I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I do so much for you, what the fuck does she do for you except take your money. I think, I am young, I have eggs, I can incubate life for him, I can give him a better life, one filled with sex and threesomes and babies and laughter and pride.

by having me at his side he would look better, why wouldn’t he pick me. I do not hear he is releasing me.

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.

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.

I am driven into the hands of some other force inside of myself who hasn’t ever had the reins before. I am not sure if it is malevolent. I do know it likes to know things by any means necessary, it is ruthless, and it will put me in danger in order to be satisfied, it is as sinuous as the inside of a mouth, it has muscular strength like a tongue.

I want the man I want to be with to change. I send him podcasts, quotes, screenshots, videos nudging him in the direction I want him to go in.

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...

If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we...

I am interrogating the man I want to be with about us as if I were interviewing him (which afterwards he says is a format he likes.)

I can’t trust what it is I am going to say. At this point I am trying to come across as chill? 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? And I want to be a cool gal? So I am without boundaries and watchful instead.

I do not want to be awake to my deadness. I want to remain asleep.

inextricably

The man I want to be with and his wife become a warning sign for the kind of life I could be in for. I could turn out to be the man I want to be with in all the ways I don’t want to be, living a dishonest life, sneaking in affairs and my boyfriend turning a blind eye to keep me.

The desire to be an artist is something that burns inside of me all of my life but I can’t get it out,

overwrought

Meeting him is like meeting the infinite, the point at which mystery is revealed. He is nothing I have ever encountered before.

OK but fr fr, what if all it is, is I am intoxicated with his money, the ease his money could provide any children I bring into the world. He is breathing access to the type of social mobility I want and can provide instant generational wealth.

fr fr

If I stay still then maybe I won’t disturb the sadness which lodges itself between my organs, thickens my blood and keeps me tripping downwards into circular, repetitive thoughts.

This feels like witchy things that women do to ensnare men, but I want to ensnare him so here I am, I do the witchy things.

She tells me I will go from being in the middle to being at the top of society. I take this as proof that the man I want to be with will be with me because he is at the top and being with him is how I will get there.

He plunges care and love into me but it only makes me hate him even more. Both of us pretend this part of our relationship is a bad dream.

dawg leave her

I just wanted to be kissed, I just wanted something adult to happen to me.

I am used to sex being out of reach, something out there, not regular but the only site of rebellion available to me because my parents didn’t want me to do it, so I obviously end up wanting to do it in order to have some bodily autonomy.

I am used to hiding parts of myself from my parents, and then hiding parts of myself from my friends, and hiding parts of myself from boys I liked, and hiding parts of myself from the society I belonged to that didn’t like the brown bits of me, and then hiding parts of myself from my family who didn’t like the parts of me that loved drugs and techno and staying out all night and sex and cocks and cunts and come and booze and freedom.

I am used to living inside of shame, I am used to being on the outside breathing mist up on the glass begging to be let in. I am absolutely primed for this affair. It is toxic and familiar.

We are more tender with each other after these fights, quieter as he recovers.

I wonder if he tolerates the fights because, in my remorse, I am gentle with him. I wait for him to come back to me.

Once he’s clear my mother says, you don’t want to end up like me. I couldn’t live without your dad but I’m not in love with him.

She tells me, when I look at you and your boyfriend, I see your dad and me, it’ll be safe but it’ll be stale.

I tell her how proud I am of walking in public with the man I want to be with, how I want to be seen with him, it’s a kind of pride I don’t have w...

she is a homebody, this lack of pride might also be a reason why she d...

My dad isn’t someone to show off, won’t make other women jealous, so ...

I realise there is nothing I can do that will make him break up with me. He should have been throwing me out but he doesn’t. In his small way he begs, and I know what it means to beg.

I’ll probably be accused of leveraging this relationship to get the status I want but if I can’t get it from having him, I’ll get it from telling you how I couldn’t.

As a teenager, I needed to be an ogre at home to frighten my parents so they didn’t frighten me.

If I breathed fire against them then I would scorch the earth around me to have some semblance of autonomy.

I amplified my rage to protect myself but then it was like I stretched my belly and no amou...

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...

The relationship with my family is so fraught that it is traumatic to share the same living space with them again. Years and years of resentment and grudges and misunderstandings roll like thunder under the carpet, the rain soaks the walls in the living room, the water saturates the ceiling.

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

It leads me to believe with dizzying certainty that when there is a man involved, and a rich one at that—especially with a dick like his—there is no such thing as a sisterhood. It’s every female for herself.

if i was a worm would you still love me

he doesn’t even like u as a human

What they say about women having a shelf life, everything they said was true, all the women who I scorned for inhaling the patriarchal ideas of a sell-by date, the ‘ripeness’ of women, the ‘freshness’, my mother who told me to pick carefully, they were right and now I have to make a concerted effort to stem the tsunami of fear at being imprisoned by my gender—which now means not having any control over the meaning of myself.

The man I want to be with is at an age where he should know better what he wants, but he doesn’t need to. The fact of his being a man means he is coddled. The world does not demand any self-awareness from him.

he can still say he might want children at an age where for a woman thi...

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

The world is built for couples. Even unhappy ones.

We wanted a man but ended up with a dependent.

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.