I'm a Fan

by Sheena Patel

I fit into spaces which already exist and contort myself to fit a shape which has been allocated for me. I don’t own anything.

Or perhaps what I want is the disposable cash to be able to buy a painting but actually what I want is something much harder to attain which is to know what paintings are worth buying in the first place combined with the innate belief I deserve to be in surroundings that need paintings on the walls before I am able to feel at home.

There aren’t just red and white and brilliant white, they don’t have names like ‘brave beige’ and ‘mermaid sheen’, no, these colours announce themselves like a discreet sommelier at a nice restaurant who murmurs excellent choice. Here, beige is split into bone, pigeon, tallow, wevet—beige is not beige in this kind of taste-country, it is rustically referenced to make you believe you are cleverer than you are and you deserve to be gently handled.

My chest is creaking. I silently start to pack the picnic I brought back into my bag looking down trying to think of a last-ditch way to turn this around in my favour and force him to profess his undying love for me and give me the promise I need which is his hand in marriage. I know he has to leave because he has to be home with his wife before dinner.

If I stare hard enough maybe I can disappear it. I sense a tingling in my abdomen, like teeth sprouting out of gums in my stomach, little headstones marking out every injury.

I am not embarking on the start of a love affair which gets me out of my relationship and into one with him where my real life can begin. Even though he is cheating on his wife and I am cheating on my boyfriend and that means neither of us is trustworthy, he is already in love with someone outside of this equilibrium of entanglements and feels no loyalty to me, which then also reveals I expect special treatment from him of some kind, a selflessness no one in this web is giving anyone else.

There is a whole other storyline unfolding with two main characters and I am merely the short subplot to aid the trajectory of their love story. I am not a main character in this ensemble romcom of betrayal, I am a supporting act. He is in no danger of falling in love with me. I am usurpable in my own life. I am on a lower social stratum to the two of them and in this way they are equals and are better matched. No one would think to invite me to a private view at the Royal Academy—I am no one. I’m a fan and because of this, I can be cut out.

Relationships are sites of winning or losing—not connection and safety, but dominance and subjugation. Every gesture, word, act, opportunity, kind face, sexual advance, dismissal, rebuff, celebration, rejection, invitation, advancement, smile, look, step forward or step back and every offered fee has to be regarded first as an insult, a threat or as a potential act of violence which is slowly neutralised. It is the only way to live a life, to regard anyone coming close as the enemy, as someone who is guaranteed to take from you, tokenise you, treat you as lesser because you are different.

He renders me dead or alive with the flare of his attention. He is like this with all of us. He is a void and there is no way to fill it.

He says this was a stressful time for him. Through all of this, he has me waiting in the wings and three weeks later he starts something with me.

How can he know me when he’s so committed to misunderstanding me. Once he withholds sex from me, I am allocated an audience with him three or four hours once every fortnight. He affords us no privacy—strained and formal, we always meet in a public place.

He starts cheating on her three years in and twenty years later, hasn’t stopped.

We are all of us engaged in a collective self-harm by trying to love him, seeking to be loved by him.

He is everywhere and lauded and everyone wants him. People say his name like they’re spending someone else’s money. The proximity to power is too much to resist. I make my pact and immediately, I say yes.

I thought time stretched out forever, I thought I had the rest of my life to make this decision but 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.

It is overwrought, longing, like a teenager, like a crazed fan, filled with the kind of fervour which insists the pop star looked at you from the stage. The letter arrives at the wrong house, the address he had put in my Uber app had only been an approximation. The letter is open by the time it gets to his mum. His mum reads it and calls the man I want to be with in a panic. She asks him, who the hell is writing a letter like this and sending it to me for you. She is afraid. She asks, how did this person get my address. She tells him to call the police. He tells her he has a stalker, it’s being handled and not to panic.

What is the line between being vulnerable and prostrating yourself for a system that won’t recognise you?

The onus is never on the system to adjust its hardness, it’s on you to shape-shift and acquiesce.

Do I weaponise my own pain and cause harm to myself by revelling in that pain, nurturing it, putting myself in danger to encourage it and then working it over by verbalising it for display, to show society, I am a human being and I feel pain just like you. Is this violence turned inwards, a knife in my hand, the weight of my body grifting down to the hilt?

For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness—by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen. If we remain part of the masses, we know we will suffer the double injustice of institutional neglect by the police or the justice system compounded by the original crime—like with our murder (Stephen Lawrence, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry but also too many others) or a history-making miscarriage of justice (the Post Office scandal and Grenfell), the threat of deportation from the Home Office (the Windrush scandal) or stripped citizenship (Shamima Begum) for making a terrible mistake when you were a child. Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely?

Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neo-colonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being ‘in service’ to our ‘communities’ by ‘taking up space’ as if by being true to ourselves, we’re doing everyone else a massive favour?

Relation, it’s not really such a burden to spin these pornographic trauma ballads for a little bit of status. We are saddened by the knowledge that nothing really collectively changes but reassured by the thought that it did for me on an individual level, as we backstroke across the vast placid sea of righteous superiority.

We are able to ask, who am I, a question our parents were never able to ask themselves—but have we ever stopped to ask, what exactly is it we want to gain access to?

I instantly lose my confidence and submit myself to what he thinks I should be.

I publicly mock his inability to fuck me, to dominate me the way that I want him to. This makes him less of a man in my eyes and so contempt oozes out of me when we are in front of people.

Why the fuck did she come back to my room. She kisses me to take the edge off my anger but I want more. I knock and slam and slap at the door to get her legs to open. She curls in a ball.

I want to get drunk with her, sweep her hair over her shoulders and tell her she’s beautiful and she’ll find someone else, that she doesn’t need him and neither do I. I want to get angry on her behalf and call him a cunt. I want to spill out of the bar, walk her to the station and tell her I’d like to see her again if she’d like to and she’d say, absolutely let’s do something next week, come over and you can meet some of my friends. After a time, we could say to one another, God wasn’t that weird we went for the same man? But we would forget that’s how we met because our friendship would go so far back and we would simply be happy we have one another in our lives. We have something real.

My feet dig into the too soft mattress and I’m falling through the gap between where I am and where I would like to

he’s not actually happy, he’s actually trapped, she’s trapping him and the way he is with me in my photos with him, he’s touching me and relaxed and we have our arms around one another in front of people, which means he loves me more as it’s obvious he’s happier with me.

There are no codes, there is only the tyranny of ruthless selfishness wrought by weak and inflated egos.

a surveillance which is echoed through social media and our governments.

The refusal to fill the space with objects but to move and reshape, invites chance and the unknown through negative space—because is this not faith, believing in what you cannot see? Is this not what invites God? An experience at its most powerful when it is suggested or alluded to, when you have to put the pieces together yourself.

Minute to minute I never know who I am going to get with him. Minute to minute neither does my boyfriend with me.

that faced now with someone who couldn’t bear to claim me, i forget i was ever desperate and lonely because i have been branded so searingly by love.

She is held aloft within a beloved centre which comes with class and money and status.

She says she has five jobs but when my dad had to work a second job at KFC to pay the mortgage, he didn’t tell us or anyone because there was no pride in having two jobs so why can she say she has five, unless she has none?

The reality is, I am part of a chaste harem, a supply of crazed female attention he likes to disturb when he’s bored but it hurts to admit this to myself so I put it out of my mind and pretend it is only the two of us and pretend he actually desperately wants to be with me and pretend he finds the situation between us as unbearable as I do and pretend he wants to resolve the situation because if I believe this then my chasing has a purpose.

It’s clear he doesn’t view women he is romantically interested in as people and we treat each other the same way.

I live on edge and my entire life’s energy is spent combing for clues, comparing his words to his actions and trying to track him online through the people I know he knows but have never met.

The comments under this post all express urgent, alarmed concern for the sacrificed dishcloth and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

It is a betrayal. He is connecting with other people, just not with me.

My race blots out my individuality quite neatly.

It further alludes to qualities she has that are innately hers by birthright and it creates a kind of frenzy around her from others.

she says she spent almost $100 on eight heritage apples and it is obvious she was unaware of the problematic nature of admitting this, which implies she doesn’t know the value of money divided by industrial bodily labour and time.

In June 2020 they post a black square and from then on, they post frolicky Black women in the company’s cottage core aesthetic and say they acknowledge they have to do better.

I wonder why no one questions her on the nepotism she benefits from, I see it all as one system, this self-congratulatory circle of back-patting and unaccountability, a circle of whiteness that commends their open-mindedness but the kind of open-mindedness that looks just like them, a hall of mirrors in a closed room.

will be something of note and care. I will be something to show off owning.

There is never a moment I think being this available is a bad thing for me. I reason, a main character would go, a main character says yes to life.

I think I am invisible and nothing and ugly and here is this very important person giving me attention.

I am very reluctant to kiss him but I do because he wants me to kiss him and I want him to like me and I’m curious as to where this is going to go but I’m not sure enough about him to fuck him so I kiss him.