I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I don’t own anything that would tell other people how much of a tastemaker I am, how much of a grown-up. I fit into spaces which already exist and contort myself to fit a shape which has been allocated for me.

dick from someone who doesn’t care if you live or die

However, he will often disarm me by giving me too much information and so if I am hurt, he says, well it’s because you asked, and if I find out later that something was different to how he told me it is, he says, well you didn’t ask the right question.

I brought back into my bag looking down trying to think of a last-ditch way to turn this around in my favour and force him to profess his undying love for me and give me the promise I need which is his hand in marriage.

We rise and I pick the blanket up which I laid down for us, to show him I can leave him quite abruptly, I am not clingy, here I am able to leave him.

Sometimes I wonder are you the main relationship in my life, he says tipping his head up to absorb the weakening sun. I narrow my eyes and curl my lips in disdain, and I say, of course I’m the main relationship in your life.

There is a whole other storyline unfolding with two main characters and I am merely the short subplot to aid the trajectory of their love story. I am not a main character in this ensemble romcom of betrayal, I am a supporting act. He is in no danger of falling in love with me. I am usurpable in my own life. I am on a lower social stratum to the two of them and in this way they are equals and are better matched. No one would think to invite me to a private view at the Royal Academy—I am no one. I’m a fan and because of this, I can be cut out.

She is dressed plainly but her clothes are cut sharply at the shoulder and the waist which makes her appear more beautiful, or more intimidating which I suppose is the same thing.

and there are crudités presented in wooden bowls, but not the kind of dry, neglected crudités I have seen on the tables of most subpar white people events I’ve attended. This is a different bar, a more confident display of whiteness.

The only way to have a relationship with the man I want to be with is through conflict. The only time he pays rapt attention to me is when I am splitting with rage or when I manufacture needing an urgent answer to an existential question about us. The war is waged like morse code, needle-bursts of pressure and silence. He renders me dead or alive with the flare of his attention. He is like this with all of us. He is a void and there is no way to fill it.

How can he know me when he’s so committed to misunderstanding me.

Nothing he says about their life together makes sense or it makes complete sense and I don’t want to understand it.

We are all of us engaged in a collective self-harm by trying to love him, seeking to be loved by him.

first of all i didn’t miss the red flags i looked at them and thought yeah that’s sexy

Our availability makes us equals. It is before the majority of them have children where their inflexible diaries denote adulthood. My childlessness and my endlessly empty hours mean I work around them, learn not to take it personally, the silence, the vague dates to meet up that go by or the missed appointments to call, and instead shrug them off. They have families and serious lives.

Our living room turns green and I spin forward in time and a voice says to me, you have to leave him. I do the maths very quickly.

I thought time stretched out forever, I thought I had the rest of my life to make this decision but I realise I am on a clock and it runs differently for me. I am female. There was never much time and I’ve wasted so much already.

Do I don vulnerability as a weapon against this culture?—If you require me to be hard and harder to fight you, I will rebel by being soft like a jelly-beaned being, but like anything, you need to be softer and softer to have the same impact.

Do I weaponise my own pain and cause harm to myself by revelling in that pain, nurturing it, putting myself in danger to encourage it and then working it over by verbalising it for display, to show society, I am a human being and I feel pain just like you. Is this violence turned inwards, a knife in my hand, the weight of my body grifting down to the hilt?

Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neo-colonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being ‘in service’ to our ‘communities’ by ‘taking up space’ as if by being true to ourselves, we’re doing everyone else a massive favour?

We are able to ask, who am I, a question our parents were never able to ask themselves—but have we ever stopped to ask, what exactly is it we want to gain access to?

The man I want to be with tells me that he can’t understand why I am so unhappy, I am a happy person, always smiling, he can’t imagine my being sad. So I decide to cry in front of him. I make a point of crying in front of him every time I see him, forensically laying out the innards of my sadness. I can sense the perversion of his cruelty held in his wonder of my tears.

My boyfriend is with me because next to my erratic behaviour he can look like the wise, steady one even though he has no direction to his life. Next to me, he can be the paternal force, the one who holds reason, which forces me to hold the intuition and feeling. I need his maternal care but it is this care which closes in on me.

