Something fishy
“Miriam, there’s a limp dick in my kitchen, and you know what I usually do with limp dicks in my kitchen?”
I yell at the top of my lungs and listen. No response. It’s Sunday morning, 12:45 to be precise, and my flatmate Miriam is still sleeping away, having discarded the empty shell of yesterday’s escapade on the floor of our kitchen slash dining room slash storage for all the scum that regularly gets washed ashore thanks to the mighty waves of couchsurfing. As I dismissively touch the naked thigh belonging to the above mentioned empty shell with my slipper, he wakes up and stares at me like a newborn would stare at the world unfolding around him. He tries to cover himself pathetically with a pillow. I scowl at him and lift my pajama top to show him my pierced tits, just to make a point. Then I walk over to the stove and start making frying eggs.
+++
I identify as asexual which means I experience no sexual attraction to human beings whatever their gender is. As a matter of fact I don’t experience sexual attraction to any other mammals or animals in general not even plants or fungi. Sometimes I feel like people would be less shocked about my sexuality if I told them I wanted to bone the EIffel Tower (such people exist, I’ve seen the documentary about it and I sat and pondered about it, but had to conclude that I am not one of them).
My flatmate Miriam is definitely not asexual. In fact, she is the definition of non-asexual. She wants it all the time, with everyone and in all those funny little ways. I find this charming. I am constantly trying to give her new ideas about the crazy shit I hear people are getting up to these days, but it always turns out that she has already tried it. Nothing in the “Cards against Humanity”-deck would take her by surprise. Sometimes it is difficult to keep in mind that ordinary people want sex in this obsessive, ridiculous and all-consuming sort of way, but hanging out with Miriam and occasionally stumbling upon naked bodies strewn around the apartment helps me accept that truth and move on. We also have this sweet cuddle-buddy agreement, and I can’t wait for her to wake up, because my cuddle drive is out of control today. I hope her spooning techniques can help me clear out the nuclear fallout from yesterday night.
+++
Falling in love is a bitch. I can’t even bring myself to describing it. I do hope I’m not in love this time.
I hurl a glass to the floor.
The proud owner of a limp dick jumps up and starts hastily getting into his clothes. He slams the door. Such an asshole.
+++
In any case, I am not really in love with anybody at the moment, I keep telling myself. It’s all about the effing cuddle drive. I don’t have a sex drive like most people, but I do have this insatiable desire to be held and petted like a giant baby sometimes. Miriam had been working some crazy additional shifts the whole week, so I didn’t get any cuddles out of her, which explains why what happened yesterday happened.
So yesterday night I had this overreaction to this random dude putting his arm on my back with a pressure that said: “You are valued. You are good to touch.” Or maybe it said: “I wanna bend you to my will.” I couldn’t really interpret it that well because of all the beers we were having. The five of us were finally done with a group project, and we decided to celebrate it in a local bar. I landed next to him, and at some point he got all touchy-feely. It was probably a bit chilly near the window, so he asked me why I was shivering. And then he kinda kept patting my back the whole evening.
What the fuck did he mean by touching me like that and stroking me on the back? Does he do it to every girl? I failed to keep up with the image of a cold heartless bitch and punch him in the groin for having neglected my boundaries without a verbal consent of any kind. I felt weak, and I seemed to enjoy it.
+++
As Miriam stumbles into the kitchen scratching her greasy head I manage to wipe out the silly smile I’m wearing. Like I am trying to cover an effing scar or something because I seriously don’t want to be interrogated and laughed at by her. And anyways, I’m only in love with his back rub. I don’t know the first thing about him. I’m only gonna see him once a week, I can manage.
“Put your slippers on, there are glass shards all over the place,” I say in a nonchalant manner, “Jesus, this guy is such a clutz, like seriously, I can see why you threw him out of your bed.”
“It didn't though. He fucking left. I had no idea he left to the kitchen. All because I called him the wrong name.”
“Haha, it’s your early onset Alzheimer’s again.”
I love pulling her leg, gets her by surprise every time.
But Miriam is not smiling. I’d say she kinda looks embarrassed, but then it’s Miriam, she doesn’t know what shame is. She fakes it sometimes to make a point that she is an obedient and responsible member of the society. I wait for a fake outburst of shame, but it never comes.
“Can we like... cuddle today?” I ask trying to sound as casual as possible, but failing.
“Sure. Six o’clock? I need to run some errands first.”
+++
It’s 18:23 and I’m lying in my bed biting my hand like some little whining bitch in heat. I have tension enough to make the whole house implode, but I’m still waiting patiently for Miriam. I should have had a whole harem of cuddle-buddies in case of crap situations like this, but there are reasons why it’s only her. I list them just to have something to do with my mind:
Miriam is awesome at cuddling. She knows exactly what I like.
