I’m only beautiful when I’m lonely / I’ll be unbeautiful when you unlonely me
It's raining in October in Mexico City and my vibrator is out of battery. My boyfriend is on another continent for a work trip and I wear my biggest silver hoops and pluck sushi rolls from the box in my lap and think about god and drink cheap red and listen to Chappell Roan and picture her straddling me topless,
respectfully.
And I’ve been trying my hair up and bending in half and donning fish nets like I invented sin and calling the movies “the cinema” and looking both ways before a new DM and doing the dishes like that counts as some kind of breakthrough and giving unforgettable head and begging for extra shifts at a job I despise and worrying about my dogs who’ve been trying to kill each other since my ex left and moved back to Vietnam where we met teaching English even though he could’ve moved back to South Carolina with his decent mom and asshole dad but he didn’t want to because his dad is that much of an asshole and his older brother died last year suddenly leaving behind 2 kids so obviously that’s too sad and I get that—being sad and avoiding things that might make you even sadder, even if there’s a good chance those same things could save you.
(Earlier when I was going on about rain and lust I thought this would be about recovering from codependency (I even had a series planned for you—confessions of a recovering codependent) but now I feel sick of recovery. (God/algorithm, can I have this one thing? This uncool crutch? Hear me out—I can’t afford to be long-term-lonely in this economy.))
With my boyfriend in X eating Xian food, my hair gets thicker and my tits get softer. I cannot keep my hands off myself. I do not draw the blinds.
After
orgasms
like falling
ripe fruit,
I wipe the dust off my journals. I line up every old lover and interrogate without mercy: Who loved me best? Who did I adequately ruin? My chart says I like to stick with a relationship on principle which is another way of saying I like to beat a dead horse. And I won’t deny it—it's insane and brimming with purpose, returning, again again, to the impossible with brute force.
With my boyfriend out of sight/out of service, I blossom out of my sweatpants and into the armchair—
Have you always looked for the opposite of your father in the people you fuck?
Who are you when no one else is around?
Do you love yourself or are you waiting for someone to do that for you?
I’ve loved in every way you shouldn’t. I think of my ex with a small copy of Kierkegaard in his big hands. He’s a mythical faun, half-man/half-goat—beautiful and magical and incapable of surviving modernity. Clunking through crosswalks. Falling in love with iphones. Misplacing all his nymphs at The Dollar Store.
No wonder I stayed so long; I was the most lonely I’ve ever been, pretty and frozen like a china doll.
xo
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*The title of this essay is the opening lines of one of my series poems, “It’s Not Confessional Poetry if I’m Never Honest”.
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