How Soon Is Now?

I can smell him on my nose ring, his beautiful penis. 

It starts the night before. After New Year’s, he got in my bed, in my pyjamas, turned to face me and put his hand over my mouth. I can’t remember why, but I was so flustered I turned Zoolander off and dropped the remotes on the floor. It took everything in me not to lick his hand. I told him I was too strong, and that if I really wanted to be mean to him I would scratch his back. I did it once or twice with a single finger nail, turned the TV back on, and we went to sleep. The next morning (it was two and a half hours later, we stayed up til 6:00 talking and laughing and shifting around) I woke up to him awake. He was quiet and far away and we thought we might get some more sleep. He asked why I never shut my curtains so I got up and shut them. I reached in my drawer and tried to put my sleep mask on his face but he wouldn’t let me. He rolled over to take up more room in the bed, to annoy me maybe, and I climbed over him and settled on his side. He stayed face down. I told him I could scratch his back while he was like this and he told me to do it. I sat on his bum, gave him a scratch once down his back and over my big blue shirt and pushed it up. He started rocking his pelvis back and forth with me on it, and catching me with his feet. Keeping me there. I got off, laid back down next to him, and said I can’t do this. He rolled over and brushed his hand from my ankle, up my leg, to my waistband, and my pussy. He found how wet I was, and I pushed his hands up to my breasts. He pulled on my nipples. Eventually both of his hands found their way back to my pussy til I was done and my next conscious moment of him was his back to me from my floor. I told him I wanted him and he said no. That I wanted to just feel him. He pulled it out of my sweatpants and let me reach down from the bed and stroke him. I ran my hand through my pussy to wet it, rock hard. He stood up and put it in my mouth. I sucked it for a while and he put his hands back inside me. Then he was inside me and then he wasn’t, we didn’t have a condom. I kick the butt plug I bought yesterday over at him and he came back to bed, to put his penis in my mouth and fuck into it. To hold my head and put it back on when I pulled off. I begged for him and told him we could take care of it after. That I had needed him to cum inside me ever since we met. And he did. He lifted my legs up on his shoulders and fucked into me with such vigour that I told him to be quieter. And then I was full of him. I said that we were now officially best friends and made him kiss me for the first time. 

Some of the things he said to me in the immediate aftermath were that he regretted it, he had betrayed her, he wasn’t in love with me, he didn’t want to do it again, and he didn’t want to ever speak of it either. None of that dampened my happiness then. We decided we wouldn’t talk about sex personally anymore, no referring to each other or ourselves. He thinks I think I know everything about him. That I have my hands inside his brain and want to know everything that is going on with him. That is of course true, but I reassured him otherwise.

I am no longer lonely. We are almost always talking unless one of us is physically occupied otherwise. He knows everything about me. I know everything about him. We talk about anything and everything and all of it all the time. There is nothing I haven’t told him except for one thing.

 I am scared there will never be anyone else. I know this can’t possibly be true. But it’s all entirely relative as well. As long as there IS him, there is no one else. And no one else could measure up from nothing to what he is now. And yet I am so thoroughly aware how bad this all is. So deeply fucking aware.

 He doesn’t think I am special. He doesn’t think I am the one. Maybe he thinks I am beautiful, or even attractive, or a just bit sexy when I’m acting like a whore. Maybe he doesn’t and is just that desperate for a fuck. I tell him all the time the ways he is special. He asks. Sometimes he doesn’t and I tell him anyway. I don’t know why I do this.

And when it comes crashing down it hurts. We decided we can’t ever be physical and risk what we have as friends. I told him I could not have sex with him and not develop feelings and he told me the same. I told him I am sorry because I would love to have sex with him and he told me the same. Tonight, we go to the movie and as long as she is next to him or in his eyeline, I do not exist. Yet, I still cannot cry, not with sincerity, or feeling, or gumption. Because I always knew. None of this is a surprise to me and never will be. Maybe I rank for him, but I’ve never been #1 and never will be as long as she is. I sit here and contemplate all the ways her and I are different. The ways in which she is special and I am not. I give myself an eating disorder thinking about it. I change myself, cut parts of myself away, and cultivate new parts for someone who doesn’t want them. To him, I am the saviour of his boredom. His insecurities. His horniness. But I am just that, no matter how we laugh together, or how much time we spend together, or how many secrets we trade. I could be anyone, and in another life, or in any other circumstances, he would have found all this without me.

I would not have found any of this without him.

The past few days, before Christmas Eve and after Boxing Day, we’ve been talking about getting off. Playing with yourself, fucking other people, having sex with each other. It’s practically the only thing we’ve talked about since we opened it up completely. We had to take a break on Christmas because we felt so filthy and last night, he still told me he would spread my legs open. It’s been the most fun I’ve ever had. Knowing that he wants to have sex with me made me so embarrassingly incandescently happy, I am so low to know now that he does want it enough to actually do it. I might have rather not known. At least I could write it off that he only has eyes for her, or that something about me just doesn’t click. But it’s knowing that he has seen me, fully, and has decided it’s not enough. He knows he is holding me like water. He knows I am lying when I say I’m not jealous. How could I love him?

