Patricia Wants to Cuddle

by Samantha Allen

Desire can be such a heady substitute for self-confidence. But she’s trying to stop searching for herself in the eyes of others—especially the dead eyes of a greasy-haired gym junkie.

Is this all there is waiting for Renee? Love, maybe, and then decay? Her body catching up with the rot in her brain?

This is not where she pictured herself at this point in life, but then again, she had always had trouble even envisioning being alive past thirty. All the possibilities she had seen in her own circles—getting married, getting divorced, raising kids, aspirational suburban grilling—each of them felt tragic in their own right, all equally dead ends. Something inside of her had always felt like it was decaying, doomed, not long for this world. But telling that to anyone would make her feel crazy.

Abortions, Vanessa has found, are a lot like affairs: lots of women have them and lots of women judge you for having them, and often those two groups of women are the same.

That’s what you get, though, when you cast women who look like supermodels but who have the same level of self-esteem they did when they were metal-mouthed middle schoolers.

How can she go back to that world? How do you return to civilization once its artifice has been exposed?