Well, I was clearly more into that than you were: a love story.
I think it’s time for you to drop back into my life, ruin it, then disappear again: a love story.
The best part of fucking you in that bathroom at the Rivington Hotel was when I went to Sephora first and did my makeup using all their testers for free, especially the Yves Saint Laurent lip lacquer. P.S. When you said, Let’s fuck at the Rivington Hotel, I thought you meant you were getting an actual room: a love story.
I’m sorry that when you asked what you could do to help me have an orgasm I said leave the room: a love story.
Sometimes when I need to comfort myself (all the time) I think about your lisp and it creates a wombskin around my brain full of barbituratesque nectar, the side effects of which include a horny surge in my second chakra and pussy, and then severe withdrawal: a love story.
The man just wanted to put his dick in things and the woman wanted her pussy to be perfect: a love story.
I only had sex with you to get you to stop talking about your art: a love story.
Wish I had a dick too: a love story.
I never really liked you but everyone else was worse: a love story.
Secretly it hurt my feelings when you were outed as a sexual predator, because for me you couldn’t even get it up: a love story.
I’ve been on your FB page for five hours today: a love story.
Imagining that you are going to come back to me is my favorite way to spend the day: a love story.
I still can’t believe that someone as hot as you has validation issues but I also know that being a very sensitive person on this planet is painful and some of us are built like sieves, or have holes where any external validation just pours right through and we never get full, and I also know it’s ultimately an inside job anyway and no amount of external validation will ever be enough (though damn it can feel good in the moment, and it sort of makes me mad at god, actually, like, okay god, you built me like this so teach me how to validate myself in a way that feels as good as when a boy does it or the Internet does it, because there is always a cost when a boy does it or when the Internet does it): a love story.
Yeah, all my orgasms were fake: a love story.
We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together in my head: a love story.
When I send nudes I like to receive a full dissertation on their greatness: a love story.
Remember when I yelled out I just want to eat pussy! in your car and you said I might actually be a real lesbian and then I ate your pussy better than a real lesbian but was still only bisexual: a love story.
I pretended you were this blond girl named Kirsten every time we had sex for two years: a love story.
I don’t want to get off the Internet or consider anyone else’s needs: a love story.
I miss the sex that I thought was love, but you knew was just sex: a love story.
The worst was when I tried to get revenge for having had a crush on you in high school and you not wanting me, because I got a lot hotter after high school, so I made a plan and the plan was that you would want me and I would kiss you but not sleep with you, yet somehow by the end of the night I ended up begging to suck your dick: a love story.
Tell me if I’m texting too much: a love story.
No teeth on the clit, thanks: a love story.
I thought we were good for each other, but my friends said you were crazy, and I don’t really trust my taste in people (or in anything, actually, and there’s good reason for that) so goodbye: a love story.
Sorry we couldn’t get it in my ass: a love story.
You said spirituality couldn’t be bought but I felt really holy eating egg salad sandwiches in your apartment: a love story.
The G-spot isn’t where you thought it was: a love story.
When you said you just wanted it to be a one-night thing, I kinda hoped you meant one night over and over and over until we die: a love story.
I guess you aren’t going to rescue me from my life: a love story.
Text me back: a love story.
Love Like You Are Trying to Fill an Insatiable Spiritual Hole with Another Person Who Will Suffocate in There
I TELL MYSELF I KNOW nothing about love so I can recover. I am recovering from a fantasy that I projected on a young man’s body. He provided music and language and fingers and a face that moaned into my pussy. I am never going to recover from being that alive.
I was in love with him. I don’t care that well-meaning people tell me it was lust or infatuation, though I have started saying it was lust or infatuation so as not to be called out first by well-meaning people. Well-meaning people can save me from myself, but they cannot save me from being alive. Only my god can do that. Sometimes my god speaks through well-meaning people. Sometimes I am so lonely.
love (noun)—a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person (Merriam-Webster online dictionary)
Was it love when we met on the Internet? Was it love when he pursued me with silly messages and praise for my writing and a picture drawn in my favorite candy? When an attractive person pursues you, there is the luxury of not having to worry about whether it is love, because you are not the one doing the pursuing. At least, not at first. My usual habit of falling for people, when I think I am not falling, seemed irrelevant. He poked and messaged and “liked” and faved my every Internet itch. I had my feelings, any feelings, under control.
love (noun)—attraction that includes sexual desire: the strong affection felt by people who have a romantic relationship (Merriam-Webster online dictionary)
lust (noun)—intense sexual desire or appetite (Dictionary.com)
I was the one who escalated it. I was the one who made it overtly sexual, as I get nervous in undefined spaces and feel compelled to sexualize things. One day we were messaging about my favorite cereals (Kashi GoLean, Cocoa Krispies post-milk). Then we were messaging about his stomach issues, which I called his “poop game,” as in “how is your poop game?” He said it was hard to talk about his poop game with anyone he hadn’t been inside. But once he was inside a person, the poop memoirs could just flow. I asked him if he wanted to be inside me. He said yeah!!!! Then he asked if I was being for real. I messaged him my number. I said we could play the sext game. We sexted all afternoon.
