The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.

I have always felt that it would be good to be a man. Not only have I always wanted to have my own dick—just to walk around feeling that weight between my legs, that power—but I have longed to escape the time pressures that my body has put on me.

I had never wanted a baby. I never felt the desire so many women describe that suddenly hits them. Having just turned thirty-eight, I had been waiting and waiting for that desire to overtake me, but it didn’t.

I missed having that open space before me in which to decide.

There was an affected comfort in these casual insults, as if to say, I know this man is mine. He isn’t going anywhere. I could take him or leave him.

I didn’t want to be seen too closely or I might have to look at me too.

but how natural was too natural? I had gotten so natural that I was naturally dead.

I wondered if they ever got annoyed by the waves’ constant lapping, the daily irritation of their own gradual erosion.

I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it—when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer. During these times we are moving forward in the void, forgetting we are going nowhere, so the void feels less daunting.

The trick, I now agreed, was you had to remain unattached to any future wishes or vision. You had to never get attached to any other person or expect anything good to come to you, and that was how you fell in love with life and how maybe certain fun and good things could happen to you. They only happened as long as you didn’t need anything from anyone. As long as you didn’t take anything from anyone or give any part of yourself away to another person, but you just sort of met the other person in space, good things could happen. You had to fall in love with quiet first.

I told him it was because the sex made me feel such powerful things. But really what I felt was despair: that this was all there would be, forever and ever and ever, until of course it wasn’t.

The hunger in me suddenly felt bottomless. It scared me a little.

“I guess the gaps are sort of a reminder that, in love, things get disconnected,” I said. “People just disappear.” “Maybe they leave room for something more infinite,” he said.

I wanted to be like this girl, not dependent on anyone else to be okay. Slutty, but an island. She wasn’t pretending to be content without anyone while secretly wallowing in misery. She genuinely didn’t give a fuck.

I knew that what I wanted was something that couldn’t exist. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t something I wanted.

That was the part nobody could handle. Some people tried to shove things in them: their own narratives, biographical crap. I was pretending that nothing had ever been there in the first place, so that I wouldn’t feel the hurt of its absence.

I wanted to be immune to time, the pain of it.

No one really wanted satiety. It was the prospect of satiety—the excitement around the notion that we could ever be satisfied—that kept us going. But if you were ever actually satisfied it wouldn’t be sati...

The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try...

Maybe I didn’t need someone else to define me, but oh, I still wanted it.

How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was?

Seeing myself through the eyes of a projection, however uncomfortable the judgment, made me feel safe in a strange way. It was like a box in which to live: a boundary against the greater nothingness, to think one knew something about what others thought of you.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over nature, there were better versions of them in control.

Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment.

How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe.

Was it ever real: the way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?

What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn’t everything you could possibly do all right?

But death wasn’t gentle. It was a robber. It stole you out of yourself, and you became a husk.

The dead girl among many is not worshipped. I wanted to be the lone dead girl or nothing at all.

Like Claire, I too wanted a thousand cocks. Didn’t we all just want a thousand hard cocks attached to the bodies of boys who have died for us, still warm, to plug our infinite holes? It was a whole way of life, really, the pursuit of that satiety.

lmfao

I still didn’t love myself. I wasn’t sure how or when that was going to happen. But maybe it would if I continued to stay alive.