Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

one Hollywood bullshit factory was equal to any other.

didn’t want to mourn. I didn’t want to accept my loss—not only the loss of communication, but the loss of an idea that my mother was going to be the one to change. It made me feel like a loser. It meant I had wanted something and hadn’t gotten it, that I’d been, in some way, rejected. It meant my needs were too big for this world.

I always blocked her image out. I felt ashamed, as though it were my own mother I was fantasizing about.

mommy issues?

was her daughter and had menstrual cramps.

disturbing

Mommy wanted me! She was seducing me, and she didn’t even seem the least bit ashamed.

I loved being the innocent one.

that sold the fake Instagram followers we purchased for our clients.

I wondered what I would have done with all that life if it hadn’t been defined like that. The freedom seemed enormous, monstrous.

ooof. mental health issues really be like that

just coolly have a burrito at rest on her desk, no obsession, no fear, a sane food woman, a woman to whom food was only one facet of a very expansive life, the burrito simply a prop, a

trifle to be toyed with, a second thought, a third thought, even.

came. It seemed that as long as I wasn’t

actually having sex with a person, I could get off to them. But once they embraced me it was over.

It was exquisite, like drinking a neon airbrushed rendering of a fruit punch island.

as though my mother and I were friends, great friends, as though I were one of those daughters who said, Oh yeah, my mother is my best friend. Those women were upsetting.

I wanted to “improve her” like a project, make her more fashionable. It was not so much about goodwill as it was about my own fear.

People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively—films, Netflix series—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irresistible

My wish for that mama had always been a response to an absence. I didn’t know how to think about a mama in terms of presence.

I rolled over onto my stomach and put one of the pillows between my legs. I was the Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of that fucking pillow. I was Adam, and the pillow was my rib, or whatever. From that pillow, I could create my dream woman.

her depraved sexuality reveals some of the deepest things i fear about my self - like taking advantage of people - haunting how this dimension of self hatred stretches for (crazy) (women)

“Everyone was up in everyone else’s business. The women were always secretly taking attendance.”

I imagined googling, How to make a golem fall in love with you. Maybe that’s all that prayer was anyway—a cosmic google. In that case, any iPhone could be a synagogue. I wished I could FaceTime with Rabbi Judah.

I was so quiet and aware of our being there together, like that, that any micromovement either of us made became a loud broadcast: the twitch of her finger, the sound of her swallowing. I swore I could hear my own blood. The movie was no longer on the screen but between us. Then, suddenly,

If I did not love Miriam, if it was purely attraction, then I felt that I would never know what love was—and I did not care to know. And when she left, I got down on my knees and touched my face to the ground. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said to who knew what. I wasn’t even sure if Jews prayed on their knees. But I was so grateful.

What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.

She had long ago implanted herself in me at the cellular level, spread into my organs—my brain, my heart—until what was hers and what was mine were indistinguishable.

classic narcissist

There was a love that had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were propagating that love. It was radiating out my apartment windows, through the city, across the canyons, over the hills, and into the night sky.

I wanted a love that was bottomless, unconditional, with zero repercussions.

“Oh, my daughter,” I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.”

She nodded at me, not like a person she had known, but like someone who was a friendly passerby—looking at her and her babies in admiration. Neither of us stopped.