I Can Be a Better You

by Tarryn Fisher

woman’s heart was an awful curse. She’d take him back, but probably remind him of his failure for the rest of his life. That was the nature of forgiveness. It came with a price.

“Humans are monogamous creatures. We stray when our happiness is threatened. Happiness is tied to survival. We feel as if we are failing if we aren’t happy, especially when we open any social media panel and see our friends hashtagging all the good things in their lives. It’s all fake. We are all more in limbo than we are happy.”

We were products of our earliest experiences, replicating the ways we were taught to love, and fuck, and interact with humanity. Some of us broke free of our pasts; some of us weren’t that clever.

It’s not women who make my dick hard; it’s my ability to control their emotions.

Maybe I was overreacting; maybe I was punishing him for something. Not being there enough for me with my father. He was trying in his own way—making sure Mercy had her bath at night, bringing me a glass of wine—it just wasn’t good enough for me. I was selfish that way, wanting people to bend and give me the love I needed, not necessarily the love they knew how to give.

My rule was if you stick any part of your body in my mouth, there better be an orgasm in it for me.

Sometimes you get this gut feeling that something is wrong. It sits in your belly like a sack of hard rocks. You can’t forget it’s there, yet you sort of learn to live with it at the same time. You still don’t want to be right. You’d rather tell yourself you’re crazy, become an alcoholic, cry yourself to sleep every night. Anything but face the truth … that you are right. That he is indeed cheating. Since when did it become easier to be crazy than cheated on, you know? It’s just nicer to be crazy than to be unloved.