letter to a man wanting to be good
be punctual. not because its polite to be punctual. but because good punctuality displays a successful attention to the calendar, and any good man knows where he will be, what he must do, at every minute. the best will know down even to the smallest sliver of a second. because i am a bad woman, i am not so punctual. i sit in my room glassy-eye, frightened at the absence of duty devoted to the present moment. i stare at the wall and times passes. the kind of woman i am is the kind that will be buried in attics and basements let to rot with dust and fruit flies. remember where you left me? deep inside your closet?on weeks when time lurches slowly and then catches you so abruptly fast that you wake up all of a sudden as an adult thats-too-old-to-be-acting-like-this—i think that i must be getting closer to something like death. i heard that in some corners of the universe where gravity is so prevailing and large an eternity can collapse into a millisecond—and if you reach the edge of it, the opposite thing happens: a second pulling thin like a strand of hair when you run your fingers through it, and so you become sliced and prepared for different planes across existence.time moving backwards pushing you back into your childhood room when you tasted blood between the gaps of your teeth for the first time. time pushing you back until you were so small you could still fit inside the arms of your mother, and you were suckling on a boob learning what it meant to be hungry. learning what it feels like to be held—so closely you cant tell if you were never not just another part of her body—do you still remember it? of course you do. which is why you search for home in every strange woman you meet on a saturday night out. which is why even after all this, you still leave the left side of your bed empty, waiting for someone else to fill it. didn’t you know that heat isn’t enough to merge two cold bodies?but even if i tell you this you wont get it. you never do. and thats the best thing about you. how you keep driving the knife in where it bleeds. how you always let yourself be the last one standing in the room. when did you learn how to trick yourself into becoming prey? arent you scared that the animal inside you might grow so hungry one day you start gnawing into your own flesh with your teeth? after all, anything with a heartbeat, if hungry enough, knows where to find his meat.—but for now you are just a baby babbling in a room, listening to someone sing to you. time pushing you out of existence until you are a fetus curled up back inside a womb, groping at darkness, searching for light. time finding time, a start meeting an end.try catching yourself when you fall. you already did this before. when you emerged out of a hospital ward punching a chubby fist to the air, crying out to the world to make it known that you were here.
last week i made myself ugly againif someone pulls you apart, do you think you'd break evenly?i feel as though i am always carrying this rock inside my throat that can expand so large and wide that sometimes it shatters all the words i feel climbing up from the hollow of my stomach and then across the rung of each spine until i am standing with my hair wet under the bathroom sink and i feel it shrink back into a pebble again. what was i going to say again? i always forget.last week i stopped trying to be beautiful for men so naturally i grew fat and became even more ugly than how ugly i used to let myself be. if they didn’t like me then, then they surely will hate me now and even a strong gesture of kindness or a half-assed promise like yes-i-will-lay-my-tongue-inside-the-bed-of-your-mouth-the-way-your-girlfriend-hates-it isn’t enough to save what little affection they have for me.i have really become a woman. i know because even my dad barely looks at me when i call. he just averts his gaze to the ceiling and i had seen him do this countless times before, like when my mother is speaking to him, asking him why he hasn't clean the dishes and i stare up along with him to understand what he might be watching. but there is nothing except the spinning fan so i guess if you watch it long enough you might be hypnotized too, into this wonderful trance that plugs your ears and drowns out the room. this is a trick i learn from him and now when i am at school and the classroom starts to spin so quickly because i never learned to read the chalk dashing the boards in pale snow i just hold my breathe and tilt my head towards the ceiling. one spin, two spin, and a third is all i need to fade myself out of everything.today is friday and i am standing in the bathroom of a large white room. my week often ends like this where i forget where i was supposed to finish. the funny thing about life is that it forces you to start somewhere: at the first clasp of air, or maybe it was that time you realize you hate your mother. but then it never teaches you when to finish. you go through it half-stilted like a drunk idiot until you appear in the headlights of someone who has caught you. and then what do you do then? if you can't remember where you were headed towards anyways? was it home you were stumbling back to? or were you trying to run away?
