A March of Marys, day twenty-one
One is always cheap and greasy, processed like hot dogs, but you know he’ll love you forever like a pet if you keep rewarding him.
Today is Day 21 of A March of Marys, a literary experience where I share a sequential chunk of American Mary, my first novel, right here online every day throughout the month of March (and April, I guess, until I run out of novel to share).
I did a really long preamble for the last post, so I’ll keep this one short. I want to share a link to this Substack article by
who writes about people and their relationship with media, especially the internet. This idea here, as well as the quoted passage from Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen speaks a lot to the chapter I’m sharing today from American Mary.One of my more esoteric beliefs about Internet usage is that we’ve picked up a sort of sixth sense for “vibes” within text. Sometimes, we’re projecting something onto text that’s not there.
The article made me want to do some actual research and reading about online relationships, because I write about them a lot. It gave me a lot to think about. Check it out.
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It kinda sucks when you realize you’re living in a Lorrie Moore story. Like, it's kinda shitty when almost everyone wants to fuck you.
I’m not even talking about sex, really.
There are always at least two boys. Two different types. Lurking and waiting and wanting. And you like that they want you, but it’s not really what you want. But like, what else do you have going on? It’s nice to have people to go to parties with and you don’t really need or want the responsibility of maintaining a connection with another person, but you get lonely or bored and slip up sometimes. It’s easier to know things if someone else is witnessing.
And it seems gratifying to be desired and obsessed over. Sometimes in your head you’re being lifted above crowds, carried down the sidewalk so that you can get an almond milk latte with an added shot like you’re the VIP of this coffee shop and everywhere else. But in real life, it’s totally unsatisfying to be worshipped, like feeding a sinkhole. Like you will never be satiated. Like I want you to want me, but more than that, I want me to want you.
And it's upsetting because you feel greedy and unethical and think you have to choose at some point, make any kind of decision but also probably not. And you like catering to someone else’s need and filling someone else’s void, but you can’t let anyone have everything. So you let separate ideas roll around in your head, bowling pins spinning and clunking and it’s all completely pointless because they're all really bad for you in their own special ways and you know it, but you don’t really care about it until it becomes a problem.
One is always cheap and greasy, processed like hot dogs, but you know he’ll love you forever like a pet if you keep rewarding him. There’s a lot like that one. It’s a steady type. Modern archetypes of everything fast and easy. They are always around, this porkroll type, and though they’re predictable, you don’t really know what to do with them. You keep them around because you love to entertain and be pleasing, but it’s not what you really want.
It’s the other one. It’s always the other one. The other one is always in love with someone else, but enjoys your body violently and excites you most because he only responds sometimes. He’s over-the-counter drugs. He’s blacking out and getting a motel room with you, throwing you down onto a carpet that hasn’t been vacuumed in months, maybe years. He’s getting what he wants out of you and then leaving you to sit on a string until it hurts too much. Until you decide to get up and walk away for good. Or until the next time he calls.
They’re both going to kill you. And probably just as quickly.
*
I might be having an affair, is what I told my friend.
Claudia and I met up early on a Sunday to go to a Charles Dickens Christmas fair and look at Victorian jewelry reproductions and eat overpriced holiday themed food heavy with vegetable shortening. Among the crowds of parents trying to make memories with their bored children and fancy dress adults decked out in their finest top hats and velvet gowns we looked somewhat out of place, but we made the best of it and took photos and bought trinkets for ourselves, and all throughout the day I kept checking my phone to read new text messages from you and reply back.
I told Claudia about the possibility of the affair while we were sitting at a picnic table inside the fair eating roast beef and pasties. Claudia wanted to see what you looked like, so I showed her the photos I have on my phone and she was not impressed.
‘You can do so much better,’ she said.
‘This is what I do. He is like my type.’
‘There’s no reason you only need to date losers,’ she said.
‘We have things in common. We like talking to each other. And I guess I could date a guy with a job. Like that startup guy was feelin me last night, remember, but I’m just like no.’
‘Yeah. But he isn’t the only one.’
‘No, but that type has never excited me. Like, oh you make money, no thanks. But also, I just need to get this out of my system.’
‘Just fuck someone else.’
‘It’s not even about that really. That’s just the mechanics of it.’
*
Tracing words in the air, keeping them for an invisible book I'll get to read when I'm dead. Counting letters in words, every word you see and hear. We did these things as kids. Recording words for later. Things only we care about.
We tell each other these things in emails. And because we’re both sentimental we make up fantasies about it, the way we tell each other these things.
We know these are secrets. We say they are. We say we feel strongly about things. You say, I feel strongly about you. I say, I feel strongly about you. We say these things in emails or text messages only. I still imagine what your hands feel and look like.
I still trace words in an invisible book directly underneath wherever my right index finger is. I’m still writing letters to you in my head.
*
Claudia and I are with our friend who is on a drug and talking about the Queen of England. We are in Jack London Square at a nearly empty bar drinking shirley temples and listening to psychedelic rock, but we came because they have a DJ and we wanted to dance. We were at a birthday party for an older poet who fed us pierogi and rugelach and shared her joints and told me it wasn’t an affair if he wasn’t married and wanted to know why I kept calling it an affair. As the three of us left the older poet’s house, I kept thinking about the weird conversation you and I had a few nights before when I couldn’t sleep at my mom and dad’s house and you said you weren’t feeling guilty anymore and I said I wasn’t either and we told each other so many things and I said so many things I’ve never told anyone, like explaining why I think I do things like I can never talk to anyone about that type of thing unless I’m paying them and even still, I don’t really want to tell them anything like I know that they don’t really get it, but I know that you do. And we both want bad things. And I said I want you to use my body and treat me like a princess. And you said I'll treat you like a queen. And I said you have to delete this conversation. And you said, I will but it makes me sad.
