On the bottom of my Writers Guild application, it said “Other Interests or Specialized Knowledge.” I put — “Men.”
This is gonna be one of those posts that I feel like I shouldn’t write. Which is what tells me I should. I’m a novelist. I push myself further, always. I go — there. I search the edges of my peripheral vision — what am I ignoring? What don’t I want to see? What am I blind to? This is my subject.
Men are my subject.
The subject of my life.
As much as I go on about women, about feminism, what’s important to us — I talk about women. I think about men.
What allows me to think this much about men is the disconnect I feel with most people. If I were connected to them, I wouldn’t have the mental energy to think about them so much.
I try stuff out — this is what keeps me flexible. I give myself permission to try stuff. To embarrass myself, to be wrong. To feel shame.
I started this post weeks ago.
I think about sex all day long.
But I’ve been burned, like a child on a hot stove. I think about it obsessively because I’m afraid of having it.
I live on an island. Men live on another island, where I can see them and long for them and never ever reach them.
I think of the relationships I’ve had. What they all had in common — distance. Even when I was with them, I could never reach them. They were estranged from me in every way –
These men spoke to me because they had what I craved — distance. The illusion of a relationship without the terror of closeness.
The only way I know how to be with a man is when he’s abandoning me. If he’s already leaving me, before I’ve even met him, that’s when I know I’m home.
I make eyes all day long. With men. I make eyes and think about sucking their dicks, think about the worst things — and then
I’m not interested in married guys or guys in relationships — they have to be near yet far. They have to seem like I can have them, like there is no impossible gulf between us. Attraction isn’t something you think about — it’s something you feel. I learned this game early.
Do they know, when we’re trading eyefucks, how little this has to do with them and how much it has to do with my life? Do they know this is my life — that I was robbed, and now I spend my days making eyes at strangers instead of being loved?
I want to be loved, and I don’t know how.
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