blown my brains out. But you didn’t, you did something worse, you invited me over again and again, and I returned every few days like an inmate being let out of my cell, you were both my escape and my prison. Soon enough I stopped working and was evicted from my apartment and living in your bed. Instead of ASMR, I fell asleep hearing you describe all of the things you didn’t like about me: how I was unemployed, how I went days without showering, how I ate too much and made a mess throwing it up, how I had never told a good joke, how I didn’t have any friends. What was the difference, though, between insults and truths? I preferred those affronts to affirmations; I wanted to believe I, like you, was past redemption. I was relieved when you handcuffed me to the radiator and left me there for twenty-six hours. I was an indisputable victim. My mistakes washed away in piss that streamed from me onto your floor, and further faded when you yelled at me for being disgusting, for not holding it in. I was a bad girl. Thank you thank you. That’s all I ever wanted to be.
