Two Three Three: Characters

A lovely friend in the Upper Midwest wrote this a few days ago:

rambling thoughts, now that I’m off vyvanse. Feel more clever, creative, but also difficult to channel this energy.

heading to Denver at the end of the month for a work conference. it’s fine.

falling hard for a boy who’s probably terrible for me- but the way he nuzzles my neck in bed, whispering how beautiful I am! the way he slings his arm around my shoulders and gazed at me with soft eyes. he’s gorgeous, can keep up with my brain, but we enable each other. “Do you want to go to the bathroom?” “I’ve already cheated at this point, so let’s just take our clothes off”. I’m riled up just thinking about his nearness.

I want to consume him, wrestle my fingers into his hair, feel his thighs intertwined with mine. it’s a lost cause, this craving. Nothing good will come of it. 

we stay up till dawn, listening to Russian synth pop, trading key bumps and tequila shots. his lips next to my ear, urging us to be better, to not keep going. But I always want to engage and go further.

this yearning is doomed: everyone tells me to be careful, to not get too close. I am willful and powerful and never say no. just try me, tempt me with a good time. I never say no to a dare.

I want a love the eats at me, a love unfurling in my lap. something dangerous to others but satisfies my wicked energy. 

I’m sitting in my office (door ajar, legs apart), thinking about him and only him. right now we could be dancing in darkened rooms, hipbones interlocked and mouths pressed firmly. I am obsessive, I’m possessive I know. but don’t I look good with my ripped fishnets and fading lipstick? Does he not want me like I need him? 

I despise the tuttering of others, their hushed judgments. Let me run wild with this boy, it’s all I’m capable of right now.

I read that and sighed. It's been a long time since a girl has written something like that about me.  I'm trying to decide whether what I feel is jealousy or envy. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to draw a distinction between those two things.

I know that I do feel empty and useless when I read her message. Girls have written things about me in the past. At least one made me a character in a short story she wrote where her surrogate has a teen affair with an older lover one Baltimore spring. I haven't been to Baltimore in a thousand years, but I was flattered, and I loved the description of the two characters sitting outside at a table by the harbor, the girl trying so hard to look sophisticated and open to seduction at sixteen or seventeen, the older man trying to introduce her to Thai food. I felt thrilled that she'd put me inside a story ,that she'd created, a story that was so obviously about things she wished she'd done.  I remember that when she read me a draft of the story we argued about whether "seducible" was a word. If it wasn't, she said, it should be. She remembered walking through Baltimore when she was sixteen or seventeen aching to be thought someone who could be, should be seduced.

One other girl wrote about me--- again, so long ago now. She quoted something I'd said to her one night, something about how her body was something I wanted to explore, about how her body was like a map to an unknown country. She quoted that at her blog and then asked, Why has no man ever said that about me before? I read that in my office the next day and I sat there at my desk, thinking that here was a beautiful girl who thought I was worth writing about, who thought what I could say had value.

Those things don't happen any more, and haven't for a long time.  Growing up, I'd always thought I'd be a character in at least a few stories or novels. That was vanity, true, but it was also something else. I think that in my younger days I took it for granted that if you knew literary people you'd end up as a character in their stories, that you'd be in at least a couple of short stories by age thirty or thirty-five.

I'd like to think that I was valuable enough--- or at least interesting enough ---for a lovely girl to write about.  It's been a long time since I could look into the mirror and imagine being someone a girl could think of as worth writing about.  It's been too long since I was able to imagine having any sort of effect on a lovely girl at all.

I'd like to inspire doomed yearnings, to inspire hunger.  Those days are likely enough gone, though. I'm not someone who'll be a character in any lovely girl's stories or fantasies. Here we are though, the hopeless and barely-reliable narrator of my own story,