A few times I’ve been compelled to come back and write. And nothing felt dire enough to do so. Or really rather, I don’t think anything felt final enough until now. I’ve always had some reason to delude myself into thinking “maybe, it could still be”, “maybe this no is really a not right now”, or most pathetically “maybe if I change something he’ll finally see”. I have to remind myself it’s not true and never will be. And quite frankly, even if it ever did change, deep down knowing all of this to be true, should I still want it? Do I have enough dignity to reject it?

What do you say to a friend who betrays you?

What do you say to a friend who insults another?

When do you owe yourself allegiance?

When is it worthwhile to forget?

I feel like I’ve woken up on the summer’s proverbial cold hard floor. It’s been a watershed one certainly, high highs and low lows, or at the very least, 20 new friends and maybe a few less. I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom in the semi dark, during the after hours of my new witching hour, where I’ve taken to brooding up and down Blythwood at five in the morning.

As per, I feel compelled back to writing from a short period of intense turmoil. Here, I’ve decided to log it, just like my best friend Nick Mullen on Wordpress. This seems to be an equally performative and therapeutic way of working through my worst moods, and certainly shouldn’t be as hard to keep up with as my hand-cramping too-small leather-tied journal. Although, we’ll see - I am after all, pathetic. Pathetic enough to sit and recount my feelings in theatrical terms so that I might convince myself they have some virtue or that I, although sad, lonely, and any number of other terrible adjectives, might still be witty or clever. It’s something I have become far less sure of by the end of what can only be characterized as a Summer of Rejection. In the specific order, it’s been academic, then romantic, professional, and now social.

For the purposes of my increasingly and concerningly shoddy memory I’ll log some of the specifics I’m bound to forget. On Saturday night, P’s going away party was held and I spent the coke come down awake and alone on their front porch, smoking a cigarette, taking selfies, and generally feeling equally pretty and emotional. I had plenty of time to contemplate every endless moment where my best and oldest friend H would pretend she couldn’t see me as she offered a microwaved plate around the room, or pretended not the hear a question I asked her, so bold as if daring me to say something like “I know you can hear me, bitch”. 

It’s been a number of incidents over months now where I’ve felt specifically and viciously excluded for no other obvious purpose than to remind me of my rung on the ladder of her life. Perhaps one of the first incidents is the most brain-seared one: right before our separate ways home from her driveway after our Montréal “microtrip”, after squeezing R goodbye she stood limp in front of me hugging me but with only her palms, quickly, yet lazily hovering her elbows upward as though her sleeves might come away from me muddy. In another concerning aspect of my cognitive health, I have been completely unable to cry after these moments. I put on a hang-dog face and blast whatever indiefemme musical panacea du jour until I feel like “Hey, it might feel like there’s something sitting on your chest, but at least your ears fucking hurt now too!”. Occasionally, I have cracked a grin or even let out a strange weak chuckle, and know something is truly wrong.

You would have to be fucking retarded to be me and expect anything else of my life. And yet I can’t still can’t muster up enough feeling to care, I’m so far beyond surprise I’ve entered ironic detached humour. Even more stupidly, I’m still generally, happy. It’s that or I’m so numb my brain has been blunted down to that of a goldfish and nothing hurts for longer than a few hours. But, that would be too catastrophic to consider seriously, so I won’t. 

I’m on my way to being well and truly skinny, just like one of these BPD art hoes P won’t stop mentioning, as I think I’ve finally given myself the eating disorder I always wanted. It turns out back in elementary, in grade 10, and in first year, and even in grad school, you just hadn’t suffered enough to be serious about it yet! In many ways, I don’t want the food because I’ve done nothing to deserve it and I know it will make me suffer more mentally than it will alleviate me physically, but as well, if I did eat it, what would there be left for me to stand on and feel superior towards others about. Assuredly, it’s not any other avenue of my life - not professional, social, sexual, romantic, financial, or even cultural. I’m still a countercultural rube by RS standards, only just picking up my first French torture fucking novel this week. I don’t listen to jazz or 80s Soviet techno. The embarrassing bitch hasn’t even done shrooms or acid yet. The only thing I can control right now is the way I look. And so I will. Even when the big cavity in my chest burns the most, I have no aptitude for self-harm. The only thing I can bring myself to do is starve. Unless, peeling and biting my cuticles raw and bloody after my porch cigarettes counts.

Being this version of me feels great. I pity the memory of the person I was through 2020 and 2021. I’m going out most nights of the week, spending too much time and money with people who barely care about me. I’ve traded whatever closeness I had left with my oldest friend, and R and P, for the half-attention of a depressed asshole who chews me out over text when I bring up the wrong subject. Tonight, it was the morality of my consumerist habits. All the ways I am completely spiritually lacking was just implied tonight. So really the material actualization of my shallow life is nearly complete! The only thing I still need, the white rabbit that evades me yet, is a little sanctuary to myself. P and I still keep up this charade with each other that we’ll someday soon move out to the nebulous and hypothetical “pad”, where we live in neutered harmony, only buying real butter, travelling together to Japan, and lining the living room walls with all my books. It feels so simultaneously mollifying and fantastical sometimes as to be practically masturbatory. Despite entertaining this impossible scenario, and I also delude myself that one day somewhere far from here, I might pretend to be young and desirable in some trendy neighbourhood 1 bed, with two kitties running around, I’ll be satisfied. And it’s the only thing in life I want that I think I might actually be able to get.