“I am doll eyes
Doll mouth, doll legs
I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait
Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, they really do
Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, but I do too
I want to be the girl with the most cake
I love him so much it just turns to hate
I fake it so real, I am beyond fake
And someday, you will ache like I ache
Someday, you will ache like I ache”Hole, Doll Parts
The first time I remember someone touching me, I was six. The first time I think it actually happened, I was four, but there’s no clear memories outside of a bathtub and a boy and a man.
By eight, boys and girls wanted to play doctor with me, humping my leg with little kid fascination and clumsiness, while they looked everywhere but my face. At 12, when the first man asked me if he could touch me if he made it worth my while, I knew the secret: sex is power.
There’s no way to make someone more more feta-like in your hands than to offer yourself, while remaining completely unavailable.
He said, “But, baby, wait. I love you.” I said, “No, you don’t. You love what I do to you. You have a problem, and it’s me. Good bye.”
I never let Spencer even get his metaphoric foot in the door. There was no kisses, no heavy petting or hands slipped into jeans with annoyingly restricting waists. He had a girlfriend for most of the time I knew him. They did that stuff, he didn’t need me for it, regardless of whether he thought he did or not. But Spencer, almost instantaneously was taken with the game that I played with words and eyebrow raises. The promise of nothing, which made it seem like I was using reverse psychology. That when I said no, never, I meant I can’t wait, soon.
“I know you’re just nervous. But you know I would never hurt you. I just want to love you. To get married and have kids and grow old with you.”
That’s what he said after knowing me for a few weeks. We weren’t even half way through high school. I was never going to marry him. He was too…everything and not enough for me.
“I know you’ll just think I’m saying this because I’m drunk, but I’m falling in love with you.” On our third date, if the word date can be used to express drinking in a pub when we weren’t steaming up the windows of his bedroom.
“I love you. I know you don’t think that I do, you don’t think anyone does, that they’re all going to leave, but I do. I love you. I want to be with you forever.” That was the one that I almost married.
All of them. Every single one, I responded. “I love {that} you {love me}, too.”
Only once have I ever said words like that, without a lead-in of their own: “I have to leave. I love you, you know. It’s why I have to leave.” That wasn’t true, but this was a really good, perfectly unflawed man. One that I wished would want to have nothing to do with me. I didn’t want to stab into him with my emotionless barbs, you see? I saved him, maybe a little, by telling him I loved him and scaring him. There’s no better way to drive a man away than to show him your craziness and follow it with I love you.
Lies, all lies. Have I ever been in love? Doubtful.
Have I fallen head over heels with the rush of someone being in love with me? Often.
“You say you don’t spook easy, you won’t go, but I know
And I pray that you will
fast as you can, baby, run, free yourself of me
Fast as you can
I may be soft in your palm but I’ll soon grow
Hungry for a fight, and I will not let you win
My pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will
Disprove your faith in man
So if you catch me trying to find my way into your
Heart from under your skin
Fast as you can, baby, scratch me out, free yourself.”Fiona Apple, Fast As You Can
“Anytime. More. Again.” That’s what one says, still. “I just love being with you.”
“I don’t know why, I know that I never should again, but I can’t stay away from you.” That’s another.
“Yeah, I know it doesn’t mean we’re back together. But you know…we were always good together. Except when we weren’t.” One more.
There’s more. If you look through my history and my present, it’s filled with boys and girls and men and women who wanted to know me in some way or another. There was a level of intoxication, even when drugs and drink weren’t there. It’s still there for most of them. I learned early that there’s no better way to make someone fight to keep you than to never be theirs to lose.
Maybe it was a pheromone I gave off from preschool-age, a musk of calculated doability. Before I even knew I had an opinion, I wasn’t victimized when that casting agent sat on the sofa and asked me to touch him. I refused, but it wasn’t because I was incensed. It was because I didn’t feel like it – it wasn’t worth anything to me. I already knew he wanted it – those pants weren’t concealing anything, but I wasn’t going to gain anything from having him in my literal or metaphorical grasp. That was the next man, though, he had drugs, for a price. I quit those, after that.
Sex has, for most of, and before, my sex life started, been about ownership. About amassing control over the other person. Whether that was the power to inure them to me, to make their thighs feel like jelly, or cause them to contemplate what I could be doing to them, instead of some one else. I threw away phone numbers. I called exes. I was and usually have always been the instigator. I’ve said, “I could ____________, but it wouldn’t mean anything.”
I’ve been blunt and unavailable, ruthless and cowardly. It’s worked for me.
The boy that I lost my virginity to didn’t want to sleep with me. He didn’t feel ready, when I questioned him with a tear in my eye – as if I was wounded at the prospect of him not wanting me. A week later, he was ready, but I wouldn’t give it up. And he was in love. And I was… not. But did enjoy that he wanted me.
I’ve never said I haven’t been a cunt.
I have to stop this.
I don’t even try to do it: he says that he thinks it’s a bad idea to spend time with me and before I’ve blinked, manipulation that seems as though it’s merely pure and supportive is coming from my tongue. I don’t mean to be deceiving, but the words that come tumbling out are designed organically to flip a switch in his mind, so that he thinks it’s all okay.
It’s the equivalent of rocking him, running my hands through his hair after a nightmare. Except that I am the nightmare and I’m clawing his back, drawing blood, as we rock together.
I know he can’t keep doing this. I know every time it costs him: self-respect, pride, possibility. I know that everytime wounds him a little deeper and makes it harder for him to not move on. The fact that I can (and have before) moved on, and he never has is testimony to this – that he keeps ending up again and again in my arms, with his head on my shoulder and crying in his own way (which doesn’t actually resemble crying, but it’s the best he can do).
This weekend, I saw something psychopathic about myself in my separation between what society tells me is the moral way to deal with a man saying “this is kind of fucking me up” and my own. Instead of that normal response, I played whimsically confused, asking why? over and over until he didn’t even understand his initial argument.
I said, “I’m not going to try to talk you into anything. God knows, I don’t want to pressure you. I just think…this is working. If it’s not broken, why would you try to fix it?”
Then he stayed, and we both got what we wanted.
Today. I sat in a piping hot bathtub, sweating out my sins. I never felt clean, even after two hours. Now, I’m left with the knowledge that I’m more predator than willing victim – even though I’d had a hunch, before, I had never confirmed it so clearly – and the acid hasn’t stopped boiling over in my stomach.
Why do I feel sick and dirty and wretched? It’s not because I feel bad for him or what I have done to him. That would be far too predictable and not me, at all.
I feel those things because I don’t feel those things about what I’ve done to him. I don’t know when or how I became quite so unfeeling, considering that there are loves in my life that I’ve cried a million tears for, women whose daily frustrations can bring me to my poetic knees. It’s abnormal for me to not give a shit.
It’s wrong, but I don’t care.
I know that I don’t want him; one day, I want to want someone in a manner that isn’t about ownership and worship. I have to quit. I have to cut it off. I have to stop fucking (with) him. I don’t know how to stop myself, when he’s so easy to break.
God, how I’ve broken this man.
