about a girl
on being the worst person in the world
As a young girl I used to imagine god, or my father, watching over me while I did my schoolwork. I’d picture them beaming with pride while I sharpened my pencils, ironed my skirt, made my bed, counted my blessings. I was happy to work harder than the other girls. As long as I could feel them noticing.
When I turned sixteen, I let Nietzsche convince me god’s been dead since 1882, accepted that my father never gave a shit about my making the bed to begin with, and learned that a short skirt will get me farther in life than an ironed one ever could. That summer I learned to starve myself and became popular. That summer I learned how to make everyone else notice.
Any incorrigible depressive can tell you when you wake up in an especially bad way, the only thing that can make you feel temporarily better is to make someone who loves you feel worse. It is 7am on a Tuesday. I text my ex-boyfriend.
I want you to know that I wake up, every day, knowing the last words you spoke to me were “fucking cunt.”
I imagine him, just moments ago, happily on his way to work. Dark hair slicked back. Glasses on. Green eyes glimmering. He reads the message and his heart sinks. He is now sitting in a parked car, visibly upset. He thought he would have a good day. I won’t let him.
My lower back surges with a dull ache while I lean over the counter, dicing the last of the onions. Domestic labor can make you angry in the most useless of ways. It’s laughable really— welling up with resentment over doing something nobody asked you to do. Even if it was your idea to be hunched over in that kitchen—you were literally on all fours begging for a chance at domesticity—one night you’ll hear him quietly laugh at the television from the other room, and you will, for a moment, wish him a little bit dead. Watching someone relax, day in and day out, while you cannot will do this to you.
I press the sharp blade into my pulsating thumb and let myself bleed over our dinner plates. The salad is robust and the pasta is al dente and I no longer want him to have any of it. I walk into the living room.
“Fuck, I’m so sorry, I’ve cut myself and ruined dinner.”
He shrugs, not looking up from his phone.
“No big deal. We’ll order something.”
I have dinner with Christian, whom I’ve known for ten years but haven’t seen in eight months because I couldn’t be bothered to be a good friend. I spend most of the night feeling sorry for myself, telling him how winter was hard for me, somehow April even harder. He asks what’s wrong this time and I tell him oh the usual. As usual, life’s rusty axe has fallen on the usual spot on my usually willing neck.
He anticipates this and laughs.
“This is just … so you.”
“What’s so me?”
“The melodrama. You have a gift, a true talent, for imagining your pain is unique. The most painful pain of all pains. That you are the saddest girl to ever hold a martini.”
“Maybe I am,” I whisper, resting my head on his broad shoulder.
He kisses my forehead.
“And we love you for it.”
I am two beers deep spending Friday night with a man in a black turtleneck and glasses. I amuse myself by sharing stories of my suicidal ideation and stare at him intensely, waiting for him to turn to stone. I casually confess I’ve already figured out exactly how I am going to die but he is still warm and doesn’t flinch. He nods to let me know he understands then asks if I don’t think the Virginia Woolf, pocket-full-of-stones of it all might not take too long?
“Doesn’t living a full life take longer,” I ask back.
Men in turtlenecks with PhD’s think they know everything. So he can make me cum in the bathroom of a bar. That doesn’t make him Jesus.
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers.
-Sylvia Plath
It's almost impossible to write if you don't imagine your pain as the pain of all pains. Universal suffering makes for shit prose.
The verisimilitude broke when you said a man in a turtleneck had sex with a woman