Him: I want to fuck you in an air duct, flattened out with our whole bodies touching, at first slow and careful, then really hard until I come in you and the bottom of the duct falls out and we fall into a boardroom meeting for walmart, like into a bucket of fondue
Him: Also eat your pussy
Me: slow and then hard is good fucking. I want to look at yr pretty face while you fuck me and I want it to look like you are on some other shit. I want you to moan in my mouth
Him: I want to whisper in your mouth that I want to fuck you while I’m already fucking you
Him: I want to peel off your tights real slow while watching your face and push you onto a bed and go right for one really long, slow lick from the bottom of your pussy all the way to right before your clit, and even slower, trace it lightly with my tongue
Me: lol tights
Me: that’s v good. i want to hear you say my fucking name and look me in the eyes as I lick the head of your cock, suck the shaft and lick yr balls so slow it kills you
Me: I want you to tease my belly, pussy and thighs until I am begging
Him: Mmmm I want to feel myself about to come and grab the back of your hair in a bunch and ease your mouth back and forth on my cock with full, long strokes until I come in your mouth while I watch you watch my eyes
Me: you will know how much I am enjoying sucking yr cock w my wet mouth bc I will be moaning on it.
Him: Yeah fuck I want to feel your moans on my cock
Him: I want you to rub your pussy under your waistband while you suck my cock through my jorts
Him: Lol lol
Me: I want you to tell me how bad you want to make me come and to take as long as I need. th
en I want you to lick my little pink clit so fast and gentle like yr tongue is my personal vibrator while I surf the internet. 10 minutes after I tweet, delete that tweet and then tweet another tweet I come in yr mouth
Him: I want to fave your tweet as you come around my face, which is soaked with your pussy juices
Him: I want to rt while you hold my head against your clit during your last cum clenches
Me: I want u to @ me while you lick my clit. then as I come I will say yr name over and over and respond to yr @ that way b/c I don’t @ on twitter and everyone knows that
Me: as i am cumming i want you to put yr fingers inside me to feel my muscles moving but not before. that will be yr response to my response to yr @
Me: fyi, I will lick you behind yr balls like I am eating the most delicious pussy
Him: I want to go deep in your Twitter feed and fave an unfaved tweet as a means of communicating that 1. I respect your art and love your pristine feed and 2. That I like getting the @ reply way better this way
Me: I keep my pussy even more pristine than I keep my feed
Me: I will like 3 of yr statuses on fb while I swallow yr cum
Him: I’m gonna eat it and get so sick and die due to its being too pristine for my human body to process, but I’ll come back as a ghost and finish the job
Him: I’m going to finger your wet pussy with my middle finger while I cum in your mouth and with my left hand share a poem you posted with the caption: soo good
Him: I’ll lick your clit for 127 hours
Me: I will like yr share of my poem with one hand and hold yr wrists down w the other as I fuck you on top. I’ll be kissing yr mouth as I do this
Me: I want you to tell me how badly u want to taste me after you’ve already been licking it. this shld happen at the 121st hour
Him: I’m going to fade in and out of a physical nirvana dimension due to length of my eating your pussy, my cock getting so hard that it cuts through spacetime and fucks our common ancestor
Him: I want to print out a screenshot of “Melissa Broder likes this” and come on it
Me: I want u to take a picture of yr cum on the screenshot of “Melissa Broder likes this” and send it to me. and I want it signed by the cummer.
Him: God I want to fuck you in a treehouse and have someone’s parents find us and instead of stopping speed up and fuck each other as hard and fast as we can until we come and when we wake up they’ve died from shock! Sad
Him: I’ll sign it w my cum
Me: I will write a poem abt yr face as I watch it go in and out of tangible reality while u eat my pussy for 127 hrs and it will possess themes of the succubus, the transcendent and temporal angst and it will be the worst poem I ever wrote
Him: want to fuck you from behind and squeeze your asscheeks until you spit out your next chapbook whole and we watch it get railed by a hot nyt reviewer coed
Me: I want to tell you “i embrace your shitgame” while you are fucking me next to their dead bodies and say “even if you had to shit at this very moment I wld not judge you, u cld just shit, just shit everywhere, and it might even turn me on, even though shit has never been my thing—not that there is anything wrong with ppl who are into it—but the intimacy of the act, yr powerlessness over it and my delight at my own radical acceptance wld be hot” and then instead of shitting you come really hard
Him: ~The perfect sext~
Him: U did it
We continued like this for a year, never meeting IRL for the first six months. He lived in DC and I was in New York, then Los Angeles. We explored various tropes along the way, from the crucifixion (Me: can u tease my pussy over my undies in an amphitheater from like 31–33 AD then finger me in a dark alley while jesus is crucified and like not know he is getting crucified bc i am dryhumping u against a wall / Him: Can you suck your pussy juice off my fingers at the exact moment our Lord and Savior rises, and he sees you sucking my fingers and goes “hold on” and stops rising, but then goes “jk” and rises again, and everyone laughs) to the Arctic (Him: Touching my cock, thinking about you kneeling over it, dropping yourself slowly onto me, on a beautiful glacier / Me: there is a sephora on the glacier and my lips are unnaturally red / Me: i lick the head of yr cock through the galactic gloryhole, french kiss it slowly outside the timespace continuum / Him: My cock glows an incredible iridescence as I enter you. The warmth of your pussy against the cold night creates a clap of thunder between us, somehow / Him: We set off a nuclear reaction in your pussy, each of us coming to the other’s throbbing orgasm).
