My Seoul, Your B2ts

I’m a girl. I’ve been suffering sexual harassment since I was thirteen years old. Since puberty really began to hit me and I lost weight. The first time was in gym class. I was a freshman, he was a senior. “Look at the way her tits bounce up and down. I wanna tap that ass.” I knew there was no way he was talking about me. It was probably the girl next to me. Then, it continued and I soon realized he was talking about me. My friend found it hilarious. She was even jealous that I received so much attention. If she only knew. After a couple of months, I learned his name. I also found out he had a bit of a reputation. He was a rapist. The school did nothing about it.

He didn’t graduate that year. The sexual attention I received from him continued into my second year of high school. It spread.

School was over for the day. My club had just ended and I was rushing toward the staircase so I could reach the bus in time. I was met by a wall of horny teenage boys. The wrestling team was left unsupervised in the stairwell to do warm ups. They called me names and began to approach me. One guy took out his penis, called me a slut, and told me to suck it. I was friends with one of the people on the wrestling team. He stood in the back and didn’t do anything to stop them. I realized I had no chance of fighting them so I ran back to my club room, hoping the upperclassmen were still there. I was lucky.

Later that year, a guy I was friends with decided he liked me. I told him I didn’t feel the same way. He told me I was stupid for not liking him. He told me I played him. He started stalking me. They told me it was my fault and I shouldn’t have led him on.

I’m in my third year of high school. My female friends and I keep fighting. A handful of them hate me because the guys they like, like me instead. I don’t return any of their feelings. But, I led them on. So, it’s my fault.

My friend just started dating one of my guy friends. They’ve been dating for a month and decided it should be an open relationship, because the girl didn’t want to be tied down. My guy friend tells me there’s someone else he likes. I play dumb. He calls me blind and an idiot. He tells me he likes me. I tell him I don’t reciprocate his feelings and ask him to not mention it to his girlfriend.

I’m at an open mic event hosted by my school. His girlfriend somehow found out about him liking me. She blames me. He blames me. All of our friends blame me for him liking me. He curses me out and threatens to kill me. No one stops him.

Later that year, Most of my female friends have left me. But, I have a bunch of male friends. My father tells me the only reason they’re friends with me is because they all want to get in my pants. I wonder if that means I’m unlikable.

The summer going into my fourth year of high school, I moved. I barely could care at that point. I chose not to make any friends and kept to myself. I was now going to school with my cousin. I had lunch with him occasionally. All of his friends flirted with me. I began spending all of my lunches alone in the library.

At seventeen years old, I entered college with unwanted compliments and cat-calls. Guys thought it alright to ask for my number without ever saying a prior word. After a few months, I turned 18. I was terrified that I was finally legal. Guys old enough to be my father hit on me. But, that was completely legal.

I wear fishnets, thigh highs, skirts, and heels, because that’s what I’m comfortable in. Because of that, guys think it gives them the okay to stare at my legs for long periods of time. They believe that I dress that way for attention.

After finals, a couple of my friends and I went out to eat in the nearby city. We pass by this group of guys and they start talking about what they want to do to us. My friends looked at my face and asked what the men said. I laughed and pretended not to know.

I’m in club, I’m the only girl. I’m friends with a couple of the members. One of the other members asks why it’s okay for one of the other guys to poke me and tickle me, but not him. I don’t tell him it’s not right for either of them to and that I just take it because I’m scared of not having friends. I try making a joke out of it. He gets up and starts acting out pinning me to the board and asks why it’s not okay for him to do that. I have to remember he has a mental disorder. I’m supposed to take it because he doesn’t know any better.

Another meeting, I caught him staring at my fishnet clad legs over a lengthy period of time. He later excused himself to the bathroom, stating I gave him a boner.

Later that semester, I waited in the hall for my friends. A guy walked by, stopped, and stared at me until I looked up. It didn’t matter how long it took for me to make eye contact with him. He did it the next week. And the week after. But, this time he kept walking by. Finally, I got up to go meet my friend. He followed me there and has done it since. But, he has a mental problem. And, society says I can’t blame him because he doesn’t know any better.

