I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

She is more important to him than I am, and I have made no real impression on him. There is a whole other storyline unfolding with two main characters and I am merely the short subplot to aid the trajectory of their love story.

We are all of us engaged in a collective self-harm by trying to love him, seeking to be loved by him.

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.

The fervent, paranoid, obsessive behaviour exhibited from Trump’s base, which was given lighter fluid during his administration is uncomfortable for me. The searching belief nirvana is over the horizon, that all the pain we are experiencing now is temporary and the time and hope we have invested will be worth it, deifying someone to an ideology that might provide a framework for all the ills, real or imagined, in our lives remind me of the desperate, fraught, blinded way of combing the world for clues I am guilty of too.

His absence becomes intoxicating and feeds my obsession. The distances mean I can fill them with whatever projection I want him to be.

He looks at me like I’m a piece of meat and I like it.

Maybe the answer is not to buy less but of higher quality, maybe the answer is just not to buy things. The individualised, curated and careful consumerism they both espouse is like trying to solve the problem with more of the problem.

I want to believe that there is a hidden meaning behind what he says so when he tells me he can’t commit I think, he just means he can’t commit yet because the blind conviction of my feelings overrides his knowledge of himself and what he’s capable of giving.

Wanting to be an artist and being one are different. Perhaps I am just like everyone else and my disappointment is desiring to be special but not being special at all. Perhaps my life’s purpose is to square myself with this.

I am used to being on the outside breathing mist up on the glass begging to be let in.

I think we all went in expecting something rather different to what we ended up with. We wanted a man but ended up with a dependent.

Except I’m not anything to him and nothing to myself which is why I stay,

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.