I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

really I wish something bad would happen to him. Not death exactly, but near enough that he realises it’s me he should be with.

I inexplicably start to heave with sobs because it hits me that, if he did get sick, no one would know who I am to him, he’d be rushed to the hospital and the nurses would say, only family at this time and no one would call me, not a mutual friend because we have none and people in his circle do not connect us the way the woman I am obsessed with is connected to him, 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,

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. I won’t get that moment.

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.

unbothered moisturised happy in my lane focused flourishing

chronic online-i might be this girls problem

He says with pain slashed across his features, if she wants to see me, I will see her, I’m not sure if we’ll sleep together but she still has a hold on me and I don’t even know why, I’m not even into white girls.

I stare across at Brockwell Park. I am on home turf, kissing a man who isn’t my boyfriend who I wish was my boyfriend and he is wishing he was kissing someone else who he doesn’t want to make his girlfriend.

She tells me things about my writing and my work. I find it hard to believe her when she says there is no future here with him when I can see it so fervently. She pulls tarot cards for me but by then I have decided she is a hack. Once she signs off, I text the man I want to be with and ask him when he’s free to meet.

😐

The man I want to be with is one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met and this is part of the reason I am so intrigued by him.

bruh pls spare me where is the development

but even when it hits me he won’t change, I dogmatically believe he will. When he tells me he can’t be with me, I am indignant.

enjoy telling him I don’t know how he’s got through life tricking people into thinking he’s smart, I enjoy telling him he’s thick. I enjoy behaving like his therapist because it means I have power and a secret knowledge that puts me slightly above him.

I enjoy his deference to me when I talk seemingly authoritatively about race as if I know how the world really works because it makes me seem more important than I actually am.

I don’t understand how he can be such a mystery to himself,

When he hurts me (un)intentionally by telling the truth or not enough of it, by doing too much one way and not another, I enjoy telling him he’s a cunt and a bastard and I hate him and he’s evil. I scream, he’s a misogynist, he hates women, I see it as a quagmire at the centre of him and he says, yes, I do, I hate women. I blame his mother. I say your mother is unable to praise you and so you seek the adoration of women around you. He agrees with me. He enjoys hearing my insults hurled at him like Molotov cocktails, almost closing his eyes in ecstasy.

normalise saying, for a yt person, after complimenting yt people

real-ika author might win me over w these chapter titles

This is whiteness. It is everywhere, pervasive, its assumption that it needs to be there to sanitise, to give order by creating a hierarchy. Whiteness on its own is empty, it is forceful in its insistence of its peculiar quality of absence. It refuses to be described in and of itself and instead it needs some other thing to define itself against.

Whiteness is nihilistic, it is the distilled form of the death drive and because it has a cold separation to life, it believes it alone is able to categorise, is the one to get rid of the excess, the one to do the accounts, to formulate the systems that regulate the chaos, to decide who lives or dies—it alone can shoulder this responsibility it made up for itself, so anxiously adrift it is without a purpose. Time must remain static so whiteness’ power can be maintained by any means.

Whiteness and white people make themselves pervasive yet think of themselves as separate. It is parental and condescending in tone—it invented the concept of race conferring upon itself—a freak genetic accident—the values of intelligence, advancement, beauty, 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. The simplicity of this belief is in tandem with its terrible violence. Whiteness believes that all things need an organising principle and by chance it has the answer—the principle it offers is itself.

I am jealous he covers all of their bills. I want to be with him so he can take care of my bills. Although emotionally he is a child, he is a provider.

I press the man I want to be with like an ingrown hair buried in my inner thigh, I press him until it hurts.

the grinch is an edgelord

i’ve never seen the movie but i believe this

He will delay and say, give me a month to think about it, give me two, which as an avoidance tactic works for a while and then you realise, this is it, there is no place to move forward. There is not much beyond the small amounts he can give.

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.

stop teaching men words

when he is levelled with a question around the lack of women evident in his career, he says the nature of conflict is that it is about war and war has traditionally been fought by men against men.

He has a clever answer for everything and now frames his work as questioning patriarchal power. He has more recently been on panels with women and been the only man—I have no idea what makes him qualified to be the only man on these panels. I erupt with rage and at nothing other than my phone when I see his concerned face in response to their opinions, his making space for them to talk, deferring to their experience and downplaying his own.

I think what would these activist women think of him if th...

he nods respectfully making notes as they talk and answering their specific points. I am seething.

I 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,

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.

girls be like are you sure are you sure are you sure are you sure are you sure

are you sure

relax, I was just pulling your leg, as if I’d turn up in Scotland like a beg. He emails back, fuck, you had me, and I reply, did you really think I would, he writes, I wouldn’t put it past you to do something like this.

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.

I am alone. I take a black Sharpie out of my bag and carve my initials into the black. Below it I write, fuck you, and I walk away. When I exit the gallery, the security guard holds the door open and I smile.

The woman I am obsessed with says she is sad and worried about the state of America and I think, it’s a funny thing to feel sad—or feel anything about racism because what a luxury.

hmmmm ?

It has never demonstrated the soaring values the American founders myth insists upon. Believing this falsified story, saying, we are capable of more, this isn’t us rather than that bone-tired weariness of, we always said it was this, we always told you but you didn’t believe us when it happened to us but you believe it now it is happening to you—is Exceptionalism.

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.

He cannot bear a woman to have control over him and sees our sexuality as a threat, set out purposefully to destroy him which he must evade at all costs. In his failure to experience and take responsibility for his own sexuality, he seeks to nuke the woman yet simultaneously casts himself as the victim so the woman he is destroying still takes care of him as she is brought down. You collaborate in your own destruction.

He’s aware of it all but doesn’t want to change any of it.

Men have all this power and this is the world they have created, where everyone experiences only slivers of snatched joy.

When I pointlessly argue and fight with him, I feel like I am fighting the very structures of the old colonial forces, where he has, holds and takes, and I give, offer and ask for nothing in return.