The difference between what men say and what they mean has never ceased to baffle me. In his bed, I’m a goddess, a muse, a Galatea for all the times his hands have traced over me. I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me. Sally Rooney, save me.
Now, I’ve been left on delivered – sixteen hours and counting. At what point does re-reading Normal People stop being therapeutic and start to constitute torture?
On-and-off relationships, no matter their irregularity or my attempts to convince my friends I don’t actually care, seem to plague me. Thinking about it, I tend to prefer the ‘off’ phases. Awkward eye-contact (or pointed lack thereof) provides my friends and I with enough gossip to fuel at least six coffee dates; every second I’m left on opened constitutes years of chatter.
Cold shoulders simply beg to be warmed in ways loving flesh doesn’t, and the hot stove means nothing to a child who’s never been burned. There’s something deliciously distracting about the sting and the shove.
Even now, I’m writing this instead of doing my reading. Reliving and rereading Rooney rather than sitting down to tease out the intricacies of Much Ado About Nothing. (Though, thinking about it, who hasn’t wanted to fake their death to make their ex fall into incredible despair?)
Sometimes I wonder when I’ll learn – a brief burst of self-awareness which is quickly swallowed by my romantic tendencies. The next girl I lock eyes with, sharing a soft silly smile, will grow old with me. The next guy’ll be him, and it’ll be love, love, love.
It is an unfortunate consequence of having grown up reading so profusely and with such ferocity that I learned to understand the world through the page. I feel in the second-hand, so much so that I seem to translate myself into the stories, relishing in the timelessness of the typed. Like Marianne, I’ll go to college and get pretty – nevermind the fact that I’ve been here nearly two years already. I think in a future tense facilitated by the eternal liminality of literature.
These are the kind of thoughts which occupy me while I’m bent over a desk – so as to not irritate my new tattoo with missionary – and his hands are digging into the very hips that are already bruised from two days of lugging around my ridiculously heavy Longchamp, weighed down with an Owala and The Bell Jar, because God forbid I have an original thought. You know it’s rough when you need a distraction from the distraction. Pun not intended.
I’m still thinking about how he left me on delivered; how I’m not speaking to the same guy I was with for all of Hilary; how I’m just really sick of dates that end with one-night-only sex.
But God, the sex is excellent. While it lasts.
He asks me to leave at 23:41. I have been counting the seconds with his heart-beat. I call my best friend on the walk back and spin a narrative where I, shirt seductively slipping from my shoulders, left him bleary eyed and stunned, a reality in which he grasped as I rose and begged me to stay. She plays along as we pretend not to know that which is blatantly, uneasily obvious. I’ll borrow Salma Deera‘s words here: “At night I dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb. I dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.” Her laughter rouses me and I am forever reminded that men are ephemeral ships passing me in the night and my friends are effulgent lighthouses. They are boiling points and blue Filofaxes.
I’ll go and dream of a different smile tonight. Softer eyes, that aren’t veering downwards.
(I’ll admit I’m a hypocrite here – I select first dates outfits almost exclusively based on whether or not my tits look good.)
Enter college, making awkward eye-contact with my favourite porter who watched, only three hours earlier, my roommate and I leave for our respective assignations. Can he tell by the tangle at the back of my hair, and the awkward smudge of my mascara I didn’t bother to fix when I thought I’d be sleeping over? Or is the hungry look in my eyes, a desperation for a satisfaction he couldn’t achieve with his fingers or his cock?
I’m still thinking about Normal People. How I’d probably leave someone if they hit me, or that I wouldn’t, and I don’t know which is scarier. Wanting to be in love causes such a terrible vulnerability. I can barely look in the mirror.
I turn the page.