Miriam is a girl, and I am never romantically attracted to girls.
Miriam won’t bring it up to someone and ruin my badass reputation. There’s nothing wrong with being a softee person, for other people. For me here is.
Miriam is not going to stop being my cuddling-buddy, even if she gets a regular boy- or girlfriend (which will never happen of course, but there is always a theoretical possibility). She’d rather ditch the poor idiot than give in to their unreasonable demands of exclusivity. It’s not because I have a special place in her heart or some sentimental shit like that, it’s more like a principle: Mariam does what she wants. Deal with it.
I’ve been trying to read a book or write that stupid essay for Marine Vertebrate Zoology, but I just couldn’t help wondering what his hand would feel like stroking me on my head? What about cupping my cheeks? And seriously, what if he just accidentally dropped his pen on the ground and stroke my outer thigh with his shoulder? Would I feel an electrical charge?
I keep focusing on the fact that I’m only attracted to his touch, not his whole person. My crushes tend to be really strong, and I can usually see one coming. This time it’s completely not like that, because I have absolutely no fantasies about talking to him, meeting him randomly on the street or saving him from some dramatic epic shit like drowning or suicide. I have an unruly fantasy, and it just keeps pumping catastrophes into my mind. But this time it’s different. I don’t care about this guy at all. I can even repeat his name to myself without blushing. No. It must be something else.
I hear Miriam’s keys in the door. I hope she has a good excuse.
+++
Twenty minutes into cuddling I cannot take it anymore:
“What’s the fucking matter with you? Why do you fumble around me like I’m some kind of Ming vase?”
I free myself violently from her clammy embrace. Miriam looks puzzled and rubs her hand as if it was an artifact whose magical power could only be restored by rubbing.
“Can you put some pressure in it, at least pretend that you care? I’m in a serious situation right now, and you’re just borderline torture-tickling me.”
“Ugh… I never know with you. First you want more pressure, then you punch me in the nose for raping you,” she makes quotation marks in the air.
Touché. I’m not all that violent, but just before me and Miriam became this starry duo of cuddling, there was one time when she started developing a full blown boner for me, because, like I said, she gets attracted to everything that moves – even the skinny flat chest of mine. And I sort of felt it coming, but I hoped it will pass, and then at some point she got all horny and ridiculous, and so I punched her.
There’s a very narrow line between cuddling and sex, and most of the people don’t even know where it is, because for most people both things are kinda pleasurable. And I guess in their minds one leads to another if you are with a right person at the right time. But try thinking about it in terms of your family (unless you are incestuous): how would you never touch your father or mother? Like you can still be very intimate with them, but not in a sexy way. Miriam crossed the line that time, I drew some blood. No big deal. I totally forgave her, and she learned her lesson.
I don’t feel any remorse for crazy shit I did years ago, but Miriam still looks hurt and vulnerable, her lip quivers, so I pretend I am sorry for that punch and hug her. All of a sudden she starts sobbing as if I had turned on some secret faucet in her, and now she’s pumping gallons and gallons of tears onto my T-shirt. I hate it when she does it. She’s not even sad or anything, just full of emotions, and I have no idea which. Her body becomes limp and bloated like a whale carcass, and I’m having a hard time trying to keep her from collapsing on top of me, because there is a significant weight difference between us. She doesn’t even realize how egoistic she is acting, but then again she doesn’t know that I’m in some epic shit myself. I hate the feel of a wet T-shirt on my tits. What a mess.
+++
At last Miriam regains speech and tells me in this husky voice that always lingers after her bouts of hysteria, that she thinks she’s in love with some guy. I get seriously pissed, because what the fuck? Ok, it doesn’t happen all that often, but then again, it’s not a fucking tragedy. She’s one of those curvy things that apparently is all the rage on the boyfriend market right now, so she can totally get him to like her and they will live happily ever after. I see no problem.
I tell her that I might be developing a crush of my own (even though I am definitely not), just to rub it in her face. See: that is how normal people deal with crushes. They ask for hugs. They don’t become a puddle of tears like some three-year-old in a tantrum.
Her whole body is still shaking, and she tells me she cannot cuddle with me as usual, because all she thinks about is him, and how unattainable he is. She met him a week ago, at a grocery store where she works part time, and she had been taking extra shifts in hope of meeting him again, but as of now she has no name, no number, no nothing.
“He probably doesn’t even live in the area!” she exclaims, making a dramatic face.
