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So, she went too far: fine. All she cares about is how she can make him own his share of the blame. Confront him with her grievances? No, that’d look petulant and reactive. Could she respond with a simple “lol”? Being glib would give him an excuse to sever their friendship with equally low effort, and he’d probably feel more relief than guilt. Ignore him? Wounded, weak, mind-gamey, plus, her absence would be punitive only if he cared about her. Retaliation is impossible when he’s doing so well. All she can do is scrabble around in ineffectual rage like a cat chasing a laser.
omg girl just let it go
The date is powerfully bad. He’s so weenily deferential, over-groomed in his little blazer with a graphic tee and matching Vans and raw selvedge denim. He has that sort of lenticular baldness where you can see the thinning patches only at an angle. Unlike most guys, he does ask her questions about herself, albeit terminally dull ones of the sort you’d ask to calibrate a polygraph test—what do you do, where have you lived, what’ve you been reading lately. She pays attention only to gather cruel observations to pass on to the group chat later. As her date finishes describing his job at a low-income women’s health-care startup, she watches his teeth, which are too shiny, like they’ve been freshly zambonied. Veneers probably.
noooo girl dont do this
She has no intention of going home with this guy, until after three whiskey-gingers she starts talking about how bloated she’ll be tomorrow, which somehow doglegs the conversation toward her eating disorder, then her situation with Neil. The Feminist’s attention activates like some motion-sensing light. Though he’s been laughing at everything she says, whether she’s being funny or not, it turns out he’s the kind of guy who’s only fully engaged when she’s talking about her pain, who subtly steers conversations in that direction, because it furnishes an opportunity for him to demonstrate caring, which is not the same as caring. He goes mercifully silent except for Wow and That sounds tough. She is being genuine, knows she’s on some level indulging him and hates it. When a stranger’s pool cue comes too close to her face she slaps it to the floor.
ick
No surprise, then, that she finds solace in the simplicity of hate—how comforting it feels to hate Neil, how succulent the fantasy that the world’s full complement of injustice could be concentrated in one stupid guy, and that to hate him silently, invent ways to undermine him, conscript others into this project, was to increase the world’s fairness.
The main outcome of all this is to make Alison wonder if she should start a podcast, maybe one about owning a raven, though she has nothing to say besides Don’t. [...]
lmao. good joke
On one of these nights, attempting to break these self-soothing habits, which make her hate herself in an intimately special way, she adapts an exercise from her old therapist, who once had her write a list of things she liked about herself; instead she makes a list of everything she dislikes about Neil. He rejected her, for one. He’s not that great in bed, not so good-looking, kind of bad with money. One time he flaked on her birthday party, though he bought her a nice bomber jacket to apologize. The nipple-sucking thing was goofy too, wasn’t it? Could it mean he has mommy issues? But every guy has mommy issues. And daddy issues. As did she. In fact, reviewing her list, the problem is not only that much of the list applies equally to her, but also that none of it is that bad, so it functions as an index of his forgivable humanity, reminding her that it might’ve worked out, if she were a better person. What hurts the most is knowing that his rejection of her was fair.
girllll
After this, she lies in bed weeping with her lips pressed together, and finds herself submerged in a fantasy of her and Neil years in the future, spooning in bed in the dark, with her telling him in a low dignified voice about how miserable he’d made her when he rejected her, how alone she thought she’d be for the rest of her life, and he would take this seriously and say, I’m sorry, I couldn’t see what we had, the whole time I was really just scared because I knew how good it could be and how crushed I’d be if it didn’t work out, but it DID work out after all, and here we are and I’m sorry, I’m going to spend the rest of my life making it up to you, now he’d kiss the back of her neck, and she would turn to him super slowly with her eyes open in the dark and say that he never really liked her, and he’d say, You know that’s not true, Alison, you’re the best person I know, you’re the only person I’ve ever cared about, the funniest smartest person I’ve ever met, and your body is so fucking hot and TINY and sexy, I just know you’re going to be a huge success one day and I’ll be there to support you the whole time. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry sorry sorry and then they would fuck. In this fantasy she is also the only woman on earth, so he would not be able to leave her even if he wanted to, and even if she was the worst, she was also the best.
The film reel ends there and she reenters her body back in bed, always already alone, ruined by how infantile and self-serving her fantasy was, moreover impossible, since she knew she would never get Neil to love her, or receive an apology from him, or ever hear any of those nice things from anyone because they were not, any of them, true.
By the time Alison arrives at the lovely bucolic farmhouse she feels like a submarine at crush depth. She’s early, and awkwardly loiters at a distance, surrounded by tea lights and easels cheekily displaying the couple’s blown-up social media posts, to observe the ceremony she wasn’t invited to. Despite her titanic pregnancy, Cece’s arms are no thicker. With short tender secular vows and an elegant handfasting ceremony, the newlyweds stammer over their happy tears. Alison would have cried even if she didn’t hate them. She’d been good, she hadn’t made any trouble for him, and this is where she ended up: there was no reward for being a mature adult who forgave and worked on herself. She rubs her numb fingertip when they kiss.
you're KILLING me
Kant realizes it sounds like he’s fishing for compliments, and that in doing so he might find the lake empty. He apologizes and stares at his stupid face in the sideview mirror, getting sucked into an emotional gravity well where he pities Julian for dating such a loser, and resents Julian for pitying him, and pities himself for being pitied, all of which cancels out into silence.
As much as he appreciates the support, he doesn’t actually want Julian to like him for his niceness or intelligence. He’d hoped that being in a relationship would somehow make his self-worth feel less concentrated around cartoonishly yucky sexual degradation; yet six months in, neither of them has acknowledged Kant’s obvious avoidance of sex, because he can’t or won’t specify his needs, being convinced that he is always in debt and on probation, that Julian’s assenting to date a stammering moon-faced pornsick Asian virgin in his thirties was already asking too much, and any extra demands would only risk losing everything, plus what could be more pathetic and off-putting than begging Julian to please pretty please be terrified of his cock. And on top of all this, Kant is basically someone who, in his normal life, wants monogamy, stability, even kids someday, a life entirely incompatible with his hideous desires, so wouldn’t it be simpler to refrain from indulging them, lest they get their roots even deeper in him? If Julian hasn’t brought up the sex problem, it’s probably because he’s fine with not having sex with Kant, and who could blame him.