Every time Kevin wants to talk to me, he calls me on FaceTime because he has broken fingers and a 25% literacy rate. He can't properly send or receive texts. He's calling to ask what The Moves are for tonight.
He's drunk already. It's Tuesday. I say I need some time to get ready but I'm going to meet Heather at the bar in an hour. He says he'll come, then we hang up. He texts me five minutes later.
Kevin: What if I just came to your place and went with you
Kevin: Cause by the time I get to my place I’ll have to turn around
Me: eeeeerrrrrrrmm the thing is i need to get myself together i could just meet u a lil earlier in south if u stay there
Kevin: Okay
Me: i just need to reboot my body for a little bit before i leave
Me: so it's probably not worth coming here
Kevin: Well I’m stupid and I took the south bound so I’ll actually probably get to fairmount at 9:30 lol
I don't take personally when Kevin shows up at my doorstep because as I said, he can't read or write properly because of the fingers and the literacy rate. He's kind of like when your keyboard is missing a letter.
Upon arrival, he'll need to borrow a charger and a long-sleeve for underneath his sweater because it's too cold outside for wittle Kevy Wevy. He'll want a glass of milk. He'll be clutching his phone at 5% and Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Craddle that he'll bring because I said I was bringing my writing to work on at the bar. I'll want to tell him that I hate Kurt Vonnegut. I'll want to tell him that Kurt Vonnegut is the worst writer who ever lived and people only like him because they found him when they were 18. I'll want to tell him that with every single move he makes, I become less and less attracted to him. I'll want to tell him that he's so sexless, he probably jerks off to my Depop profile.
Kevin came from South, where we're about to meet Heather. If he just waited there, he wouldn't have needed to borrow a sweater from me that he'd then ball up and stick in his mouth as a joke once it doesn't fit him. He wouldn't have needed to give my phone charger back at the end of the night that he'd lug around despite there being nowhere to plug it in. And he never would have made me get up in the middle of editing a draft of a hit piece about our misogynistic non-binary friend.
At the bar I say that my friend Bear and I came up with this idea to write a blog called rateyourboyfriend.com and Kevin says he hates it. He says we shouldn't do that. But Kevin uses RYM (rateyourmusic.com) everyday and never takes it personally. I ask Heather across the table if it's weird for me to read a piece about my ex-boyfriend at our mutual friend's house this weekend and Kevin, next to me, says I shouldn't. I mention that I want to write a piece about our one non-binary friend, a story about a non-binary person who hates women and voted for Trump in 2016 but Kevin says I need to talk to a therapist. "You forget what ideas feel like," I say, and he furrows his brows at me.
I say I'm going out for a cig but I've never smoked one in my life and I open my phone and dial my therapist's number and tell him it's urgent. I explain that it's not that I'm trying to kill myself but that I need to talk to him desperately. That Kevin said so, and I'm trying to take what men say seriously from now on. The therapist calms me down and soothingly instructs me to Repeat After Me. I Am A Toxic Person And I Want To Get Help. I Am A Toxic Person But I Am Worthy Of Recovery. I Am In Control Of My Own Life. And I repeat him. I'm toxic, I'm worthy of recovery, I'm in control of my own life. It's a process. Sobriety is freedom. I will not write another hit piece about a man in the Philadelphia DIY scene. I am not alone. He recommends I read The Body Keeps The Score. He says that what Kevin is storing in his body is cancel culture. I don't understand how Kevin could store a universal phenomena in his body but I don't question it, I figure that I am misled and ill-intentioned. He says how Kevin might feel threatened by the ideas I'm sharing, since they play off the trauma response a lot of men have developed out of fear of getting cancelled. My therapist says that "part of dating now is knowing that everyone is afraid of being cancelled or called a creep or narcissist and you have to treat everyone like a traumatized animal and repeat over and over that you will not kill them for telling the truth." I realize later that he had plagiarized word-for-word an Instagram post from @sighswoon.
The therapist tells me that, to write, you must be smart. The therapist tells me that, to write, you must be self-aware. And that maybe one day I can land here, in this reality, instead of the one I've formed in opposition to masculinity.
Kevin once used his dead dog as an excuse to touch me on the bus. He tried to get my friend who was asleep to trade spots with him so he could touch me even better but I said no at the last minute because it was one of the Chinatown (NYC) to Chinatown (PHL) buses without AC in the summer—so I said that I couldn't breathe.
When I get home, I buy the rateyourboyfriend.com domain name for the $900 upfront fee and hire a computer guy to attach everything to strings and make it stand straight like a marionette puppet or a film set or a miniature model house. I clench my back and wiggle my toes and take a deep breath before I click the ENTER key and get sucked up inside the great machine. Spit out right before the horizon. I think about how men are sad, I wonder if I should go back. To help them. But there's a big beautiful skyline right in front of me, how the deep green mountaintop curves into a waning incline. I want to dip my little feet into the big blue heaven that pours out onto the soils and herbs, and let myself sink in like quicksand. I want to run around with the blue all over my feet like paint and cover all the white until most of it is lost and suddenly a sky has been given life. I feel combative, as if an after-effect to the lost world I've left behind, and I need to sink my feet where they don't belong. I need to straighten out. I need to learn my place. I need to run into the sunset of the great big blue speckled white sky and stay there forever.
Activating the rateyourboyfriend.com API I move from letter to letter to form the first sentence of the first post of the very new and upcoming literary journal, and with all my might, I punch in the glossiest, most sparkling review I can muster: "Every time Kevin wants to talk to me he calls me on FaceTime because he has broken fingers and a 25% literacy rate. He can't properly send or receive texts. He's calling to ask what The Moves are for tonight. He's drunk already..."