strange men who watch me
i think i should be more afraid of the strange men who watch me. most of them tend to be middle aged. when i am out buying a coffee, or walking to the library, i will often catch their gaze: a dad on vacation with his family. a man in an ironed suit. in these few seconds, i feel as though i’ve been handed a very intimate secret no one else knows. his wife could be standing right next to him, tugging on a sleeve, saying “there, there, let’s go there” and he’d still have his eyes fixed on me. vacant. bare. predator hunting prey.i should be more afraid of the strange men who watch me because i know what it means to be a young woman on the streets. even i sometimes dream about my own body being gut open, sliced cleanly into twos. how would it feel to have my organs spooned out of hollow of my stomach? for my blood to be drained, pooling in a bowl by the edge of someone’s sink. i just know that it would be rotten, and i wish i could write an apology. about how terribly inconvenient the mess afterwards would be.but then again, i go through a lot of days where i am only half-awake. this afternoon, i tried measuring the space in front of me and i could barely make it. i tilt my head towards the sky and the blue seemed so close, it felt like the world could just collapse on me - - now, and i wouldn’t even bat an eye because at this point, that seems like the trajectory of things: to know the start but never the end. existing at an eternal intersection. which way, eve? which way?today the glance from a strange man might be the first thing that made me feel alive. there is nothing like fear to make you want to live again. if you ever feel too removed from the basis of life, you should just try this:bring a nail to your throat, how deep are you willing to slice it?
this is for the ugly girls.you know the ones: hair pulled back in elastic bands, face split open with blistering acne. they walked with an awkward saunter, bodies cleaved as they held an arm to hug the hips. in high school, i was an ugly girl. i kept my lips pressed in blunt envy, carried books to hide this terrifying truth, buried myself in things that made me “smart”—because at least that was a commendable excuse for a girl not wanting to be pretty.but i did, and i did so with a deep, aching pursuit.at night, i spent hours trying to perfect the wing of my eyeliner. i put on clothes i kept hidden deep in the closet, hosting a forbidden fashion show for outfits i'd never wear in public. i kept a small mental catalog of all the things the pretty girls wore: studying the way they clasped on their golden-hoops, scooping their braids into vintage claw clips. i followed the routine of beautiful tiktok girls with frustrating, enduring effort—replaying and rewatching the same videos again & again—but i could never do their makeup and hair with the same graceful ease, same daring comfort.my insatiable hunger to become them grew with such a palpable rage, it turned into an inward hunger. i heard all these stories from friends about being whistled at, stalked, as a punishment for being too pretty. at the same time, i witnessed a boiling contempt from internet men, who talked with a knowing bitterness about this untouchable force of women: where a man may have everything—intelligence, strength, power—but in the face of a beautiful woman, he too will surrender at a humiliating arrest.beauty was woman's great equalizer, and i felt like i was blessed with no such gifts. whatever pixie dust aphrodite sprinkled to make other girls’ skin glow with their warm halo had clearly dried out by the time she got to me. i was abstractly girlish at best. at school, boys apologized for accidentally slamming doors on me. in debate, where i was the only girl on the team, after our competition meets, members would start their debriefs with “and which hot girls did you meet?”when i attempted to join them in their circle of friends, they would all shuffle awkwardly—as if they did not know what to do with a girl like me: pickled-skin & frazzled hair, no soft or alluring physique. so i learned to practice silence, muting myself as a form of protective peace, because calling too much attention to myself would be like asking to be burned by the same rejection twice.when the pretty girl next to me finally began talking to me after 5 months of sitting together, i listened to her with a desperate devotion. she told me about the house parties she’d attend with her other beautiful friends, and the boys that she liked, was talking to, and that she could never dare speak to again. she showed me snaps from the same guys that would pass me over with an indifferent glance, and i'd witness a new side of pitiful likeness to them. in the pretty girl’s phone, men i was scared of seemed to crumble into small, pathetic versions of themselves—their texts reading like a metaphorical dropping to their knees.i wanted to live the pretty girl’s life, where a flip of her hair in the right direction sent the world into orbit. i listened to her stories with a religious attention, egging her on for details because i believed that if i just tried hard enough—to insert myself into the picture, validate her misgivings—i too, can keep a small piece of her to me.it made me feel “in” to nod with false understanding when she told me about these stupid, desperate men, who were always so eager to please, as if i too had the privilege of basking in this forgivable coldness, one that made grown men collapse at my feet.but at the end of each class, when we were swiftly excused, i'd watch as a small militia of men, who'll seemingly rise from the consciousness of nowhere, gravitate to her aid. one would rush to carry her bag, while another stumbled in flustered banter. i'd watch from behind, as they forced an invisible space between us—one that felt so large and assuming, that it felt undeniably concrete.