We also texted about other things: depression and anxiety, therapy sessions, the hamster wheel of the mind, our secret childhood pains, what it might mean to have a second childhood, different types of voids, a bad acid trip involving the moon. We sent pictures of our naked bodies. He told me that a poem he’d written, which I’d admired, he’d written for me. No one had ever made me the muse before. Something inside me shifted. The little kid in me erupted. She said, You see me. I am finally seen.
It takes so little, really. How well do we see someone who we know only for a brief while? How well do we ever see anyone at all? I know too much and I know nothing at all.
infatuation (noun)—an object of extravagant, short-lived passion (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition)
The first time we met was at a hotel in the financial district in Manhattan, just before Thanksgiving. I remember sitting on the hotel toilet, trying to make myself shit before he got there. He seemed to have had a lot of anal. I, nine years older than him, had never had anal. I enjoyed cleaning myself, making myself look beautiful, dressing for him.
When he arrived in the hotel room, I thought Jesus. He had the black hair of a pixie, the face and body of a gazelle. I was relieved that he passed for normal. Hot-normal. People on the Internet often get weirder and less attractive when you get off-line. I remember we hugged for a long time, as if to say, I know you. We sort of did know each other. Also, not at all. Then we started kissing. I remember his lips were chapped. I remember feeling like the kisses were too hard. It felt like a forced urgency, and despite his assurances that he would eat my pussy infinitely, I didn’t think there was any way my body could catch up. It felt cinematic in a bad way. After all the sexting we both had too much to live up to.
Next we were in our underwear, rolling around on the hotel bed. I wanted to rewind and start again, to move in slow motion. He licked my pussy and I found myself faking or at least moaning in a dramatic way—something I had done with other lovers in the past, when my brain and body were nowhere near the pace but I wanted to seem present. I think I tried to suck his dick to space things out. I think I tried to get him hard. He must have felt the way I did, because he stayed soft.
Then I think we were making out again on the bed. Suddenly, I felt a wave of all of the sadness and all of the fear that I usually keep dammed up. I drowned for a minute. I felt like he could feel it. What I didn’t consider at the time was that the sadness could have been coming from him. Later he apologized for what he called a dark energy that he had brought with him—a depressive state that he couldn’t shake that night. But I thought it was my own. Maybe it was both of ours, and maybe it was what bonded us to each other underneath all of the sexting. I think we were both looking for light, maybe a fake light, maybe a real one.
I said, You have experienced a lot of pain in your life. You are so intuitive. I didn’t tell him that I felt like he could intuit my own historic pain in that moment.
He told me he was getting tired. Would I mind if he slept some? I told him, Of course not, but felt rejected. I realized I hadn’t eaten in many hours. I told him I was going to go out for food and asked if he wanted anything. He said no. I wondered if he was hesitant to eat at sleepover situations because of his digestive issues.
I went to 7-Eleven and bought a thousand calories worth of food: a Golden Grahams bar, a pack of M&M’s, some weird Japanese-looking peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. B
ack at the hotel room, I sat on the bed feeling really cute and pretty. I ate, mindful of him, like I was putting on a show. I told him that he should sleep and that I was going to take the second big bed (there were two).
love (noun)—a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition)
I don’t remember drifting off but I remember waking up at dawn the next morning and brushing my teeth, then getting back into bed, pretending to be asleep. I heard him get up to brush his teeth. I heard him piss. I opened my eyes and watched his gazelle body languidly milling around the room. He had a hard-on in his gray boxer briefs. He asked if he could get in bed with me. I said yes, and then we kissed softly—so much more natural than the night before. Then he kissed down my body. Then he ate my pussy for infinity.
I went to space. I came on his tongue. I said, Want to fuck a little? and we fucked. I said, Kill me with your arrow cock. Then I gave him a very long, slow blow job until he got harder than he had been. He came in my mouth. I swallowed his cum.
We had until noon. We kissed, rubbed against each other. He talked to my pussy. He made out with it. We talked about concerts. That was disappointing. I didn’t want to talk about anything cultural, anything tethered to society. I only wanted to talk about feelings, life in its most primal and essential form. There is something about the blankness of a hotel room that makes you feel like you can do that—that such a thing as primal, essential life exists. There is something about occupying that neutral space with someone you really know nothing about—except the very essential, or the essential as they have painted it, or the essential as you have chosen to perceive it—that makes this seem possible.
So Sad Today Page 3