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"But why twenty-one?" I asked with some agitation, perhaps even with resentment. "Counting me, it will be twenty-eight rubles, not twenty-one."
It seemed to me that this sudden and unexpected offer to join in would be a handsome gesture; it would immediately win them over and raise me in their estimaton.
[...]
"But why? I'd think I'm also an old schoolmate, and, frankly, I resent being left out." I began to boil over again.
the most cringe one can possibly hope to ensure
I sat ignored by everyone, crushed and annihilated.
Good Lord, is this fit company for me? I thought. And what a fool I've made of myself before them! [...] The numbskulls think they've done me a favor by letting me sit at their table, they don't understand that it's I, I who am honoring them, and not the other way around.
[...] I was furious with myself but, naturally, she was the one who would pay. A terrible anger against her surged through my heart; I could have killed her. [...]
I text Josh, a guy from back home that I worked in a pub with. Joe didn’t want me to be friends with him because he knew there was something between us. It makes me feel giddy, as though what I’m doing is against the rules. I’m allowed to do whatever I want now. Josh responds with a voice note:
‘Now then, Annie Lord, tell me you’re out tonight?’
There’s something so hot about someone referring to you by your full name. It reminds me of being told off by a teacher. I listen to it again. I like how his thick Yorkshire accent curls over the Ts until they disappear, smooth as a beach pebble. Josh sends a photo from where he sits in the pub, gums shining pink through his smile, beer froth bubbles popping on his top lip. I message other nearly-sort-of-but-not-quite men and try to build some kind of scaffolding of attention that will prevent me from ever hitting the ground.
‘What’s he said?’ asks Moll, but Josh has stopped replying.
this is sad but not unrelatable
‘No,’ I laugh. ‘You look much better.’ When I hug her she feels like a wilting flower, one that keeps going even though there’s no sun. I want to be strong like Granny, but I’m not sure I’m made of the same matter as her. She’s iron and I’m something like dust.
i dont like this attitude ofc but it's still sweet
In ‘The Glass Essay’, Anne Carson goes back to her mother’s house on a moor in the North to try to repair her broken heart. In the poem, Carson remembers a conversation she has with her mum in the kitchen:
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
I don’t want to put it down either. I want to hold onto it until my hand burns. Until the skin peels away in flakes.
‘I guess you can tell how I feel about you at this point.’
Somehow it was you that said this and not me. It was a strange feeling, realising I was inside the moment I had been waiting for forever. Nothing could be as perfect as the way I scripted it in my mind, but it took on a more beautiful form in the harsh grip of reality. We were kissing and it was clumsy, our teeth bumping, our tongues pressing at the wrong times. It was too wet. But we carried on until blood swelled to the surface of our lips, until redness blurred outside lip lines, until your stubble scratched my chin pink, until jaws stiffened, until we were back at mine and there was lilac light seeping through the blinds, and it was morning, and nothing could get me out of my bed because you were in it.
We go to a bar and at first I don’t know how I’m supposed to be. I’ve never really dated before. There were just bathrooms at house parties and then there was Joe. I tell him I’ve just come out of a five-year relationship and his lips tighten shut and he says, ‘Must have been a real captivating guy,’ and I realise that’s not something you say on a first date. So then I change the subject to a fall-out I had with my friend a few weeks ago over not responding to her WhatsApp messages and he says, ‘Does that happen a lot?’ and I realise you shouldn’t say stuff that’s so personal. But I get better at being who he wants me to be. When I say ‘path’ he makes me repeat it back to him because he says I sound Northern, so I tell him other things about where I’m from that make it sound more exotic. That people from home say ‘me sen’, meaning myself. When I can’t light my cigarette he takes it out of my hand and says, ‘Let me do it,’ with so much conviction that I let him do other things I can do because he must like doing them. Like Google Map us to a bar I know the way to or explain how mortgages work. When he says he plans to learn choreography for the first dance when he gets married, like you see on all those viral Facebook clips, I lie and say it’s cute. Avoid saying ‘that’s weird’ when he mentions that Ronaldo’s his favourite football player. Parts of me slip away. I don’t mind watching them leave.
i dont like this :/
I get the ick – that sudden, slightly sick feeling where you find someone you previously thought attractive all at once extremely unattractive and everything they do is infuriating. Not because this guy got something wrong, but because he looked so pathetic when he realised.
He’s not the only one who gives me the ick. I get it because one guy waits for me to say ‘table for two’ even though he’s standing in front of me, because one guy says he ‘felt like superman’ when he snorted coke for the first time, because one guy begins a sentence with ‘the thing with girls, right …’, because one guy holds his cutlery between his fist and bites down on the fork when taking things off it, because one guy meets me holding an umbrella, because one guy’s legs are dangling off a bar stool, because one guy presses the traffic-light button and actually waits for the green man and I’ve already crossed over and am standing waiting at the other side of the road, because one guy has all this white stuff between his teeth, because one guy’s shoulders hunch upwards when he gets cold, because I accidentally imagined one guy wearing a dressing gown, because I accidentally imagined another standing naked in the bathroom waiting for the shower to heat up.
At the door to the house, I think again about how I could just say, ‘I’m not feeling this, sorry,’ but the more I rehearse the phrase the harder it becomes to squeeze it out. It’s like I have hot mashed potato in my mouth. In bed, he swipes past my clit like he’s scanning items on the Sainsbury’s self-checkout machine. Then, almost without warning, he’s inside me, moving in me with this aggressive circle motion. My brain rehearses the words I might use to correct him, how his face might break apart like a smashed plate if I did, how he might leave my room walking smaller. So I swallow those words back down, try to find other ways, moaning when he moves more in the way of something I would like, shuffling to different angles. But every time I just end up on my back again counting all the cracks in the ceiling as he draws those same circles into my cervix. It feels like someone’s rooting around in me for something they need to remove. After a while I give up and lie there, thinking of England.
lol