SEP 12, 2025
6:03 PM
diary entry 003one of these days i'm going to run away and i really mean it. i will take a few things with me -- one of those being a nice, pleasant husband -- the kind that animals naturally gravitate towards they warm up to me. the kind you catch boiling jasmine tea in the morning.in the last 3 days, i've been buried in my mental pits again. i'm living in my personal ring of dante’s hell, and it involves devouring at least 15,000 excess calories and feeling like a fat ass in bed, bloated to absurdity. i don't even like pizza and i will know it will make me fat and ugly . . . which means the internet will stop being nice to me. but maybe that might be for the better. sometimes it's really fucking hard to not be normal and witnessed constantly. people will be nice and sympathetic towards me (because there is always an endless supply of patience if you are pretty), but they don't ever “get it.”the truth is if i get another paragraph of “you got this!” i will literally pack another 5 lbs out of spite. when has this new age gay positivity ever worked on any addict? i mean, do you know one real alcoholic that was moved by some idiot telling him he “can do it?” of course he fucking can. addicts aren't so mentally stunted that they don’t know how to put down a drink, or snub a cigarette. but it’s essentially the same thing as pressing “i'm 18” when you're thirteen and just starting to jerk it. sometimes you just need to cum even when it means rotting your brain to do it.that isn't saying that some amount of optimism and self-imposed discipline won't fix me. i admit that a large fraction of my problems, if not all of my problems, can be erased if i just learned how to accept “no” with a good measure of maturity BUT the fact is that it's feels reviving, fun even, to keep entertaining my own mental ailments.life is so boring and no matter how much i commit to all these testaments about living balanced and zen, i just keep coming back to fapping it. frying my neuro-transmitters until i'm checked out on a friday night like an idiot. people are so mentally well-adjusted that sometimes maybe there is something that went wrong about me. i don't think i endured anything truly traumatic or hard, but i mean, there are moments of my life under close inspections that i guess, could have left some wound . but if i stall on that for too long, then i'll just become another kind of idiot, the more insufferable kind: the one that needs everyone to know about their "suffrage" so they can get a pass to acting like a narcissist.anyways, my question is -- how the fuck is everyone so mentally well adjusted anyways? i am stunned by my peers, who can have healthy lives and don't walk around entertaining any new bullshit. trust me, i've tried wearing my own version of a social chastity belt but i can't help that i always have a raging hard-on that likes to keep itself exposed to the public. look at me everyone i'm retarded. Har har har.last year my therapist suggested that i become an inhouse patient. what they mean is that i should admit myself into a mental institution. of course i refuse because even i dislike coming to my own awareness that i'm not normal. if i just keep referring to it with humor and irony, it becomes ever the more permissible. but now that i'm thinking about it, it might not be such a bad thing. at least in the ward, i can sit in a circle with a similar group of open idiots, twiddle my thumbs all stuttery and gay -- and then stand in the hall, tapping my feet to invisible music like a bafoon.i’ll even become a real sex addict, slipping into another patient’s bed midday to have audible sex on a squeaky twin-size bed mounted on wheels. close enough to a dorm if i'm unconscious already. it will be great and feral. after all, the best sex always happens when you're jobless anyways, and not afraid of looking violent and deranged.
SEP 12, 2025
diary entry 002i have a roommate who lavishes herself in expensive creams, soaps, and products. every few days, i come back to our apartment unit, and i see her wrestling with a new package, as tall as her body, unwrapping another shelf of the best luxurious goods, with all the words that would make a vegan explode with orgasmic bliss: “cruelty-free”, “organic.” this isn’t to shame her. after all, i share a similar excitement in watching her unwrap her gifts - - but it has made me think, about how unlike the two of us are.compared to her, i’ve always frugal, painfully so, to the extent that i’ve peddled between two grocery stores several times just to compare their pricing on broccoli. it took me five years to upgrade my skincare, and i am excruciatingly precise about my grocery orders, timing them perfectly to ensure that there is no excess. in fact, i even commit a bit of passive stealing sometimes: i’ll save a meal by grabbing fruit from the pantry at the queer center, or pretend to be a christian at easter dinner.e-girling though, has given me a new experience of being spoiled. last week, my amazon wishlist was cleared twice by a generous donor, who signed himself off as “simp” when my gifts delivered. for the first time, i stopped agonizing about whether it was the right time to buy new boots or concealer, even if both were rotting away, and instead, saved myself the mental agony by ordering both.it's a very liberating feeling, to regain this sense of girlishness - - where i am lavished with gifts sent from the kindness of men. it felt like christmas every day : when i arrived back to my suite, i’d comb through the pile of packages by the door, and scurry back to my room with at least one or two in my hands. granted, they were all of a similar kind (skirts, necklaces, and cute shoes) because men were far less concerned with eye-sensitive mascara than they were with how cute my ass might look in a short skirt. it’s whatever - money is money, and if it were me, it would have taken at least another year of mental battles for me to place the same item in my cart.though i have no complaints