The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

whatever it was, even if it was weird, because he was rich, it was fine.

What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?

It was then that I understood that these encounters were fundamentally about loneliness, flashes of intense intimacy so awkward and fragile that they had no place in real life. The men I met online were not secret initiates into a world I could take part in, but refugees from the world I already knew too well.

On the one hand, it was a relief to know that what had happened to my own family was not singularly shameful, but I was also taken aback to learn that the majority of people found their lives so dreadful as to need to enter a near stupor every night in order to continue living

How weird it was—to cut off the sexual organs of plants and give them to each other.

knew that sometimes people found themselves in a moment. They found themselves pressed up against themselves inside of a claustrophobic moment. And you couldn’t see how it really was from the outside.

I was not confident enough to tell him what I myself barely knew, which is that being true to yourself, even if it makes everyone hate you, even if it makes people want to kill you, is the most radical form of liberty, and when you make contact with something as electric and terrifying as the unadorned truth of yourself, it burns away so many other smaller forms of bondage you weren’t even aware of, so you find yourself irradiated and unencumbered. That there is something holy in that kind of stubbornness.

You don’t know what it is to grow up in a country that has only ever been at war. To do active shooter drills in fucking kindergarten. To grow up knowing you’ll never make a living wage. You’ll never own a house. That the whole game is rigged, and you’ll work your whole life and have nothing to show for it.

Who needs a house like this? Who needs a three-car garage? Who needs a master bedroom big enough for a couch by a fireplace? Who needs fucking LaCantina doors that slide so the whole front of your house is open? And the answer is: Everyone. Everyone wants their own personal fucking mansion, and everyone is willing to do whatever it takes to get one. We’re like rats at the feeding machine, pushing the lever, confused when all we get are shocks. And

Why did we want so desperately to be seen? I saw her. My eyes were full of her. But it wasn’t enough, and I was no longer hurt by it. The way she loved me wasn’t enough for me either. Maybe love would never be enough. Maybe it would never do what we wanted it to do.