Do you hate me because I was the other woman?

I was desperate to be touched

Drooling over Glen Powell movies, I’m reminded of a guy I used to fuck who looks like him. Charming, arrogant, and just as fucked up as me. When I was with him, everything was fine. Were we acting? Maybe. Sure. Yes. But aren’t we always? It was good. We knew our parts. We were hungry. I wanted to be told what to do. I wanted to be told I was pretty. I wanted to be wanted for my body. I wanted to be taken. Touched. I wanted to be intimate/but not. He wanted someone to want the worst of him/and pretend she didn’t know any better. I was exhausted. It made sense.

He was dating a pageant queen. You know, dating, like publicly. Like everyone knew about her/nobody knew about me, except that we were “business partners.” An effective front. I still don’t know who came first - me or her - but the whole time, I knew what was happening. Not that he told me, but that I pieced it together immediately.

Her name was spelled funny, with far more vowels than necessary. She had red hair too, perfectly straight, and she wore perfect makeup and perfect outfits and did perfect charity work. I lived in a tiny bedroom with a king size bed that took up the entire floor leaving a sliver of space for my yoga mat and a clothing rack. Fairy lights were strung up everywhere and bottles of whiskey and too many candles danced on my built-in bookshelves. I had all new lingerie and I thought it was the most perfect dream I’d ever been in.

I felt confused for them. His fancy apartment was antiseptic, but there was a pool table I sometimes sat on in a trying to be sexy sort of way. Could she sense that I had been there? I guess it helped that our hair was the same color.

Sometimes he texted me drunk or high in the middle of the night wanting me to come fuck them, though judging by the photos he sent, she was always on the verge of passing out. I just wanted to keep up our charade. Pour some far too expensive scotch, pretend to work for 45 minutes, rip each others’ clothes off.

The scotch warmed me prematurely. Softened me for this man who I wanted to be too good for, and who I wanted anyway. The scotch let me be the woman I was ashamed of being. Desperate.

One day he took us (me and the beauty queen) to lunch together and acted like it was normal. I did nothing. She didn’t bat a mile long eyelash. Was she buying the business partners story?

On our first date, we met in a trying to be romantic, dimly lit restaurant with too many people and not enough space. When I went to sit down, he quickly spun me around to the opposite side of the table in an attempt, I’m sure, to hide me from someone he knew. Maybe she did come first.

It was strange — surreal to watch myself not care about the deception. But I guess I didn’t. Or couldn’t. Probably I still couldn’t feel anything then. It was just months since I’d become a runaway bride. I still half owned the house I’d convinced myself might distract me from my anguish.

There was no love in that house.

Now I was in the liminal space. Untethered. Wanting to be rescued. Wanting to know something. Anything. Wanting a happy ending. Wanting to be comfortable. Wanting to feel alive. Wanting independence. Wanting to be chosen.

I’d never been chosen. Not all the way. Not I can’t live without you I want everything about you chosen. I’d been taken as property. It’s not the same.

Though he married the beauty queen, I think he chose me in a purer sense — fucked as all get out.

•••

In high school, all the guys wanted to mindfuck me. As in, penetrate my mind. They wanted to know me, but they didn’t dare. That would be too risky. And so, as horny teenage boys do, they chose to finger bang me instead. And tell all their friends about it. And pass me around like the {{ sacred woman }} whore I always have been. I was convinced I wanted one of them to be my boyfriend. I asked guys to date me, but they always said no. Maybe they knew. Maybe they could hear it in my voice, in the hours spent talking on the phone. Maybe my openness gave it away: I was the one who wanted to be ripped apart, tormented — that was my role, and I played it expertly.

It’s not like I wanted any of those boys. I wanted a man. I wanted my english teacher, actually. I wanted to be touched, with wisdom, with hands that felt, with eyes that pierced through the veil. I wanted to be known. Nobody told me I could know myself, touch myself. Didn’t learn that till much later. Can you imagine the tragedy that could’ve been avoided had I just known my power was in my breath, and between my legs, and that I was the one who could access it best?

Though honestly, I wouldn’t have learned even a billionth of what I know now, had it not been for my love crazed madness. Or my lust.

Sometimes I do trust lust completely.

The thing about me is, I want the love story, you know, the one with prince charming and happily ever after. I also want to be alone. Often. I want to be fucked like a slut and cradled like the tenderest new bud. I want to be a good girl. The best. Perfect. And I want to bring you to your knees in terror. I want to be human, and I want to be the goddess so bright you can’t gaze upon her with mortal eyes. I want to be all of it. I want to be known in all of it.

•••

Here, I’ve broken it down, all of it, I mean. It’s all permutations of the same basic things:

In love —— in anguish,
in the throes of passion,
tortured by tension.
good girl
bad girl.
In the liminal spaciousness,
expanding.

These are the primary axes of being. At least, in my world they are. If tension, then release. If yang, then yin. If love, then hate. It all works out. I get bored eventually.

For days, weeks, months even… I am ecstatic. I am lovergirl or cosmic slut or devil bitch or total fucking mess. And then… something shifts. It’s like being tired, but not. The energy is still roaring but it doesn’t want to be in that shape anymore. It’s to hell with the world you’ve made. It wants to be something else. So something has to change.

•••

At the end of Hit Man, Glen Powell says “seize the identity you want for yourself. And whoever you wanna be… be them with passion and abandon.”

I don’t know “who I am,” — it’s not a static thing, a statue that can be seized — but if I focus, I can feel it, and only then do I know anything.

I know I am passionate, sometimes reckless, and I abandon logic more often than not. I know I want violently, I know there is no plan B, and I know that my capacity for wanting is always shifting, always expanding, even when it seems to be contracting or stagnating. I know that desire, more than abstract titles, composes identity.

And I know a surefire way to get “there,” which is really to say, “here,” to the center of things, is to notice all the holier than thou bullshit getting in the way of pure, honest, selfish heat. There’s a time for altruism, and it’s not always.

Maybe I’m playing catch up for the younger years many spend “finding themselves;” now I have the advantage of a bit more wisdom than I would’ve at 18.

The truth is, I am demanding. And messy. And too clever for my own good. I am always going to want more from you/for you/for us. And I might say I worry that I am too much, but really? It’s just a story I don’t believe anymore. I love being too much. I could never be less. I will always be more.

There is more, and more, and more where this came from.

Become a paid subscriber for access to the full archive of mysteriously delicious poems and essays + Feed the Muse, a weekly transmission support your deep dive into the dark matter of your erotic, creative self.