Worst girlfriend in the world
I was a compulsive, self-alienating girlish-thing except now I could order gin & tonics and buy cigarettes in Europe.
Cyber Diary is a collection of digital diary entries.
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I have never felt like one of the girls. I have never felt like other women either. I have not felt like a man nor something in between. I knew I was a woman but I did not feel like one. Correction: I have never felt like what I imagined other women feel on the inside.
Always, always, there lingered the phantom sense that something inherent was missing from my internal architecture. A gentleness, a lovability. The kind of joy or muse-ness that sent men into battle willingly. The kind of innocence that drew jackets off of shoulders when it was cold outside. Where she possessed a soul of fine flamingo feathers, I held inside of me a black-shelled snail, a mole rat, shaking and blind and ugly. Something so vulnerable, off-putting. Red-eyed. I could wink and I could tease, sleaze, slink, I could charm a horse back from the dead (in my early 20s, forget it now — I don’t feel like it) but I could not nurture you, I could not think of you, I could not be with you for real, I had no space for you in my life, only in my lofty and languid ideas, those ideas that flew off from my brain to build faulty palaces out of tissue paper, and the ideas failed to be satiating at a point, I am not sure where on the road I was, whether it was a corner paved with ice or winking flowers, but at that divine conjuncture there was suddenly nothing a text message could make me feel anymore.
There was nothing I could type or write that was real enough, nor you to me. I needed you under me, I needed you on me completely. And even if you were with me, I wanted extreme confessions. I wanted your entire psychology laid out at my feet. It was not enough to wake each day and lay each night beside you, to build a life slowly, to sweeten the pot little by little. I needed to understand immediately, to memorize the game plan, I needed to know what you would give (up).
“But that’s a sick love,” M told me once, when I had explained it to him. Passion, passion, I kept thinking. Pleasure, piercing. Isn’t that all it is? Uncertainty, no, that’s not thrilling. A love like fire ants, like stripper heels under a wedding gown, holiday palm trees under a hospital-red sky. I’m talking about a dedication to forever, okay? Rain or shine. Questions but no questioning. Curiousity and fever without a possible cure. I wanted clear certainty, written-in-blood, tattooed-on-your-hipbone certainty, certainty always and forever without a doubt. Or else why rest here, with him, in a dream? A love without commitment felt like a trip to West World to me. I wanted to worship each other like ancient cats. And if one of us dies, there is no other, just our children, long live, or the moon.
We were on the beach in Positano, living there for his work, and having one of those days (from my perspective) that caged us distinctly in two separate bodies. It was killing me, the effort of bridging us. Looking back, what I wanted to hear was It’s you or it’s nothing. I wanted that confession to soothe the child in me and bring me back to his heels again but instead he said, “I don’t think we should want to die for each other. We should want to live in the best way with each other in mind.”
M is my boyfriend now, a true diamond. The man has Saturn on his good side. His hands feel like home to me, his kiss could melt refrigerator chocolate.
He’s a classic Mediterranean beauty with a dark, serious gaze and a hidden sense of humor that he keeps to himself until he’s somewhat confident that you’ll get it. When I first met him, I almost wrote him off completely for the simple fact that he was not immediately obsessed with me. I wrote Tumblr text posts about him sucking on my b[***]s three hours after we met but in actuality I was an emotionally unavailable 23 year old who had just gotten attractive and was unconsciously craving constant ego-boosts.
Yes, he took my number and messaged me on WhatsApp here and there, but he realized sooner than I did the shallowness of our international iPhone love affair. “You have to live the love to know the love,” he would say, musingly. His reasonableness felt a lot like rejection. “I imagine cooking for you, when you’re here.” Before him, I had only entertained men who future-faked for dopamine and hit my line at 2am to tell me things like, “I saw u in a dream. U look like J-Lo,” or, “Sorry I disappeared. You mean a lot to me,” and then never made plans to see me IRL. Me, a low self-esteemed sheltered teen, thought that had been “the chase” that people spoke about. Men chase, they disappear, they chase, they disappear. I was ripe for brainwashing, twin flame YouTube tarot reads, Mercury Retrograde reunions, misreading intentional silences as something secretly full of meaning. M was and is the opposite. The realizations he has sparked in me have felt like the dream I had of the chakra wheels lighting up one by one down my spine, hidden rainbow. Steady, reserved, and his word is impeccable. I used to think he was stoic, but he was just behaving how regular people do when they don’t know you yet.
And I am writing this because I felt like a horrible girlfriend this week.
I feel like a horrible girlfriend often.
Mostly when I drink and lose track of the days. And when I lose track of our laundry, and I forget to ask if he’s eaten, and I forget to help him search for our next rental, or to check if we got a parking ticket downstairs (we did, 30 euros in damage sitting hot on the dashboard). I still don’t know if I am a good partner as it stands. I am here to learn though, I want to learn. I wrote in the beginning that I have never felt how I imagine that other women feel inside, and I should rephrase that but I don’t know how. In my vague and subjective perspective there is something some women inspire in people, this desire to care for them, cradle them, protect them (?). I feel I am missing that. Whatever that is. Like, their perpetual positivity that inspires good feelings in other people who get to exist in their proximity.
The other week, on Twitter, I saw a thread written by a man about how/when/why he knew his wife was the one. “She inspired my ambition, and for that she has my heart forever.” Others chimed in in the quote-replies, reflecting on their own women. “She’s my peace, bro, IDK who I would be without her.” I’m not exactly peace personified. And I still don’t understand how to inspire a man’s ambition, truly. I am not particularly worldly but I’m also half-ass with my spiritual pursuits; I dangle between the realms, I commit to neither. I am Mercurial to the bone, but as I said I’m starting to find ideas alone unsatisfying. Do those other girlfriends get jealous? Did they IG-stalk his ex girl? Do they have breakfast on the table at 7am? Are they happy to come when he calls, always? What if they are exhausted? Hungover? Craving endless sleep? Perhaps I’m entering my Venusian chapter.
