I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

my stomach flipping sick with delight when her profile picture is ringed red.

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, would I press into you, I want to know exactly how your body moves when you are turned on—to know for myself why he cancelled fucking me to fuck you.

I sense my creeping desperation—say yes or no, the words brittle through my gritted teeth.

I know he has to leave because he has to be home with his wife before dinner.

she crazier than i thought

Even though he is cheating on his wife and I am cheating on my boyfriend and that means neither of us is trustworthy,

what is happening

Relationships are sites of winning or losing—not connection and safety, but dominance and subjugation. Every gesture, word, act, opportunity, kind face, sexual advance, dismissal, rebuff, celebration, rejection, invitation, advancement, smile, look, step forward or step back and every offered fee has to be regarded first as an insult, a threat or as a potential act of violence which is slowly neutralised. It is the only way to live a life, to regard anyone coming close as the enemy, as someone who is guaranteed to take from you, tokenise you, treat you as lesser because you are different.

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.

He renders me dead or alive with the flare of his attention.

Once he withholds sex from me, I am allocated an audience with him three or four hours once every fortnight.

the woman I am obsessed with kisses the man I want to be with for the first time, with her then-husband in the next palatial room.

damn everyone cheating

Later, when she falls out of favour, he recasts their meeting as her hunting him down and forcing him to be with her and telling me he regrets ever having met her.

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

plagiarism i know my internet quotes

We are all thirty now

thirty 🧍🏾‍♀️ u thirty acting like this fawk

he devours one half-naked woman then the next. I sit obediently next to him, waiting for him to notice me.

save urself

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.

mixed relationships we enter into with white people,

ur not white,,, where’s ur mom,, tell me this isn’t biographical

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?

i mean what’s the other option? assimilation? i think talking about our culture and experiences fosters a sense of relation and understanding among people, it’s a recording of thoughts and history but then again im arguing w a fictional 30 yr old obsessed with an irrelevant man whore so

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.

I want to be fucked and my boyfriend wants to make love.

He tells me he doesn’t believe the way I want to have sex is who I truly am.

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 wan...

say anything you want, call me whatever you want, anything, you can do whatever you want to me. I want to be the cause of his loss of inhibition, I want to be the reason for his loss of control.

I want him to render me stupid when he comes close to me, I want him to believe he owns my body, to tell me, in graphic detail, all the things he wants to do to me, to tell me what I feel like when he’s inside me, that I’m tight and wet and only for him, I want to be spanked and bitten and objectified,

we take in stories on Instagram where you cut between dozens of peoples’ days within a minute, keeping up with the narrative of the way their lives are presented—

You hear people you don’t know, in living rooms you’ll never be invited into, preparing meals you’ll never eat.

when she slams the front door I think, fuck, work is going to be awkward tomorrow.

bruh

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!

mmmmm

He 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.

simpering

My mother speaks a colonial French called Creole,

creole,,, the way u act get more insidious by the second

I’m not even afforded the dignity of being called a girlfriend. The reality is, I am part of a chaste harem, a supply of crazed female attention he likes to disturb when he’s bored but it hurts to admit this to myself so I put it out of my mind and pretend it is only the two of us and pretend he actually desperately wants to be with me

We’re a relationship-in-waiting and it’s only he who has the ability to fire the starting pistol. Every day I think, this will be the day, he will tell me today he’s going to leave all the rest of them and be just mine.

In order to fend off intimacy and body block commitment, he plays all of us off one another. What we know of one another we know through him. It’s clear he doesn’t view women he is romantically interested in as people and we treat each other the same 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 d...

We will still turn on each other. What we should have done is unionise bu...

I live on edge and my entire life’s energy is spent combing for clues, comparing his words to his actions and trying to track him online through the ...

His absence becomes intoxicating and feeds my obsession. The distances mean I can fill them with whatever projection I want him to be. In my fantasies he could be the perfect boyfriend and the perfect father for my unborn children.

when you miss your man that’s not your man but can’t trip cos he ain’t your man but he is your man

and that’s real-ika

Hatescrolling her Instagram unleashes something corrosive in me.

I have to position myself as the friend because it seems it is the only spot open.

It seems like the only real thing this man gives me is her.

i have another dream. i am in his kitchen with two men and we are talking of work. We all stand up.

lowercase i

Resentment pinpricks my eyeballs.

you’re both talking over one another, you’re not even listening to each other.

It’s as if I have sliced them both very thinly. I have ruptured normal scheduling, I have disrupted their comfort.

They stop interrupting each other. I am literally high. I have penetrated into her universe and it makes me swim, makes my temples throb.

Unknown furies lodged deep inside my rib cage make me stand up abruptly and to cope with all the additional energy, I hop from leg to leg, my phone an anchor in my hand.

It takes me a long time to realise that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.