undressed
content notes: 18+, and also, I’m fine, even though everyone seems to think I’m not, which is making me a little aggressive. Also I’m ovulating
“Well, I am dying,” I told my good friend, “but it’s a metaphor.” I thought about it. “Ego death,” I corrected myself.
She assured me no one cares. Uhh that was not true, and I had the DMs to prove it. People were, in fact, very worried, very caring. “Mortifying,” I whispered.
I was also mad. Like, I’m trying to be gracious about it—about people giving a shit—but I’m particularly sensitive to weaponized gratitude. On one person, I’d fucking snapped. (“I basically already live in a padded room,” I’d assured her the next day. But also, I’m surrounded by love. So knock it off with the “are you okay” stuff. The only reason I can have my long-delayed, very important menty-b is because I’m in the safest environment you could dream up. The straitjacket is implied. And imaginary. But I’m well on my way to achieving full health.)
People really want you to keep it together, to remain employable, to be so normal. What they’re asking you to do is to compartmentalize. And if you do that, you will die.
“Will you sit with me while I cry,” I asked my friend. She said okay. I asked her if she’d do a video call with me, or was the information that I was crying already enough. I didn’t wait for an answer and called her. My face appeared onscreen above hers, a little postage stamp, flushed and wet.
She warned me that this was the outcome of drinking all the sake. Yes, consequences, thank you very much.
“I was crying before that,” I said indignantly. I’d already been thinking about good, dead men, dying on their wedding days, dying after their honeymoons. I’d contemplated their wives. Since the house is empty right now, I’d run through it, a wailing banshee, singing the song of my people, which goes “huuuuuaaaaahhhhhhghgghh” and involves some key changes.
I told her about falling in love, an accident, unintended, illegal, and also, the sheer scope of my subsequent utter misery. My marriage was already ruined, already ending, that much was true. So of course I’d managed to find a way to make it a little messier. Why experience one tragedy when you could make it into two. It’s pragmatic, economical.
Weeks ago, I’d phoned a different friend, someone who has known me for many years. “I want to apologize to you,” I began. “I have been living a lie,” I said. Her instinct was to laugh, because I’m very obvious, I’ve fooled no one. Oh, no, I told her, no, this has actually been going on for decades, since the first time you pointed it out to me at least. What I’d loved most about my husband was his vaguest passing resemblance to somebody else. At this, my friend had gone sheet-white. Anyway, I hadn’t wanted to cop to it, ever, because it doesn’t look good. So I’d kept it a secret, had hidden it from everyone, “especially from myself,” I told her.
And I told him. Early on! Early on, I’d opened my mouth and admitted he was a placeholder for someone else! I told him, with my mouth, with my full chest! At the time I’d thought I was being romantic—isn’t it so interesting how I’ve been guided here, to you, to this present moment, all my life long—and opened my mouth and said, somehow, the absolute cruelest shit you could ever say to a person! “Isn’t this so romantic, how you remind me of someone else.” That is so incredibly shallow. I’m… horrible? Yes, I’m horrible. Oh my god I’m fucking horrible.
Then I’d waved hello to my friend’s daughter. “Look at this,” I’d said, and I’d rummaged around a drawer, had put on a plastic bracelet. The little girl had gasped.
“You still have it!” she said. She turned to her mom. “I made her that!” she exclaimed.
“It’s very important to me,” I said. As I said this, a bead just… flew off. I cringed and hoped the kid had been looking away.
Yesterday I tore open some plastic packaging, then realized I could’ve undone the twist-tie instead.
“I am no better than a man,” I said out loud, shaking my head. Then I contemplated it. Yep, still true, I realized. Just a blanket true statement, a generalization that was absolutely factual. I wrinkled my nose and left the pantry, pulling the door shut behind me, radiating self-loathing.
Have you ever felt like this before.
Nope! No.
Actually, honestly, yes, once, almost, at around half-intensity. You’re not gonna like this story very much.
