Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

When he does go out in public, he avoids looking at any woman’s face, convincing himself it’s respectfully uncreepy, but aware in the gloomy sub-basement of his mind that the real reason is because if she is beautiful, then the image of her face, and the question of how he might have introduced himself, and the beautiful life they might have had together, will torment him for days.

Finally, it’s happened: they’ve killed him. He might as well be dead already. It is now certain he’ll never get the one thing he’s ever wanted. All because he internalized and accepted his unwantedness, languished too long in mealymouthed consolations, let himself be deceived into pitying those who would never pity him. Nothing can be done.

Lying around afterward, she configures herself in Neil’s negative spaces, back-to-chest, nose-to-neck, mindless and snug as a martini in its glass.

The friendship, it seems, has been quietly ruined by its reckless redistricting.

I’ve seen it, the obvious glee you take in talking about how awful men have been to you, and now it looks like you’ve decided to make me one of them. I guess you believe that’s what makes you sympathetic, or you need it to lend gravitas to otherwise ordinary dissatisfaction.

All she wants is some credible vouchsafing of love and admiration

Every toast she has to write, and gift to register, and plane ticket to book, and male stripper to hire, and escape room to solve, and manicure to schedule, and stylist to suffer through, and group photo to mug for, and self-written vow to applaud; every baby to shower, and onesie to knit, and birthday magician to tip, and baptism to pretend to take seriously—each weathers away a thin unreclaimable layer from the enamel of her patience.

Interesting punctuation here

Stale loveless boring endless dread: not even of death, merely the petty fear of becoming older and ever less likely.

Then she thinks of all the other pathetic podcasts by and for people like her, with the same tastes and worldview and craving for recognition, and the same impulse to commodify them, varying only in degrees of shamelessness, polish, and reach, the outcome in every case to make their audience even lonelier.

She clenches her eyelids and presses her fists into her temples, as if to physically crush this false conviction that Neil is in some way realer than everyone else, that he is somehow the axis of her life and the only one who can “save” her and his opinion of her constitutes her entire worth, having staked exclusive mining rights to her happiness, because of the irreplicable circumstances of how they knew each other, when at the bottommost level of truth she knows he’s just . . . another . . . fucking . . . guy.

After many years she will see the whole saga not as a tragedy but as the beginning of a horrific process of self-understanding, at the end of which she will accept that whether or not it has been her choice, to be and feel nothing will be all that has made life possible.

Everything is so encouraging and underwhelming that it feels like nothing has changed—or rather, that what’s changed is everything but him.

his complicity neutralizes his claim to oppression.

is a cairn of shames, towered and teetering on his chest, that the slightest movement will lethally topple: not only the first-order shame of the straight gaze, under which his self-worth was based on their social norms, but the second-order shame of wanting to cater to these norms despite knowing better; and the third-order shame of knowing that even if he tried to cater to them, he’d still fail; and the fourth-order shame of trying anyway.

Ignoring Julian, he gets fully dressed, puts on his ugly sandals, and makes for the door. His syrup feels like blood. His air is full of head.

it is a pacifier, a syringe of oblivion.

For all people claim to hate being stereotyped, they love doing it to themselves, even better when someone they admire does it to them, they’re dying to be issued their personhood so they can pursue it without hesitation, hence astrology and personality quizzes.

Oh, I loved it. All the talk of bodies and spaces in a place that lacked both. The give-and-take of giving takes where no one could take what they’d give. How everyone was represented by their best jokes and worst opinions.

But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.