I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

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.

it is rustically referenced to make you believe you are cleverer than you are and you deserve to be gently handled.

I wonder if my crumpled is the same as a rich person’s crumpled.

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

She is better in bed than me. She has his number which means he wants to be easily contactable by her.

Even though he is cheating on his wife and I am cheating on my boyfriend

She is more important to him than I am, and I have made no real impression on him.

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.

don’t know why I need him to be loyal to someone, perhaps so I can say to myself that he could be capable of it with me one day.

He starts cheating on her three years in and twenty years later, hasn’t stopped.

all these women waiting on his word and it energises him, propels him as he moves out into the world, conquering it with his ideas.

him. 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.

How does performing vulnerability and being performative to win the stamp of authority that whiteness brings, warp our private, most secret self?

he doesn’t believe the way I want to have sex is who I truly am. I instantly lose my confidence and submit myself to what he thinks I should be.

he must be right, I don’t want to be treated like a whore, he’s right, it isn’t me.

dismiss the knowledge he deletes all evidence of me from his life calling me ‘Laura National Trust’

It is not convenient to the story I tell myself, of our star-crossed and obviously meant-to-be kind of love.

I retreat into dreams of delusion where I think the man I want to be with is trapped, doesn’t know how to leave his wife, really desperately wants to be with me.

look at the reality of the situation, which is that he is not going anywhere and we have all been deeply betrayed.

her captions address him directly, which feels ridiculous as he’s not even on the platform so instead she gathers the praise meant for him, for herself.

She says she has five jobs but when my dad had to work a second job at KFC to pay the mortgage, he didn’t tell us or anyone because there was no pride in having two jobs so why can she say she has five, unless she has none?

tells me he’s thought about what he’d say at our wedding, he thinks I’d make a good mother. When I hold him to his words, he tells me he doesn’t remember saying them

In public we would all decry this behaviour, we would shout, dump him! to our friends.

The comments under this post all express urgent, alarmed concern for the sacrificed dishcloth and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

bed. I am fixated with his capability to have done this and how it happened on the weekend he cancelled fucking me to fuck her.

will buzz and buzz, I want to invade their living space, I want to destroy the hand that ticks, one comfortable second to the next.

look at the last time he was online as a sign he is alive and breathing. It is a betrayal. He is connecting with other people, just not with me.

don’t fall in love with me, he tells me, I’m dangerous.

He’s changed his phone number and not thought to give it to me.

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

i don’t want him to leave her, i want him to stay put.

two privileged white women talking about care of the Earth and the land as if they are distinct from the white people who are racist and those who have pillaged this burning, now volatile planet of ours.

I have penetrated into her universe and it makes me swim,

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.

emotionally supporting you, I do so much for you, what the fuck does she do for you except take your money.

I need to keep hearing him reject me.

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.

I want the illusion rather than my self-respect.

I am owed profit, growth, a reward as I have given so much, I am an early investor, I deserve some payback for my loyalty. At what point do I get a return on my investment?

He is not interested in making me come as he feels it is my responsibility to make this happen for myself.

What I enjoy is having the full glare of his attention on me uninterrupted for four hours, which is why I want to keep doing it.

I now understand this need to penetrate and disrupt his home life.

I am tense as I wait for his verdict and a resentment towards this woman stews, why can’t she fucking let him go, it’s over for her, it’s my turn.

because you kept arranging to meet, you were never forced, you initiated all the contact.

I want it so no one else can have it.

nothing. I want to succeed where all the other women failed, and it is not so much to win him as it is to defeat everyone else.

I doubt he has ever said this to the woman I am obsessed with, they were so sexual, why have I been moved to the realm of family?

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.

He tells me how funny it is to like two women who are so opposite to one another,