I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

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.

oh okay

dick from someone who doesn’t care if you live or die

Lmfao the chapter titles

Even though he is cheating on his wife and I am cheating on my boyfriend and that means neither of us is trustworthy, he is already in love with someone outside of this equilibrium of entanglements and feels no loyalty to me, which then also reveals I expect special treatment from him of some kind, a selflessness no one in this web is giving anyone else.

Relationships are sites of winning or losing—not connection and safety, but dominance and subjugation.

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 way to have a relationship with the man I want to be with is through conflict. 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. The war is waged like morse code, needle-bursts of pressure and silence. He renders me dead or alive with the flare of his attention. He is like this with all of us. He is a void and there is no way to fill it.

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

lmaooooooo

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.

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.

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?

I publicly mock his inability to fuck me, to dominate me the way that I want him to. This makes him less of a man in my eyes and so contempt oozes out of me when we are in front of people.

He says, she’s not like you, you’re easy going. I don’t think this is a good thing.

and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

The thing is I don’t even hate-follow the woman I am obsessed with, I don’t follow her at all. I don’t follow her and I hate her—what’s that called?

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.

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

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.

Girl

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.

There is no shelf life for the man I want to be with like there is for me, there is no cliff face, he can be forever perusing.

The world is built for couples. Even unhappy ones.

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. When it comes to emotions, emoting or verbalising emotions however, he is frozen, he blocks and he evades. I am patient at first because I do not know the kind of intractability I am up against but even when it hits me he won’t change, I dogmatically believe he will.

The delusion

There is no space for expansive and evolving creativity, only insecurity and homogeny are fostered where straight men uphold one another through a homoerotic bond, or are complicit through silence. 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.

The man I want to be with wants you most when you do not want him, he prefers the chase. The point at which you become emotionally invested is the exact moment he loses interest. 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. 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. We all have teeth in our stomach for him. We are all sacrificed at the altar of his fear.