I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I am performing all the time, performing being myself, what is myself, who is me.

I stand next to him so he will notice me. He doesn’t and I keep standing, waiting for a command which doesn’t come.

He wastes women’s time, which to me is the most heinous crime he commits and the second is his lack of remorse.

We wanted a man but ended up with a dependent.

You truly feel like you are sharing a life with him just because he dreamed it so. It’s only when you are apart that you realise you are apart because the relationship is not real but by then he’s onto the next thing and the next person and you are something far away again. You have to maintain the illusion all by yourself and like a surveyor, he may come back to check it’s all still running the way he left it but he won’t do the heavy-lifting.

Except I’m not anything to him and nothing to myself which is why I stay, and he enjoys all of us, gets something whole out of a multitude of people and I put up with it because a bit of him is better than nothing at all.

I think what would these activist women think of him if they really knew him. These women who want to fight patriarchal systems, who ask questions of each other like, what would a more horizontal society look like—more female, non-binary or trans-led—and he nods respectfully making notes as they talk and answering their specific points.

watch him dreaming of utopian futures with these women he doesn’t know but keeps me in a kind of purgatory where he forgets what he said to me a year ago, two weeks ago, sometimes saying he wants children with me and then forgetting it a minute later asking me with puzzlement at what I’m talking about.

I start to feel jealous about the way he is with this animal because he is not this way with me. That’s really when you should be thinking about getting out. When you start getting jealous of a dog.

joy. There is no space for expansive and evolving creativity, only insecurity and homogeny are fostered where straight men uphold one another through a homoerotic bond, or are complicit through silence. No matter how much some say they respect women, each man, even the ‘good ones’, benefit from women’s low expectations of them as control is exerted via a climate of instability, fear and violence.

He wants the consistency from a mother and not the conditionality of a lover.

She is grinning straight into the lens and he looks off camera with an enigmatic smile on his face. It could be happiness or safety but aren’t they the same thing. If I loved them, I would say it was a beautiful photograph.