By Lenna Suminski
In the escape of answering the what-am-Is that dawned on me and dauntingly demanded, over an extra-dirty, extra-wet gin martini, I gave the perfect answer that I would oh-so-love to be the love interest. This response satisfies, excites, and disarms whichever man it is that is threatening me with a good time and a ring to follow. It is true, though perhaps cowardly. Determinism has governed my life since before my conception. The consummation of my idealisation appeared in the fantastical imagination of my father’s head. His first and only novel was written in a language I don’t understand but is his mother and mother’s tongue–one that he refused to teach me. We have that in common, cool terrains that are our own and solely our own.
The love interest in his book, one that that 2000s blog posts describe as erotic, erotically dark, erotically masculine, erotically romantic.
I often feel as though I had no choice but to become her. But I can never know her. I cannot read it. He will never let me know her.
I was never meant to be a scathing self-empowered person. My gift of performance and beauty and witty intelligence is far too polished to give autonomy any space.
Every time I fall in love it begins tragically. The only time I have ever been honest was with someone that really did not deserve my confessions:
I can only be imagined. I can’t exist without other people.
Why?
I don’t know.
We were staring at each other and he had the look that men get when they smell a woman’s vulnerabilities. Sense and Sensibility are what they hate. I imagine his mouth watering at the same time my eyes did. I must have been insatiable. I started to cry and went to my kitchen to make Lady Earl Grey tea from a dashing silver can. He followed me and tried to fuck me on the counter. I let him. I cried and smelled the rose petals in the tea leaves. I didn’t cum, I never do.
I stopped seeing him because I was too much of a lady and frankly my disgust for him overrode just how much I needed his attention, his obsession. I was the best thing he could ever call his own and we both knew it. And I didn’t let him. I stopped falling in love with him when I had to pay for his oysters at a restaurant he thought to be fancy and he ordered two more spritz after I said I would pay. Talk of money and any anxiety always freaked me out. I don’t like to be aware of it. The fact that he didn’t know how many shells to order revolted me. Men that try to impress without the allocations and importance birthed into them made me nauseatingly abhorrent. I found him embarrassing. Some revolutionary that was being taken out to dinner by a woman he saw as an archetypal aristocrat.
He didn’t know how to eat oysters and he never bought hard-cover books. He farted in my bed and I couldn’t take it anymore. It felt like the most apt violation a man could do to me. I told him to get the fuck out of my house. He slept with someone much uglier than me the next night. I felt pity.
And then I felt sad. No matter how much I dislike a man, they will always make me hate myself more.
I write it in a letter that he would never have the privilege of receiving:
When I see you again, I will greet you with warmth and loveliness. And I will look gorgeous and feminine and ephemeral. You always liked the fleeting nature of my essence. Though you always did correct me like a child when I would misidentify a philosophical essence.
I resent the way you’ve reduced me of all my complexities, I used to be able to feel so much more in all the possible worlds and now all I have is resentment. My inside writhe when I think of how you will package and deliver me to a group of self-proclaimed individuals as one of your stories that will reconfirm your eccentricities. At one of your dinner parties, like the last wine and cheese night you invited me to, where the flute players outnumbered those who actually know you, or like you. You confuse admirers for friends. And you confuse the wise with the loud. You confused me as everything else and as God and as a virgin and the whore. I am really none of those. I am really just a woman with a past and present and sometimes I am not even that, merely a person that hopes to have a future as well.
It is like you’ve stolen me away, to be an anecdote. And it feels like rape though it isn’t, like you’ve taken my insides and my innocence and left me to rot.
And then I am reborn again and again, euphorically leaping from the heads of Zeus’ except every man wants to have the taste of creation, if only for the sake of squashing that very life anyways. So I am born again and again for you to take me on.
I can only be imagined. I can’t exist without other people.
Why?
I don’t know…Wanna go for another round?
Featured Image: Saint Peter at The Grand National Hotel