Call Me a Good Girl.

You are exploiting my emotions for your own pleasure and control. You’re fucking twisted and it’s Machiavellian. You know exactly what the fuck you’re doing. There's no loyalty to morality here.

Not my finest moment. 

What are you talking about?

He sent. Followed by something like:

I did my best to appease your good girl kink, but if you get my dick hard it’ll bark back.

Somehow or another (not really somehow I know exactly how I got there. I took the L train)  I ended up in this Bushwick apartment in the bedroom of a man with bedsheets for curtains, and the roaches of spliffs that littered his desk. Prescription pill bottles scattered throughout the room, and the dim light of a bedside lamp took me back to a time where I’d chain smoke cigarettes with this man listening to Joy Division in a Philadelphia frat house.

This reconciliation I knew was an awful idea, but couldn’t help myself.  I wanted to play with fire. I wanted to confront my past and quite literally straddle it to prove to myself I wasn’t the girl he once knew. Most importantly I think I wanted to stop bumping into him at the most inconvenient times in my neighborhood, and I was willing to pay my karmic debt, cut this cord, by sacrificing myself as tribute. 

Maybe you’re lashing out on me because of your relationship with your family, your father, and your history with the church, but I did my best to allow you the space to cry because I could tell you were backed up and it was honestly making me uncomfortable.

This is exactly what I was fucking talking about. I didn’t respond. He followed up.

You’re blaming me because you feel comfortable around me and that scares you.  So you say I do this and I do that. Loyalty to morality isn’t even a good sound bite bitch. 

Back to the morning in Bushwick that started this whole text ordeal in the first place. Okay yes he was not wrong. I was emotionally backed up. Afterall I was facing the first man I ever said “I’m in love with you” to, who responded at the time with something like “That fucking sucks”, who drunkenly told me the night before that he was fully in love with me at that time too. 

Maybe that was the reason I needed to revisit this situation. Maybe him apologizing to me for being an asshole about it when he was in Tokyo eight years ago wasn’t enough. Maybe somewhere inside of me knew that this saga together would never be done until I had him tell me what I wanted to hear back then, even if it wasn’t the truth. Maybe it was a lot of things. 

We were laying down on his bed, and he told me that this was a safe place. Which I naively believed because of our history, which also should have been a fucking indicator that it wasn’t. Told me that I needed to cry. Held me while I did, and in the middle of my sobbing I felt him getting turned on.

I didn’t even ask you what you were crying about because honestly I didn’t even want to know. I have this effect on people and I’m not proud of it. 

So I stopped crying, asked him what the fuck he was getting at, and shifted back to trying to find a level of power. This back and forth of “fuck you”, and “good girl”,  this transactional connection fueled by escapism that I’d conditioned myself to believe was romance or healthy connection held me hostage. Trying to figure out in real time why for the first time, I felt exposed and somewhat violated, but unable to stop myself because like him I was a fucking addict. Addicted to power, to chaos, to my darkness. I thought I was in recovery. 

In the middle of putting my hands around his wrists I recognized a pattern I’d been running away from but no longer able to avoid. The pain of confronting the fact that we never loved one another, we loved the thrill of trying to use one another to justify our own addictions. We fought our insecurities through each other and called it an attraction. The idea of love, the excitement of sex, was a placeholder to avoid facing our own internal chaos.

We romanticized harm. We wanted control not connection.  This realization followed me on my L train ride (with delays)  back to the East Village, and my subsequent walk crying through the streets of Chinatown listening to Sade. It wasn’t so much as the reality of this situation, but the reality of most of my past connections. 

What I mistook for intimacy had always been about power. Even the men I thought I loved, the men I chose, only cared about finding a level of power over me. They were willing to do absolutely anything to find a way to fucking exploit me, to emotionally manipulate me, to avoid dealing with their own bullshit. To avoid dealing with the fact that they too felt powerless in a world telling them who they should or shouldn’t be. It got them hard, to see me vulnerable.

Not because they wanted me to feel my feelings, or because they gave a fuck about my wellbeing, but because it was easier to fuck me, to force themselves to think they loved me when they could dominate me. When they could take me to a place of emotional submission without my consent, and then throw that emotional vulnerability back in my face when it was convenient for them. 

Maybe I was the same. Maybe I would never love anyone the way I loved my darkness, and maybe my good girl shit was a cover-up for the fact that I could only accept praise if it meant being exploited. Maybe I’d only be submissive if it meant I could use it as leverage to manipulate the male gaze for my own convenience, my own pleasure. Maybe I was so conditioned to being objectified, that I thought I didn’t deserve to be treated as human. Maybe it was time to face the reason why I’d never call a man daddy, because I felt it would summon the ghost of my own. 

Can we talk on the phone please? I swear I’m not trying to fight.

Two rings later he picked up. 

“Look, I'm sorry for what I said. I feel like it could have been expressed differently. After reflecting on this, I just feel like you knew exactly what you were doing to me and it hurt my feelings.” I said. 

“I’m actually not sorry for anything I sent. It made me feel good to say what I said and I’m not apologizing.”

I went to Bushwick one more time after that.