My friend is moving to the other side of the country, so I sleep over his house to play video games and watch anime one last time. He starts touching me.

Today (well, technically yesterday) was International Women’s Day.

When I first started at Rooster Teeth, there was a woman who told me I didn’t deserve my job and spread terrible rumors about me that are too awful to even type out; I’m honestly not sure which one hurt more to hear. At every opportunity, she tried to make me feel like I didn’t belong, and that I was less than her. 

I’m extremely proud to say the all the women I work with today build each other up, not tear them down. We support one another, encourage one another, and congratulate each other on our victories. She for she, we for we. This is the way it should be. This is the future. 

I made this today and can confirm it is the real deal. If you are poor and/or eat instant ramen all the time like me, you should give it a try.

you can eat the stalks whole one by one, or just cut the greens off with scissors and let them grow back from the white base. just don’t let the water get too old or too warm, or submerge too much of the greens, or you risk losing a stalk to rot— just replace the water once or twice a week, do an occasional sniff test.

if the roots get real long, you can even upgrade your stalks to houseplant status. when potted, the upkeep’s a little higher, because you have to water them regularly, but the onions start to reproduce.

New York City breathes. With each screech of the subway’s metal wheels upon metal tracks, with each pedestrian’s quick-paced step onto the next block, it inhales and exhales with the collective breath of 8 million interwoven lives. 

Pick one thread out of this moving, evolving tapestry and you’ll find the attractive French man, dressed to the nines, speeding down Sixth Avenue while chattering away on his phone. He jumps over a puddle, almost bumping into a woman who looks thrice his age and hobbled over as if the exaggerated curve of her back marked her years. She looks back at him as he navigates through the throng of the weekend crowd, eyes plaintive with wrinkles carved into their corners like fjords. They walk on in opposite directions.

Pick at another thread and you’ll find two girls, tall and leggy and blessed with long virgin locks down to the middle of their backs.  Their easy confidence in 90s grunge gear mask their youth, but each open-mouthed stare at the heights of the city is far more telling of their narrative–young girls taking this town upon themselves. They walk in sync, stopping only to ask a young man advertising a tour bus service to take a picture for them in front of the deafening light and glitz of Times Square. He obliges, side-stepping their dropped “Modeling School” bag to capture the right angle. He says “cheese.” They smile. He does not.

This is a city of dreams, they say, a place where people come from far and wide to accomplish goals, to establish lives, to find themselves. And that’s a horribly romantic vision (and this coming from a self-professed romantic). Maybe it is those things, but this city is also confrontation. When so many lives are packed together, moving on the subway together, eating in crowded restaurants together, you cannot help but notice how all our threads are intertwined, and yet, how we manage to live on separately, pretending we never knew the others existed.

I encountered many lives during my short trip: the kind traveler who watched over my things in Penn Station, a young Thai restaurant waitress who accidentally knocked over a glass of water that splashed onto my bag, a recently-graduated Tumblr friend, an inquisitive bookstore cashier with a love of Proust and The Avengers, a gaggle of tourists who bought handbags of questionable origin in a Chinatown park, a bartender with an ass to die for who danced atop the counter in skin-tight jeans to country anthems, a stranger who thought it would be a good idea to rest his hands on my waist for a few fleeting moments, an older couple who shared my joy for brunch and chicken-and-waffles. 

We first kissed on the banks of the creek that runs through the woods behind my house. The edge of the boulder I was sitting on was slick with humidity. My hands gripped the sides, clammy with nervous energy. The moment came during the dying hours of a summer’s day–the day before my 19th birthday. 

We sat quietly on the boulders right before it happened, within earshot of rushing water and the distant whir of bicycle spokes and labored breathing that passed overhead on the jogging trail. Words were exchanged. I swiped the sweat off my brow. I looked at him, I remember, and thought that I could spend the rest of my life with him. He looked at me, I remember, and I desperately wanted him to reciprocate my feelings.

