I'm a Fan

by Sheena Patel

He stands in front of me. I want to hurt him. Are we building to a future? I ask.

I realise I am on a clock and it runs differently for me. I am female. There was never much time and I’ve wasted so much already.

The man I want to be with tells me that he can’t understand why I am so unhappy, I am a happy person, always smiling, he can’t imagine my being sad. So I decide to cry in front of him. I make a point of crying in front of him every time I see him, forensically laying out the innards of my sadness.

I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

(she says England in this very deliberate way, not mongrel ‘Britain’ or the ‘UK’, but England as if she has extracted the native character of the country that is mine).

It takes me a long time to realise that when the man I want to be with tells me he likes being seen with me in public what he means is, he enjoys what my skin colour says about him to other people.

I fantasise and fall in love with a version of him I’m not sure exists outside of my imagination. He is constantly failing in comparison to this person I know he could be. If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we could be happy.

Then I am reminded of how old she is and how single she is, how much she wants children and how far away that is right now for her, and I draw some comfort from that.

He would ask, did you come, and I would say, no, because I have never come with him, I never felt safe enough to.