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she will happily spend $300 on a vase where she displays really, really organic fennel flowers, by which she says there is organic and then organic, buys a $500 ring for herself during a time of financial strife for the rest of the world
Sometimes I wonder if I ever met her, what would I say to her, would I tell her of our connection? Would I tell her I know where she lives, would I tell her how I guessed that she broke up with her boyfriend. Will I tell her I know why the tone of her stories changed because the man we are both sleeping with, the man I want to be with, shamed her for exploiting her privacy the last time they saw one another.
Would I move in closer to smell her and feel what he felt when he felt her—would I taste the inside of your mouth to find out what was so compelling,
to know for myself why he cancelled fucking me to fuck you.
it seems that being a founder of an independent web-shop is the new rich kid thing to do.
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.
how and where do you go to buy paintings? Or perhaps what I want is the disposable cash to be able to buy a painting but actually what I want is something much harder to attain which is to know what paintings are worth buying in the first place combined with the innate belief I deserve to be in surroundings that need paintings on the walls before I am able to feel at home.
It’s the kind of street where there are no ‘for sale’ signs because everyone here knows they have a good thing,
Here, beige is split into bone, pigeon, tallow, wevet—beige is not beige in this kind of taste-country, it is rustically referenced to make you believe you are cleverer than you are and you deserve to be gently handled.
I start by laughing, like, look at me, oh I’m so light-hearted and fun and kaa-ray-zee! I pin his arms back over his head and I laugh because this is a light-hearted jovial waterboarding.
He tells me he’s not sure he’d be up for having sex with me if he sees me afterwards so it’s best to cancel our meeting. It seems he cannot let go of her—you can’t get rid of love, he says wetly. The email is a confession, an unburdening from him to me.
I realise many things very quickly. She is better in bed than 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.
She declares her love for her boyfriend/husband often. As a couple they favour the lift selfie and she posts these in her stories.
The woman I am obsessed with comments ‘gorgeous’—a trademark of hers is to write one-word comments under her friends’ posts.
which makes her appear more beautiful, or more intimidating which I suppose is the same thing.
To leave the walls this way is not because of monetary constraint, it is a design choice. There is wealth evident everywhere so there is no need to try so hard. Various objects that have no apparent use but look expensive are dotted about the room—
He renders me dead or alive with the flare of his attention.
How can he know me when he’s so committed to misunderstanding me. Once he withholds sex from me, I am allocated an audience with him three or four hours once every fortnight. He affords us no privacy—strained and formal, we always meet in a public place.
He is hypnotised by his addiction to conflict, to the fraught and desperate attention of women pleading with their lives to be with him or to make up his mind, to the push/pull mechanics of flirting with and then refusing intimacy.
We are all of us engaged in a collective self-harm by trying to love him, seeking to be loved by him.
People say his name like they’re spending someone else’s money. The proximity to power is too much to resist.
we hold our faces close to one another and say, this was nice, I’ve missed this, I’ve missed you. 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.
After jumping into the water, I had swallowed some of it and had cut my ankle against the bank but I have to be sexy and nonchalant right now so I say, who cares.
I empty myself out in order to appear as his ideal, whatever it is, I’ll be.
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.
Vulnerability lends authenticity to my voice and fills in for where I do not have the more formal backing of an MFA or the recognition of an award or the prestige of an eight-way auction publishing deal. I have an English degree yet when faced with the task of writing, I am almost adrift.
If you require me to be hard and harder to fight you, I will rebel by being soft like a jelly-beaned being,
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.
Our human imaginations are funnelled to think along the narrow lines of the algorithm—if you liked that you’ll love this.
we tell the story of being acted upon, we speak from the position of the victim. For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness—by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care?
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?
so white people with the keys to the castle can gasp and shake their heads and say, I never knew it was this bad, it’s [insert year] for God’s sake,
we know what Britain really is and you don’t, buy my book to find out the Truth.
We are saddened by the knowledge that nothing really collectively changes but reassured by the thought that it did for me on an individual level, as we backstroke across the vast placid sea of righteous superiority.
Who exactly are we addressing our creativity to? What do we hope to gain? What does this do to our voice? Does it matter?
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.
I want to be fucked and my boyfriend wants to make love. I ask him to call me a slut in bed. He tells me he doesn’t believe the way I want to have sex is who I truly am. I instantly lose my confidence and submit myself to what he thinks I should be. I’m not sure if what I want is what I want. I am convinced he knows me best, better than I know myself and because I have resigned the power of my decision making to him, he must be right, I don’t want to be treated like a whore, he’s right, it isn’t me.
I want to be the cause of his loss of inhibition, I want to be the reason for his loss of control.
He tries once. I make pained, embarrassed-for-him faces as if I’m braced for a car crash which forces him to stop. He tells me he doesn’t want to do it again as I’m not encouraging.
I want to make his knees shake when I suck him and I want him to be a little afraid of the power I have over him, how hard I make him come. But we do none of those things. Once every couple of months, it is quiet, non-penetrative, perfunctory and gentle, two seahorses nuzzling in the surf and then we curl around one another and go to sleep.
You hear people you don’t know, in living rooms you’ll never be invited into, preparing meals you’ll never eat.
In this type of social media storytelling there is no volta, no crescendo, no pay-off in the plot line. Syms isolates the everyday quality of this type of media and asks you to focus on it, to interrogate the fragmented storytelling where we present ourselves as the protagonist of our own self-shot movies, of the sharp clips of people talking, the tease of information before a big reveal,
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.
She perceives herself to be vastly talented in that Victorian sense of being well-accomplished—able to cook, draw, paint, host, write, she speaks a number of languages and has an impressive cache of artistic and cultural historical knowledge.
she posts links to fundraisers on her stories, often decries politicians’ inaction over climate change and believes she has enough authority on Instagram to tag the most recent presidential incumbent in her public messages of disapproval as if she is an elected congresswoman and these tagged politicians would write in her comments, of course, we were so wrong we see the light now, thank you for tagging us in your posts!
He says, she’s not like you, you’re easy going. I don’t think this is a good thing. She makes him buy her a dress from Jigsaw and I screech, Jigsaw! Who the fuck shops there but old white women and he says, I knew you were going to say that.
There is another part of me that wants to meet her and commiserate, like two weary war vets, compare battle-scars, engage in friendly one-upmanship and offer sympathy. I want to find solace in failing to get him to love me. I want to grab her arm in recognition and say, he did that to me too! And laugh about it, which would take the sting out of the humiliation. I want to get drunk with her, sweep her hair over her shoulders and tell her she’s beautiful and she’ll find someone else, that she doesn’t need him and neither do I. I want to get angry on her behalf and call him a cunt.
After a time, we could say to one another, God wasn’t that weird we went for the same man? But we would forget that’s how we met because our friendship would go so far back and we would simply be happy we have one another in our lives. We have something real.
On the Overground train I pick over our messages panning for the slightest glint in the water that would convince me it was worth the wait, glossing over where he says he can’t commit, he is stuck, it is impossible to leave his wife, and instead I hold onto his compliments which he gives me as cheap recompense for any structural changes—as if new curtains would costume or refashion a gaping hole in the wall, as if he is an estate agent telling me, yes you’re cold and this hole is largely inconvenient—but use your imagination and pretend it’s a window, just look at that view.
