Post Love Forty Four
There was a certain ease with which Esther drifted in and out of my life. It was so because I let her. There was no resistance from my end. I was hopelessly in love with her. I couldn’t reject her. I fell for it again a few weeks after the last time I saw her. She happened to reply to a message one night. She said she’d just gotten off the phone with her ex. We started talking about relationships, break-ups, all of the complicated, pathetic mess we’d created for ourselves. Esther said we should get drunk together and spill our guts. I wasn’t sure wether that was great news or horrible news. Get drunk together? Great. Spill our guts… about what? That could go anywhere. Regardless, I was to call her around midnight the next night.
I didn’t have to. She walked into the bar where I was drinking around eleven. She came in and walked right past me and my table of friends. Was that Esther? someone asked. She saw us on her way back, and walked over. I told her to sit. It only took a second of formal chatting until I got it. She’d been drunk the night before. She didn’t seem to remember anything about our proposed drinking and spilling of guts. A few minutes later she got up to talk to some other people standing at the bar. And that was it.
With this new filter on the light that shines down upon me, I got up and walked to the bar too. Not for her. For my true love. A shot of whiskey and a pint of beer. Oh, she said, this is my friend Sally. I looked over to the black girl standing across from her. Polite handshakes followed, and Sally’s eyes fucked mine until they turned back to Esther. Her voice had a lower, more private pitch now. She didn’t know who you were.
It’s funny how a person can form a sentence with six simple words and manage to communicate an arsenal of complicated thought, cruel emotion, a message that a million more words could never satisfy. Human communication is a masterpiece of evasion, of code, of fear and cowardice. It’s not Esthers fault. She could have never looked me in the eye and told me the truth. She couldn’t have said “I know I wanted to get drunk with you last night, but that’s only because I was drunk, and I only like you when I’m drunk, and that’s only if you remind me of your existence. I am a gorgeous woman, have always been a gorgeous woman, and have never had to pay attention to anyone or anything. Men throw themselves at me constantly. You have sat and watched them do it. You have fought them with your words, you have sat at a table with me and another man, both taking turns talking to me, two completely different conversations, like two chess players and me the game, the board, the pieces, the reason. I live in a fortress of unavailability and rejection, a second skin, a layer of protection against men trying to get me. The only men that ever get through to me are assholes. Psychotic, compulsive machines that never stop. They don’t feel anything. They don’t feel rejection, they don’t feel love, they feel blood rush into their cocks and keep trying, keep smashing into the walls until they’re in. They know how to act. They know what to say. They know what not to say. They don’t say aw, thank you when I tell them I like them. They fuck me. When you lunge for me I move out of the way and push you into another girl. I panic when you remind me that you like me. It annoys me. You could wonder wether I think little of you, and tried to set you up with some random girl with nothing interesting about her because that’s who I think you should go for, or, that I think highly of you, see your loneliness, and introduced you to a girl that is very interested in you, because I want you to be happy. Or, maybe I don’t really give a shit about anything, maybe that girl just happened to ask me about you and you just happened to get up and walk over. That’s my power, you see. The fact that you wonder. I make you wonder because I never let you know what I’m thinking, how I’m feeling behind the wall. That’s the addiction. I keep you at bay. I give you just enough to stay on the line, but never enough. And I repeat that, over and over, and it never goes anywhere. I am the eternal handjob. I am the dry skin palm stroking up and down in your mind, mental masturbator, good enough to keep you hard but too lousy and careless to ever make you cum. You are the postponed orgasm, you are the cock that never cums, you are the failure, you are frustration, you will never fuck me.
The men that get to fuck me know I’m not that good in bed. I don’t have to be. I’m beautiful. I’m the object of desire, a cold statue, a blow up doll that never blows up. It doesn’t matter. I know you want to be them. I know you want to be the guy that gets the girl. I know you want to keep trying to get me. You will never catch up. You started a decade late. You’re old. There are boys half your age with twice your game. Yes, game. You gave up the good life, the wholesome married man facade, and you tried to start over. You missed your youth, had a mid life crisis before thirty and decided to become someone else. You’re halfway there, pal, and you’re too fucking old to make it all the way. Now you’re half a man, half a husband and half a player, never anyone whole. You’re two emotional midgets fucking each other. You’re a schizo looking for pussy and love, love and pussy, lots of it, at the same time, but always separate, you’ll never win. You’ll keep trying and trying and hurting, because you’re not a machine and you never will be. You will carry your emotions into all of this, you will hurt, and you will not recover. You cannot compete. Stick with other peoples’ drunk girlfriends. Stick with eighteen yearolds. You can’t get a good girl. You’re a loser”.
And that’s what I read in her six word sentence, like a rorshach test making it blatantly obvious where my issues lie. All within my own mind I come up with fictional conversations so I can reply with some pathetic, high and mighty answer, like “You know what, Esther? You fucked it up. Not me. You had a chance with me. You know you like me, deep down somewhere. And I like you too. But you fucked it up. You made a move before you told me about him. Fuck it. It’s too complicated, Esther. Go work out the mess, go fuck more scumbags, maybe I’ll see you down the line some time. Maybe I’ll still be single. Maybe you’ll get it then”. But that’s not true. It wasn’t her. It was me. I fucked it up.