He says, she’s not like you, you’re easy going. I don’t think this is a good thing.

says he dreams of taking me shopping and buying me things and I am tempted but I can’t because it feels like he’s giving me money in place of love except I do want gifts from him because I don’t get love but the Pretty Woman overtures are tew much.

way. I wonder how so many intelligent women who claim to be for women’s stories and promoting women’s lives and women’s independence, can be this cut-throat and possessive over a man. In public we would all decry this behaviour, we would shout, dump him! to our friends. It’s so archaic and humiliating to realise nothing has changed despite all the rhetoric suggesting it has. We will still turn on each other. What we should have done is unionise but instead we splinter.

However, as if aware of my softening towards him, aware the chase is over and he has me, he initiates gaping silences, he tells me to get in touch with him in a week, in a month. His absence becomes intoxicating and feeds my obsession.

The comments under this post all express urgent, alarmed concern for the sacrificed dishcloth and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

If I buy these one-off items like her, from individual vendors, from makers who have limited edition runs of their very niche specific items like clay candle holders, or jugs, or plates, then I too will be a unique, rare and special person like she is and maybe the man I want to be with will want me and won’t throw me away like he does so dismissively. I will be something of note and care. I will be something to show off owning.

I stretch my legs out and he looks at them like he wants to eat them. I look at him looking at them. I don’t think a man has ever looked at me like this before. I am immature for my age and unaware of my presence in a room. I think I am invisible and nothing and ugly and here is this very important person giving me attention. He looks at me like I’m a piece of meat and I like it.

The man I want to be with doesn’t look down to see if I’m ok and I know this because I keep looking up to check.

I have to position myself as the friend because it seems it is the only spot open. It is romantic elsewhere. He wants a platonic place to time-out so I decide this is what I’ll be.

The night he gives me her name is the undoing of me. Really, it’s the only thing I have left of him. It seems like the only real thing this man gives me is her.

I need to keep hearing him reject me. I am unable to see what is right in front of me, I refuse the reality of it. I see his rejection as merely a first offer and keep going.

I want to be rescued and so I retreat into delusion, what he really means when he says he can’t be with me is that he wants to be with me, he’s just scared so I need to fight for us, for the both of us. In this way, I relinquish control over my life and avoid growing up.

I want the illusion rather than my self-respect.

At what point do I get a return on my investment? My people-pleasing, my co-dependency, my lack of boundaries, which on the surface looks so giving, nurturing and self-effacing is actually controlling, ego-driven and emotionally demanding. There is something at the core of me that starts to warp at the fear of impending bankruptcy, grows ugly and distorted every time I slap a hand on the table and roar for what I believe is mine.

What does it say about your person when you know what these desirable objects are? What does it say about your femininity if you know how to make a room pleasing? Knowing how to make a home is the ultimate wreath to crown your femininity. Where do you attain the confidence and the certainty to impose and expand yourself and your tastes onto four walls of a room and what does it say about you when you can’t do this?

I am relieved. I think I am very sophisticated for how calmly I accept all of this.

I think it is on me to keep the momentum going but really it is the way he wriggles out of responsibility for how hurt you will eventually be—because you kept arranging to meet, you were never forced, you initiated all the contact.

That there are hordes of other people who might want the same thing as me, sends me into a near frenzy. I want it so no one else can have it.

I want it so that in the luxury of having it, I can ruin its perfection and then reject it when I am sure it means nothing.

I fantasise and fall in love with a version of him I’m not sure exists outside of my imagination. He is constantly failing in comparison to this person I know he could be. If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we could be happy.

Like I’m absolutely chill with everything that is happening because it’s chill? As if demanding better behaviour or putting down boundaries would mean that I am not chill?

He and I meet a couple of weeks after he has flown back because I have been unable to stay away from him for the forever that I threatened him with the month previous.

After this severance, I switch sides and I start to defend her, I am protective over her when he speaks of her. I say, there’s no denying she’s a cunt but you led her on what else was she supposed to think you were going to do when you ‘came inside her with abandon’—I quote his own words back at him.

A history I do not know occurred to move me here, I don’t really know my story. I wish I had a connection to land, to native plants and soil and earth from which generations before me were born. What I rely on is the falsity of concrete and cement.

All I see is the disinheritance and the bloodshed which runs through the land to have made it a quiet and safe place for her, a place of nourishment and sustenance—not a place of abject grief.

I say, you should be thankful everyday those two women decided to stay quiet about how you treated them, you should be on your knees in gratitude, they could have ruined you.

If I made them frightened of me, they wouldn’t ask me where I was going and I could do what I wanted without their fear of what the community would think. This abstract idea of ‘community’ was enough of a reason to police my behaviour, my body and my actions.