I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

The world is built for couples. Even unhappy ones.

We wanted a man but ended up with a dependent.

I could confidently guess he is the little spoon, or that she is the one to put her arm around him and he will sit like a cat in her lap.

they wouldn’t say to me, the man you want to be with is in the hospital, don’t worry he’s fine but he’s asked for you, I wouldn’t be able to do a dramatic, drop everything, my boyfriend is sick! and rush to his side with no make-up on but moisturised, in a tank and culottes and my birks, where you can see I’m pretty but I haven’t made an effort, I’m tired and stressed, my lover is in the hospital! and I sit there with his hand in my hand watching over him like I’m a fucking saint, brushing his beautiful hair off his face and he opens his eyes and I’m like, hey you, and he says, it’s you, I made a mistake.

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 enjoy assuming I know more about his emotional landscape than he does and making grand proclamations like a Poundland Cassandra.

as if I know how the world really works because it makes me seem more important than I actually am.

The Othered image or object or person needs to be processed through her eyes, her brain and then her fingers, transformed into captions on Instagram, which then turbo charge its value. In this way, she signals her approval, which then leads to other white people paying attention to it and then admitting it into their personal canons.

Time must remain static so whiteness’ power can be maintained by any means.

whereby the lower the level of melanin in the body, the higher your place in the hierarchy, the lighter the skin tone, the closer you are to whiteness therefore the better, more beautiful you are regarded, the more suited to power you are.

My life isn’t busy enough for me to be sexy and I don’t know what it is to play hard to get.

It dies with one call I have with her where I laugh hysterically at my own jokes and take the piss out of the process as if I’m too cool to have a regular job, I have a cool person’s job where everything is insecure and seasonal, like I was too busy being cool and sexy to figure out tax brackets, my god.

as if I could charm her into turning around and saying hey I like you, you can have a house!

in the gap I make up my own meaning, which is that he loves me more.

Although emotionally he is a child, he is a provider.

Her imagination is full of men. She has all of her art framed to gallery-exhibition level, no cheap plastic Etsy frames for her.

Yet nothing is unattainable for the woman I am obsessed with. I have this memory of Chris Ofili but she opens her eyes to him every day. She is an equal to these names, or at least sees herself as equal to these names and lives with real life art that I can’t afford and wouldn’t know how to get and I put posters up with Blu Tack like I’m still fifteen years old. Like a fan.

Every week, I dm the posts from Terroir to Diet Prada and I say, look at this web-shop culturally appropriating these objects.

By the fact of your gender, you are fundamentally dismissed and because you are asking for his vulnerability, you become the enemy, you are treated as a hostile invader, with suspicion, surveyed as a constant high-level threat and you will be suppressed or defeated. You are judged by him as lesser for loving him. He projects his self-loathing on to you and you carry it thinking if you skim off the scum maybe something good will come eventually.

The love he receives from his base gets him used to things being one-sided, he never has to work at anything, never has to work on his insides because so much is projected onto him.

They become our spokesperson nominated to do this for us so we can carry on living our lives unperturbed. These people are only human and when they commit acts of harm, we hold knowing and not knowing together,

I do have a vision. While I am on top of him in a first-floor hotel room in Kings Cross, I have a vision of being alone, underwater, surrounded by black and blue knotted nets.

Things are truly bad when, at the park, a dog bounds over to where the man I want to be with and I are sitting and he pets and coos over the dog so warmly and indulgently and I sit there un-petted and un-cooed over and 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.

I wouldn’t put it past you to do something like this.

it was six hours of horror and if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.

It’s as if she thinks she’s better than the rest of us, her ability to protect her privacy and to abstain from the internet and our collective narcissism.

It is like she is finally speaking to me and I am able to see what could happen to my insides if I gave myself away to him. Her palette is black, mauve, washed-out blues and greys, like having an old colour television on—the less vibrant options are the ones she chooses. She combines photographs with paint and presents amorphous, lonely, disembodied figures from the back so there is no emotion to connect to, no context around them, the imagery sits on the surface avoids pulling you in or under. I am reassured when I look at them but I am desperately sad.

She uses archaic words, or else long words to describe simple things, like lacustrine, pellucid, provenance, which shows the pedigree of her education but also her total detachment from real life.

She was bequeathed this tick because of the luck and randomness of genetics, because of the life she was born into and the benefits and access she is given, which led to an aspirational life which she posts on the machine, is given this blue tick by the machine and then because of this blue tick, is further enhanced by the machine—

it’s a funny thing to feel sad—or feel anything about racism because what a luxury.

She doesn’t understand what racism really is. She only posts the exceptional things Black people do on her grid.

I want to feel familiar to her.

Women are beautiful, alluring but terrifying forces and the way to deal with terrifying forces is to break them.

You collaborate in your own destruction.

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.

This is met with my own wounding where I want what doesn’t want me. He wants the consistency from a mother and not the conditionality of a lover.

There is sweetness all around me and I am a hard bitter fig.

I see he has a talk in the countryside, a famous literary house has invited him to talk about something no one gives a shit about anymore.

It could be happiness or safety but aren’t they the same thing.

I could say, I’m on the pill it’s ok, or maybe he wouldn’t ask, my cunt shrouded in a secret we would enjoy together. There is something so transgressive and reckless about the idea of having a man come inside me, refusing the science available to prevent the inevitable, a rebellion against the separateness we insist upon,

there is a sick thrill in conjoining all our ancient animal parts and knowingly ruining my life and doing it with reckless abandon.