I would be such a good spiritualist if I had an attention span. I have the addictive personality of someone who was a monk in their past life. I used to be able to feed on daydreams. Now I need flesh and form. I feel sick when I eat too much beige. I need a salad, juicy white peaches and sexy beets and fresh tomatoes and tuna fish in oil, fat avocados, I need spiced olives and greens and sardines I need to ingest the colors of life. Raspberries, black plums, feta. Chocolate mousse. This change in my brain was probably sparked by my psilocybin trip in the winter of 2020. Just me in my Greektown apartment with Yves Tumor on repeat, collapsing in anime-sized tears in the crouching candlelit darkness as it crashed down on me all at once, the realization that my constant thoughts were just another social media that I did not know how to log out of. All of my concepts, patterns, webs, grids, plans, and fantasies that I wrote daily to-do lists to fulfill, to get closer to, to be consumed by, were just dragging me away from my pulse. All that my reality had consisted of was not in fact REAL LIFE at all, and there I was, wrapped up in it like a toxic gift to humanity. The problem with living your life through ideas is that everything in your life becomes another idea. People become characters so that you can cope. You never step into the depth of anything. It is beyond words, beyond ideas, where reality lives — when you first witness it, when you are first within it, your heart breaks. You cannot help but think: If I have not been here, where have I been?
Mid-20s, second puberty. Whatever grew on my back was not fairy wings. Not supple, not pink, not velvet. I was a compulsive, self-alienating girlish-thing except now I could order gin & tonics and buy cigarettes in Europe, turning delusional on the pickle juice of Snapchat and Instagram — other virtual realities which enticed me because they moved so fast. One picture could project so much and I was incredible at hand-picking moments to share. I have an Eye, so to speak, I am good with composition. But I didn’t read enough, so my intelligence was waning. I socialized less, so my banter was just barely above baseline. When I moved in with my boyfriend seven months ago, I was no longer the woman he only FaceTimed for one to five hours every night after work. I now had to account for my time, my absences were no longer mysterious and interest-piquing.
How could I explain to him how drawn to sleep and dreams I become when life feels too difficult (almost always)? Like social media, dreams are dopamine-producing (at least in theory, I don’t know the science). They are fast and I am leopard-speed inside them. I am liquid, water, sometimes air, sometimes smoke, a flower, a fish, a child, a bird, a tree, and whenever I get caught in a bad situation I only feel the pain for an instant. I punch my way out of nightmares without a scratch. “I need to sleep until I sleep it all off,” I imagine explaining, and although I am not afraid of looking crazy in front of M, sometimes I do wonder if I am crazy, like, for real. Today I pointed to the middle of his forehead and said, “I wish you’d open this eye too sometimes, not just those two.” If we ever break up (—knock on wood—) I am 100% going down in his history as that one weird woo-woo girlfriend he had from Canada.
WYA?
I have often held this fantasy in my head of a womanhood that is locked off to me. Womanhood à la Cater 2 U by Destiny’s Child, except it’s not the song exactly but the atmosphere of it; gems and bronze tans and gold sunshades, and a luscious subservience that I think is only possible to offer truly if you feel stable, if it doesn’t feel like a loss to give anything at all of yourself. I felt much more like The Knife, a bucket of tiger pee, come with me, I am sorry but I will forever me this jangling and discordant being, dreaming of a pearly gated room draped in red satin, a mythical and moderate and majestic place, a place where one glass of Chianti is enough for me and my body is The Body by like all magazine standards, I read the Fragrantica forum regularly and am a self-sustaining entity with money saved, my mornings start at 6am with woody iced matcha, meditation, chlorophyll, dry-cleaned powder white lingerie and a steady knowing that I am gorgeous for my sex appeal and for the spark inside my soul, I am complete and desired and cared for, looked after, by forces larger than me. Ideally God, but if a boyfriend could fill that role I wouldn’t mind it. Except now, because I am in love and I want what we are doing, making, living, to be fair to him. I want to be able to offer him more than my ~glitzy~ personality. Attention, devotion, consistency. It’s still beautiful to think that a man, this man, who could have lived his life as a stranger to me, is choosing to stick by my side, through all of my accidental tests and turbulence, bewitched by — well, that’s the thing. I never felt I could be loved for what I was, for the empty space that I felt I was, and I still don’t know why he’s here sometimes, but I don’t want to write his story, just mine.
ଘ(੭ ᐛ )━☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ
I think I exiled myself out from “womanhood” because I foolishly objectified the whole damn thing and flattened its nuances out of pure self-hatred, because I weighed 5 kilos too much, or couldn’t hold my liquor, or felt unwanted and awkward, mouth too big for my body, too talkative, too witty (wit developed as a defense mechanism against earnestness), too whatever, the whole thing is whatever AKA everything to me, it is my birthright but I’m still unraveling it all and whining, I mean — writing.
Oh you!
Oh vous !
Girls today
les filles d’aujourd’hui
The women of tomorrow
Les femmes de demain
I feel inexorably
Je me sens inexorablement
Drawn to you like a magnet
Attiré par vous comme par un aimant
When we dance my whole universe
Lorsque nous dansons tout mon univers
Collapses
S’écroule
You’re an INCREDIBLE writer. Wowowowowwww. I’m greeeen 💚
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