It's been 3 years of email. You never met me at the lake.
*
I left work early that day. You had emailed me two days before and said, ‘Let’s really meet’ and I said, ‘Really’ and you said ‘Yes, really.’ So we set it up, date and time and everything. I got ready to meet you. I left work early and went home and took a shower. Then I put on a dress and got some of my books together and took the train to the bookstore where I dropped them off for consignment and talked to the bookstore owner for a little while, but I felt self-conscious and weird in my small dress. Too sexy for daytime. It was a sundress, short and cut loose, cinched at the waist with stringy straps and a cut-out back and a few strings intersecting on the back to form a pattern. Underneath I was wearing a black lacy halter lingerie piece I bought online to wear to impress some other boy on a weekend getaway a few months back. For modesty, I was also wearing a cardigan, but it was a warm day. When I looked down and noticed the one of the straps slipping off I said goodbye to the bookstore owner and walked down 13th street toward Lake Merritt.
On the way I passed some hole in the wall donut shop and decided to stop in and got a cup of coffee and a half dozen donuts. Mostly old fashioned, some chocolate frosted. I made my way to the spot you told me to go to, across the street from the stairs, and found a place under a tree to sit down. The grass was damp and I sat on my bag, knees bent and folded under me. I looked around for you and pulled a book out of my bag to look busy and not desperate because I was fifteen minutes early. I want to say it was A Streetcar Named Desire because that feels fitting for this scenario, but I know I had read that when the weather was colder. It fucked me up. The book I pulled out on this day was probably some funny nonfiction book, some literary theory or something. Yeah, that sounds about right. I sat and read and ate two donuts and smoked four cigarettes and I looked around a lot and after about an hour, I sent you a message and said, ‘I’m here at the lake, are you here.’ I smoked another cigarette and decided to walk around and see if I could find you, scrolling through photos you’d sent me for reference, and there was someone in the general area with a skateboard, but it wasn’t you. I walked around for a bit more, but the sun was starting to set and the wind was picking up and I only had that dumb cardigan so I sent you another message, ‘I waited an hour and it’s getting cold and windy and I’m wearing a sundress.’ I walked around some more and stopped and got another coffee and got a message from you that said, ‘Sorry I was with my brother, but I wish I had seen your ass in that dress.’
I looked up walking directions to another bookstore and walked there to drop off more books. I threw the rest of the donuts away.
*
I don't want to be touched, I want to be understood. I don't want sex, I want to trade my capital for what I feel like I need. I want to transaction validity, make the truth a pay-as-you-go system.
I want to feel like I am here with anyone as long as they take me seriously. I don't want to be questioned, I do enough of that. I don't want to be a joke. I don't want to be something that gets passed over. I want discomfort and I want hurt and I don’t want to be repulsed by you.
I want so many people looking at me and accepting my existence. I want to know they’re watching.
*
I guess we're not having an affair because you're going to rehab. And too many of my friends said it would be a bad idea whenever I brought you up.
Unlike me, you have something to lose. Or you think that you do, even if you don’t believe it or want to admit it. Or you don't want to kill it because you like what it is, even if killing it means something else will be created. This is easier for you. You need the separation from me. You need me to not be real. You need me to be something you only connect with when you look at your phone. You need me to be the thing you’ve made up about me in your mind and not all the broken pits and and shards that I’m constantly trying to reglue to myself. All the ugly parts about me, all the inconvenience. You don’t want those parts.
I still feel guilty.
I once sent you a message and said, ‘do you think we built it up too much.’ And you wrote back, ‘kinda, yeah’.
I told my sister about you after the night I stayed up until 6 am texting you and she said you were probably catfishing me and later I told you ‘my sister thinks you’re catfishing me’ in a text message and you said you had to look up ‘Catfish’ on Urban Dictionary. And then you said, ‘that’s not what I’m doing.’ But you are getting something I’m not. You’re getting more.
Or maybe you aren’t.
It’s still too much, too idealized. How can anyone believe a dream.
I once told you I was sleeping in Seba’s bed and had a dream where I was screaming and trying so hard to scream, but no sound came out. I remembered it when I woke up to get ready for work in the morning and Seba told me he woke up because he heard me making a weird noise, low throaty squeals. I told you that was the worst part.
You said you had a dream about me, you said I was glowing and hot to the touch and that we talked, but you couldn’t remember what we talked about and I didn’t know what else to ask.
I make myself ask things now when you tell me things because I want to know. And I don’t care that you know I care.
I don’t know what else to do but this. And maybe it is the only way.
You will always be there. A general you, an idealized you, a theoretical you, a specific you. You have always been there and you always will.
I told you to send me an address so I can write to you in rehab. You said you would, but then you didn’t.
You told me you were Catholic. You told me you were Jewish. You told me you were Irish and Mexican and Ohlone. You told me you were a liar, so maybe you’re not really going to rehab.
I told you I would give you space, but I did text you to see if you were okay when you posted something on Instagram and the location tagged was a cheap motel on MacArthur Boulevard. You said you were fine, you were at your brother’s house and he lives next to the motel.
*
You keep liking my Instagram posts. I’m leaving you alone.
Missed the last post? Read it here.