pitying the loner virgin brown girl, alcoholism-ish, and down to fuck
"hey wanna be friends with benefits? hey wanna fuck? dtf??? wait what's verse"
My first “official” kiss (and I say that lightly) was when I was about 19-years-old. It was cold and dreary, similar to the gloomy weather outside today, in the West 4th street train station. The food we ate was salty, and it was when I realized I was not a huge fan of dumplings after all. Or of this date.
It was the first and only date I’ve been on since then. I remember scrolling through Tinder, a typical introduction to queerness as a baby gay. We messaged each other and bonded over trashy lifetime movies we liked before I knew it, we set a date. I was surprised and slightly taken aback but overall in awe of how easy this was going.
After 2 hours of her talking about her ex and how shitty her mom was, I decided it was time to go home. We walked to the train station and before we parted ways, she bent over and kissed me. I remember puckering my lips and squirming as if I sucked on a sour lemon, the same analogy I used to tell my friends when I got home. Later that night, I decided to nip it in the bud and told her it was nice meeting her but we should just stay friends. A few hours later, she sent a bitter text to which I responded that perhaps she shouldn’t talk about her ex so much on a first date. We haven’t seen or talked to each other since then.
But 4 years later, my mind shifts back to what she boldly said to me after I rejected her. How she easily saw that I lacked experience. Four years later, I still stand in the same place. And this time, it’s much clearer to me than ever before.
The other day, I was at a bar in Bushwick with a friend. Right before our failed clubbing attempt on a weekday night, we were down our second margarita drink. I sipped it, sealing the alcoholic drink by licking my lips. We drunkenly laughed away about white hipster men, our deepest sexual fantasies, and more.
I gulped down the last sip. Sour.
“I just really want to have sex,” I say, tipping my head back. We laughed.
“Really?” she says, almost as if she was shocked.
I spread my legs in a dramatic attempt to show how clearly horny I am. I grab my breasts, “I just really want someone to suck them!!”
We howl in the pink lit bar. I tell her how I want someone to desperately hold me and kiss me. To devour me whole. She caresses my back while I go on and on about my fantasies. Every so often she lets out an “awwww”. I stop and looked at her, puzzled.
Did I say something wrong, I ask myself. She looked as if I told her someone died.
Then it hit me. She’s pitying me.
I bend over and say (perhaps a bit too sternly but while also laughing. Okay maybe passive-aggressively), “I’m okay. You don’t need to feel bad for me…I’m honestly fine.”
She flinches back and snaps herself out of it, reassessing what I had said. Perhaps even processing why I didn’t want her to reassure me. Or to pity me even.
I go home later that night and wonder “Do people pity me? Have I been living small? Is my life small? Am I small?”
I wonder about all my friends and how they had traveled the world, slept with different people on their wild adventures, and claimed themselves into sexual positions while I listen to their stories before going home and searching up on Urban Dictionary, “what’s a verse?”
I would hear their stories and think about how the farthest I’ve traveled by myself was to Massachusetts and I was there for less than 48 hours because the second day I was away, my father cried asking when I’ll be back home.
I questioned if they see me, and think this girl has not lived at all. She has not known the sweetness laying beside someone’s naked body, hungry for each other’s taste, the sourness of heartbreak, being held by someone you love. She has not experienced any of these, so how does she live?
Do people look at me like I’m a defenseless fawn, naive of the world? Inexperienced?
So for the past 48 hours, before I fully realized what I was actually doing, I decided to wreak havoc on lesbian dating apps. “Friends with benefits? Down to fuck? Fuck?”
I locked myself in my bathroom away from my mom who was preparing iftar, sexting random women, not entirely sure if I was actually enjoying it, and trying to carefully craft a reply by thinking of Wattpad fan fiction I read as a teenager and movies I watched.
For the last 2 months, I’ve been drinking each sip, sealing my lips with its sour taste, stumbling into my apartment, craving until the next time I could taste it again. The next time I could float again. Until I can escape again and again.
I felt my mind floating into the sky, my limbs loosening, and told myself that this is what the life of a 20-something-year-old should look like. This is what living it up means, this is what living life on my own terms truly meant. Yes.
While I craved each passing drink, I tried to escape and gain the courage to thrust into a woman’s body, thrust into the inner core of the world until eventually there was nothing left of me.
Perhaps by doing all of these things, I could prove to myself and others that my life isn’t in fact small. That by doing all of these things, I am somehow pumping into my life, into my existence, making its weight heavier and larger. Expanding.
But then I remembered that life cannot possibly or rather rationally be measured. And if it was measured, what would the ruler look like? Who is behind the ruler?
I remembered all the small moments in my life. Standing in the ocean with my friends, the beach beneath us, the sun dangling above us. The same sun my grandfather whom I’ve never met once stared at. Or Prospect Park, where I traveled every inch with my own two feet but still discover something new each time. The same park where I got high for the first time, where I fell in love with a girl who too eventually became addicted to the escape alcohol promises, where I had my last nervous breakdown, where my best friend and I laughed so hard until she threw up into the murky pond and laughed some more. Or how I’ve traveled the block radius of Coney Island Avenue with my mother, the chaat of dahi bara running down my chin as the nostalgic aroma of butchered meat and incense flies through the air. So how could any of it be small?
They run through me, pumping in my heart like a vessel. Then if my life is measured and equated by this intangible ruler and declares it small, then shall be it.
I am proud of this small, minuscule life. Because it is mine, and that is more than enough.
for every scary feeling I have, you have an article that makes it easier to carry