He asked me if the plaintive words I had posted on my blog were about him. The words that came about after months of pining, confusion, coming out, and, eventually, acceptance that, yes, he was the first boy I ever loved. He was the very first person I had ever loved. I confessed yes and closed my eyes waiting for the inevitable rejection–that he was straight, that he only liked me as a friend, that we were never going to work out with him having just graduated and me having two more years left in college.

Instead, he sighed. “Oh, Anthony.” And he turned our heads together so that our foreheads touched, his gentle breathing ghosting upon my lips. And we stayed like that with the water rushing, the bikes whirring, the cicadas our only audience to this moment. And we stayed just like that until he cupped the underside of my chin with his hand and kissed me for the very first time. All I could see was him, and all I could hear was the rushing water.

–

He was the first of so many things for me. Beyond that kiss, we crowded into a single chair while I played horror movie clips on Youtube; he tried to escape the room, and I just held onto him more tightly. We shared a hot pocket when I stumbled back from a night of partying, sweaty and disheveled; I remember sitting on his covers in only an undershirt while he carefully constructed a napkin holder for me to eat with. We later laid in his too-small bed the night before his graduation pondering about the future; we cuddled and when he rested his nose on the back of my neck, I couldn’t help but feel a tremendous sense of “this is right.”

But these moments came with so many other feelings: I was surprised, even shocked, that I could be falling for him (I hadn’t even come to grips with being gay at the time, still going on dates with girls); I felt awkward at times, angry at others (I spent weeks pining and being despondent without fully realizing the reason would later be attributed to his impending graduation); I was confused and scared (I didn’t know if he liked me, I didn’t even know if he was gay, I didn’t know what would happen if I confessed, if we managed to end up together).

None of that mattered because I was in love, or at least what I believed was love. And as with so many other first loves, crushes, relationships, it was all-consuming. Like being plunged headfirst into the speedy current of a relentlessly rushing stream, I was swept away by him, by my emotions, by the future I had already started constructing in my head. And I was happy to be swept away if it meant being with him.

–

After he kissed me, he had a few confessions of his own. 

Yes, he was gay.

Yes, he had started developing feelings with me.

No, he couldn’t start a relationship with me.

And just as quickly as the stream had swelled, it had already started receding from its banks. I was devastated. Heartbroken. Gone were those memories that eventually became the foundation of “this could be you and me.” I was angry at him for kissing me and giving me something he already knew that he would never be able to followthrough on. Like the maniacal guard who dangles the bottle of water before a thirst-stricken prisoner only to pour its contents onto the ground, I was left high and dry.

It was only months later that I would be able to reconcile with my heartache and process all that had happened with my first. And, perhaps unexpectedly, he was actually the first person who helped me to realize the error in my thinking:

I was more than happy to be swept away by the rush of my emotions and my expectations of what could have been my first relationship. But what I hadn’t realized was the danger I was encountering by tying my well-being, my future, and my goals to one other person with no conditions. I was ready to give it all up for someone else, without considering what was actually best for me, what was best for that other person, and what ultimately was best for the two of us. 

In a birthday card I read only long after we had left the shores of that creek, long after he had already driven home, he wrote to me: “I think it’s great that you found someone you so deeply care for, but you place a burden on not only that person but also yourself when the feelings cannot be returned.” And that was a burden I had become blind to.

I was swept away by a torrent that obscured my senses, distorted by emotion and with unrealistic, one-sided goals. I had become so entirely invested in someone who I never 100% knew could provide me with the type of relationship or emotional return that I had been seeking. I wanted so much to be his that I had forgotten what I wanted for myself.

These days, I look back and think about what I could’ve done or what I should’ve felt in the months and moments leading up to our denouement. But hindsight is always 20/20 and it’s easy to chastise our past selves for falling into the clichéd traps, committing the typical emotional blunders that we’ve now become accustomed to.