about living half my life like a greek goddess, sometimes the gifts send me a particular kind of pain. this week, a man asked me when i was going to update my wishlist, and it took me three days to do it, after several kind reminders. this was free money, i’d think to myself, and yet, i wasn’t any more concerned with it than i would be with anything else mundane. i’ll look around my room and see the unopened skirts i got last week. i still need to try them on, i’ll think.i still need to try them on.growing up, my room was plain and white and the only real thing i bought were books. i would decorate my phone with beautiful pinterest boards of lovely clothing, adorned with ribbons and bows, and convinced myself that this was it - i was going to wear this. and to some extent, i did -- i make a bigger effort towards the way i dress now, as in, i'll occasionally saunter in a skirt if it's the right weather and place. but i resort to the same rotation of clothes each week: a pair of low-rise jeans and my mom's blue sweater.i still spend my time entertaining these men for their money. i swear it’s the stupid fucking dopamine. the hit of getting them to spend a little something on me. money is such a great fucking thing because people are always talking about how hard it is to make. i remember being eight and my dad saying to me “eve, once you start making money, you’ll know why i'm like this -- why i'm not easy.”and he’s right. even though the gifts are essentially free & so are the cashapp sends i get for being passingly pretty, there’s a panic that grows inside of me if i start to think about how temporary it feels to me. the people around me are planning to work on wall street, and i am lying inside my room, listening to a man talk about how he loves jerking it to me.i want to write because it’s the only thing that feels real to me. if i can’t write or do anything real, then the next best thing would be to do something sustainable, i guess, like law or banking. so that when i am 30 and the men that proclaim their undying love to me graduate onto the next young girl -- at least i’ll have something here. a home. a husband that loves me. a daughter to call mine.but most of all i just want to make something real. something happen here. i don’t have long in my short, short life. if i am lucky, i will have something like 75 years, and i’m almost 25% the way there. i believe that the best things in life are infinite - - like art, or love that keeps you swimming up to the surface again. i constantly feel like i’m trying to search for light, and the world keeps collapsing itself on me. i end each day, tired like an old dog from all my classes & thoughts about the future that i can only fade back into sleep. only to wake up the next day to do the repeat.my pencils are untouched & the notebook is blank & tonight the moon is large and round. it stares, longingly at me.i feel as though i’ve promised it something.
SEP 11, 2025
diary entry 001every night at 2:00 a.m. i watch a man run on the streets. it has become my favorite past-time activity : as the hour nears, i'll start feeling a hot kind of frenzy, the kind that sends me wiping the kitchen counters clean and dusting the sofas in preparation of his wake. then i will dim the lights until the entire room is a pale black, and i will climb onto the end of one sofa-arm, perching behind a wall of translucent blinds i bought just because of him. and right around the hour, he will appear, with a religious consistency, jogging aimlessly under the halo of the victorian street-lamps, his silhouette moving between shadow and solid before he turns to disappear around the corner. in those few seconds, i am always enchanted. it feels like something profound has happened.last week, i was crouched behind the curtains again, my eyes studying the clock. as soon as it struck two, i heard him, the slow pace of his foot, his labored breathing marching up the hill. i watched, with the familiar excitement that always possesses me. but as he reached the midpoint between the two ends of the street, he began to do something odd. pausing as if he had been suddenly struck by some mysterious gravity, he stops under the floating ring of light. and then he turns to stare, directly at me.this almost catches me off guard if not for the fact that i had been prepared exactly for this. i mechanically flicker a wave, and lift up the ceramic mug i keep, for these rare occasions where people notice me. but instead of a reciprocal nod or a shy wave, he just continues to stare - - vacant and bare - - as if he were a predator observing its prey. and then he started off again, one foot in front of the next, before submerging back into the dark .i have stopped watching him since.
my roommate has an internship this summer at goldman sachs and i hate her for it. every evening, she listens to a new podcast - between some ceo and a young male talkshow host, both of them seated on casual armchairs, as if they could be in our living room, right now, having this conversation about the fed.i tried it once during my second year of college. i folded myself neatly into power-suits and formal shoes, and i marched my way up to networking events where i spent my time twiddling with a toothpick stabbed in salami. it didn't make any fucking sense. none of it did. the way we would stand, in tribal circles worshipping some bank analyst. and then peck on expensive european cheese."and what was your favorite part about being on the team?"
"the people, truly."so i gave it up. the way i do with all things that even slightly irritates me. sure, i could have been like her - - my roommate, and sucked it up. attend all the meetings. grab coffee. talk about how much i love the company protocols i even use it to masturbate.but instead i didn't. because deep inside i really do believe that i'm an artist, which means that i would rather live pissed poor on the streets exercising my hobby, instead of being on wall-street and jerking the management team.
return home?