Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

After this incident, he develops thoughts of self-harm, which are sharpened by his awareness that rejection, loneliness, and sexual frustration are nothing compared with institutional and historical oppression. His sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness.

boys really feel about their dicks the way

Podcast subscriptions are a numerical measure of loneliness, she thinks.

forgivable humanity,

I am now the most important man on earth, because the enormous umbra cast by my cock over the earth’s surface, and the renewable phallothermic energy it generates, and its surprising ability to convert carbon into greater cockmass, have reversed climate change—therefore, keeping me hard is a matter of planetary survival.

My individual spermatozoa are so tall and charismatic that they’re elected to lead the G8 nations, ushering in an era of equitable prosperity and nuclear disarmamentation, and they all have hot boyfriends too.

And it’s almost endearing how people are so transparently their child selves online, how irrespective of content or sophistication the subtext is always Look at me and How dare you, and the sub-subtexts Who am I and Save me.

The only thing worse than opinions is facts.

Shrieking into the void is more fun when you’re also someone else’s void.

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.