Society feels like this crushing weight on us all. How can anyone breathe with this pressure? How do people stay happy? I feel like a bystander sometimes, just watching it all happen around me, going through the motions, wondering when I will have a moment of peace. It isn't the world, it's people. People are so desperate and hungry, so afraid to be anything more than a caricature of themselves. I crave attention, I crave to feel beautiful. At night I am alone and I am a goddess inside, and my flesh comes alive and I become hungry like they are. But I don't want to let them in. I want to be used and to use them, and that is all.
I did a stint online, browsing the men, yearning for something beyond what any of their empty words could give me. Long walks on the beach—how could any woman stoop so low or feel so generic? I broke hearts on these dates.
Hundreds of men wrote to me, mostly lame thoughtless pickup attempts that felt as fragile and useless as a teenager making a pass. No guts or talent to them. Occasionally one would shine through and pique my interest. We would chat back and forth until I felt like I could enjoy sitting through a bar or restaurant or movie with them. Always I would get there and feel bored. They would look at me with their puppy dog eyes or their wolfish eyes, or anywhere in between that spectrum. It didn't flatter me or turn me on, but eventually I would reach a point in the night where I either knew I was going to go home with them or that I wasn't. The sex was mostly passable. Desperate fumbling and licking and biting and fucking. It wasn't what I wanted to be feeling, but it filled something in me. I would look forward to these little glimmers between the doldrums of my life. I became addicted to the encounters, but never to the men.
My therapist said that meaningless sex wasn't going to bring me happiness, and she was right about that. It was always fleeting. I would let myself go as far as I could, and then I would immediately withdraw, like a disinterested man. This caused the men to try harder, to fall in love with my unattainability. Eventually I would let them all down easily, with a text. During this phase, I only gave one of them a second date, and it wasn't a date it was just a careless fuck that he didn't understand. I apologized to his hurt feelings a few times and then told him flat out to stop texting me because I wasn't interested.
He was an alright guy, but he wasn't for me. Maybe it was this small city I detested, and the numbing existence of the inhabitants. I'd lived in San Francisco, Portland, New York, Paris. And here I was in upstate NY, some podunk town that had no soul, no breath, no pulse. Even the vampires here were just addicts getting lost in the charade of nightlife without any goals to make them interesting. It felt like every man I met at work or online or just out and about was a parasite, trying to grab onto me as I worked diligently toward something larger. They all felt doomed to go nowhere and do nothing, just walking through the same daily steps that had gotten them here in the first place. And what could possibly be interesting about that?
My girlfriend Annika was from Berlin and taught Sociology at the university here. Annika had a soul that burned and she was going somewhere. One night after wine and Tapas and some dancing at the bar, we retired to her apartment and laid around on her couch drinking more and being silly and bitching about life. We recapped the men who'd talked to us and made fun of their lame pick ups.
"That Dan guy actually danced up behind me and told me my hips don't lie!" I said.
We cackled about him for the fifth time since he'd said that. I'd told him "Ewww, my hips are about to kick you in the nuts if you don't go away."
"You don't have to be a bitch," he'd said, returning to his buddies at the bar.
Annika was wearing a short button-up dress that she'd unbuttoned once we got back to her place so her bra was showing off a generous glimpse of her ample breasts. God she had gorgeous breasts. A full cup larger than mine, they pushed against anything she wore as if they could barely contain themselves.
"I feel like I'm so bored of men that maybe I'm just boring," I said. "Because if I were exciting, I would obviously be excited to be alive. And I'm not. I'm just... living in this funk."
"No, hon, it definitely isn't just you. It's me too. So either we're both boring, or they're actually all boring. Really just fuck these men." It sounded like 'feck deze men'.
Annika had a subtle German accent, hard to describe, but it rolled softly from her lips. When she was angry, it deepened and I would jokingly tell her to stop talking like Hitler.
"You're definitely not boring. Feck deze men is right!" I said.
She and I were a hot pair, her blond contrasting my brunette and we always had plenty of attention when we went out together. Funny thing is that we went out to have fun and talk to each other and dance together and it was annoying to have the men buzzing around us like mosquitos. I know every guy thinks that if we dress up it's because we want them to approach us, but that's the opposite of how we felt. We dressed up to feel good for ourselves, and we loved dressing up together, looking at each other, just being girls together and appreciating each others' beauty. Not in a sexual way, just to be feminine and share that bond that women can only share with each other. Mostly we'd go to the gay bar to avoid grindy mosquitos, but a lot of straight men had figured this out and would lurk at the gay bar trying to dance and cop feels on us. The lesbian bar had closed, but that used to be a sanctuary, except the butch dykes were as annoying and aggressive as men, while totally lacking the right plumbing to turn us on if we were in the mood.
I have to admit, I'd thought about having sex with Annika, but I wasn't prepared to do that. We were flirty and gropey with each other, but we also knew this wouldn't solve our issues in the sex department.
"I have a confession," Annika said. Then she blushed and giggled and threw her face into a pillow. "Oh my god, I can't say it but I really need to tell someone."
"What is it?" I leaned forward, knowing from her body language that she was going to drop a juicy bomb on me.
"Well, I can't really explain it in any way that's going to make it sound good so I'm just going to say it."
"Tell me!"
"I've been... um..." She laughs and hides her face again. Her dress is riding up so I can see her butt-cheek and her black panties. Yeah, it's really short. I can't blame men. It's almost cruel for her to wear that and meanwhile have no interest in talking to any of them. What can I say, we're all a bunch of bitches.
"You have to tell me, Annika! Spill it!" I demand.
"Okay, well." Another pause to torture me. "I've been meeting guys... off of craigslist, and..."
"Annika, you are NOT a craigslist prostitute!!"
"NO!" she says, emphatically. "I just sort of meet them, then suck them off. Then I leave." She hides her face in the pillow, laughing hysterically. "Oh my god, it's so embarrassing to say it out loud."
I stare at her with my jaw hanging to the floor, trying to process this. I'm distracted by hunger and other needs that are better fulifilled on the north side.
"Do they pay you?" Why are you doing this?"
"I just... like it. I can't explain it. I started doing it two months ago and..."
"You've been doing this two months and didn't tell me! What the fuck Annika, I thought you were my friend!'
Her face is as red as a life-threatening fever. "I was just browsing the missed connections one night, and I saw this ad from a college guy who just really wanted his dick sucked. He posted a pic of it and I was just in the mood to suck him off. So I—"
"How is that a missed connection?" I demand to know.
"No that one was in casual encounters."
"I just lost all respect for you!" I say, laughing.
"No no, it wasn't sleazy. He wrote a really sweet ad and I just felt like doing it. I couldn't sleep, and I was a little horny and I just missed being young or something. I felt like a mischievous little girl."
"And?"
"And I met up with him in back of the Tops parking lot, and he got in my car, and I blew him."
I'm trying to process the dark secret life my bestie has just laid on me, and I can't. I'm turned on imagining it, but I also just can't fathom her meeting a stranger in the middle of the night and doing this. "Okay, so you and this fellatio prince charming of yours have been together for two months?"
She shakes her head, giggling again. "My god I am such a whore. No, Aura, I actually never saw him again. I just started... doing it to other guys. Like whenever I'm craving a little somethin somethin but don't want it to be a big something."
"You whore!"
"No shit!"
"How many guys?"