We’d gone on a date. Now we were in his hotel, on the bed, and he was suddenly gripped with the paranoid thought, no, the absolute certainty, that I must do this all the time. In actuality, I’d done this zero times. So he strongarmed me into admitting there was someone else, wasn’t there. I was about to cheat on someone with him, wasn’t I. Who. Who. He wanted a name. Frantic, I searched for one. I guess I did have sex a little too recently, I admitted. Satisfied—content with my false confession—he ended the date.
The “someone else” didn’t only never call me back; he unwrote himself. He disappeared from the Internet. He might’ve even changed his name? He didn’t just ghost me; he, like, fully ghosted. Sometimes I hope to myself that he is, y’know, alive, because there is literally no evidence that he is. He’s like a fully fictional character I’d made up. I can’t even prove he’s real.
So I was told to give a name, I blurted this ungoogleable name of a ghost of a person, and the man, finally satisfied, got dressed in front of me. I was unmoored. There is absolutely something wrong with me, because I have only ever been hate-fucked. Every time I come close, so close, to getting regular-fucked, some ghost enters the room and whispers “this one’s insane—and a slut, probably” and my date looks at me wild-eyed like “did you just hear that?” and puts his pants back on.
Okay, now I went insane. I messaged him every day. “I’m not always drunk,” I tried to assure him.
“How would I know that,” he answered seriously. Fuck! He was right. I was a mess. Plus he was tired of hearing about my dead mom. I really know how to woo someone. Did I mention the time difference? I was drunk at all hours and he was in another country, which really illuminated the proportion of my pretty significant substance-abuse problem.
Right after my mom passed away, I went to stay, briefly, with a friend I’d known in high school.
She saw my grief. She decided to do something about it: She invited a friend over. She told me he was there to fuck me. Surprise!
“What the hell?” I said, grabbing my car keys. I was viscerally disgusted. “What is wrong with you,” I said to her. “Why would you think I’d want to sleep with a stranger? How does that help me?”
She called me a sex-hating, moralizing, evangelical prude. I told her to keep her ‘help’ far away from me. In fact, never ‘help’ me again.
“I am none of your fucking business,” I told her. She promised me, then, to never give a fuck about me, not even if I begged her.
“And if I’m ace?” I asked her then.
“You’re not asexual,” she said to me angrily.
“The fuck I’m not,” I told her. “What I am is none of your fucking business.”
It was terrific, terrific, because I still had to sleep there.
Anyway, I was over it, all of it. I got married. He’d pursued me like I was going out of style. It was beyond flattering. I surrendered. I loved being married—absolutely loved it—because I could not run away from him.
“How’s married life,” the aforementioned person asked me, now a full year after that other encounter, which was already too shameful to dwell on. And now he was asking me about my marriage, in public, at a party, which was truly excruciating of him. Maybe it was two years? Either way, I should be embarrassed, ashamed of the timestamps, ashamed of my own highly apparent inability to be alone, my instability. I’d been married about a month—a little longer if you backdated to the secret marriage, the paperwork.
I couldn’t look at him. I looked down and told him exactly how it was going. Fuck! With this person around, I’d go on and on, spiraling, spilling my guts like he wasn’t even there, forcing him to participate as my witness, to be the pages of my diary. Of course he hated me. Fuck! Someone in the world had taken one for the team, had married my messy dumb ass, and I couldn’t even pretend to be grateful about it. What an absolute bitch.
Sorry to this man. Sorry to do him like this, to cast him in a role in a sob story, when his justified instinct, the very correct impulse, was only to get away from me. Fellas, take notes! This one had the right idea.
So yes, I have felt this way before, which is to say, I have 100% become a man’s worst nightmare. And then I very, very willingly took myself off the market, for the good and safety of all. And to my spouse, sorry to this man. I loved him the best I knew how, which is not great news. I loved him like an immature, weird, spoiled, clinging, anxious, depressed, deranged person, and only when I wasn’t hiding in another room entirely. For a while I slept downstairs. Sorry to this man.
I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to be loved. But god, how I have been hated; I can make a full McMeal off hatred. It was… incredible. I was seen so clearly—every little thing about me, things that I didn’t even know were there, things I didn’t know you could hate about a person. I have been seen so completely, hated so intimately. It would almost inspire awe, if I could just stop throwing up.