Sometimes people puzzle me big time. Miriam can get any dick she wants, and yet she got herself fixated on some guy she only met once. I keep picturing how she hands him a beheaded salmon in a paper bag in a slow-mo sexy way and then proceeds to licking her fingers one by one while keeping intense eye contact with the guy, the salty fishy taste on her lips. I can’t help it, I just find those scenes intensely funny, but Miriam looks back at me like a hurt baby deer, and I wipe off my silly smile.
“That’s pretty fucked up, Miriam,” I say taking off my wet T-shirt and trying the drawer for a clean one.
She looks at me with an empty expression and nods in this intense and vague way. I am exhausted.
And then she gives me a sucker punch:
“What is the name of your crush then?”
And I realize that I cannot put it into my mouth.
+++
I wake up to a wet dream. It is not completely unpleasant, more like awkward and absurd. Like one of these dreams that are not entirely nightmares, but are just tiresome, where you are constantly late to the airport or something. In my dream, there’s some guy who has an intense desire to have sex with me and he is nice and gentle, so I say why not, after all I’m not a virgin. And first we just bounce up and down in this immense bed of his with all those really soft and white pillows and shit. And then he puts his dick into me, and it falls out, so I put it back, because I seriously don’t mind that guy at all. And then I lie back and just wait for it to be over, and the bed is seriously the softest bed in my life, so it feels rather comfy. But then it draws out for ages, and this guy keeps turning me around and doing things from all kinds of angles and I feel like it’s getting really boring and repetitive, and that I’d rather do anything else than that. Even though I really don’t mind being fucked at all.
For the record, the guy from the dream doesn’t look anything like my crush. My crush is auburn-haired, bespectacled and skinny, while the guy in the dream had this mane of longish combed back hair and a very large and muscular body. I would have never said he was my type. But then no one is really my type. I can never fall in love with just a picture. It has to be a complete person, with mannerisms, mimic and all those little things that make us different.
+++
I’m walking to school and it suddenly happens. I’m having a conversation with Him inside my mind. We’re talking in this snarky and confrontational way while crossing the street when a car, no, scratch that, a bicycle suddenly knocks him off his feet. His head is leaking blood onto the pavement, and I put him into the recovery position while I simultaneously try to call the ambulance and gently nudge the little shards of glass from his cheeks.
+++
We are now friends on Facebook. We are chatting. I find excuses for talking to him, I pretend that I need help with selachimorphae and I almost make him meet me at school to get some reading up done. But then it turns out he has to visit his aunt in hospital. I bet he doesn’t even have an aunt.
+++
I find this awesome documentary about a community of people who meet up for strictly non-sexual cuddling, and I watch it on repeat in between studying. Miriam is still distant, but she fucks more than ever to the point where I almost get annoyed, because she is obviously overcompensating and trying to prove a point to herself. The more she tries, the more she realizes she cannot get over her crush. We’re both very pathetic, each in our own way.
I want to send the link to the cuddle documentary to my crush and ask him to become my cuddle buddy. But I’m afraid he will call me mental. I am sure he already knows I am.
After having watched the cuddle documentary for the 50th time, I get an idea to try and watch some porn. What if I like it this time? It’s just an experiment after all. I find some soft porn where women appear to enjoy it at least a little bit, and I watch for a while until I find myself annoyed and bored, and I shut the experiment down. It kinda reminds of me of that one time when I tried to learn to like football to make one of my exes happy. I even got the hang of the rules and all the strategic implications of every move on the field. But it didn’t become a thing for me, because honestly, I didn’t care. You can only do so much.
+++
I cannot concentrate on the lecture, because I feel like I am the ugliest and most despicable person in the room. It’s all because he is there. And we even touched briefly, but it felt dismissive and cold. I am not sure about anything anymore.
+++
I tried googling cuddle societies in my area. It’s either that they are super-secret or they don’t exist. I am not a fan of going to a super-secret one, because it might be creepy. I realize that this is a very prejudiced thought, because it was exactly what the people in the documentary said, everyone expects them to be brothels. But then again, I don’t want to risk it. And also, I have no idea how to find them if they are hidden so deep underground.
+++
I sit and talk to my only male friend who knows I am asexual and who is not one of my exes. We get some beers, I tell him about my nasty situation. I feel like he might be better at giving advice than Miriam who still cannot shut up about that guy she saw at work weeks ago. I am not judging or anything, I am just upset that this is apparently how our human minds work. We love to brag about how rational and logical we are, and then something switches off and we become a clingy weeping pile. That is, Miriam becomes that. I don’t. I become destructive, mostly to my punching bag. But both of us are affected, and both of us suck at reasoning right now.
My friend listens to me and says:
“So, you wanna have a relationship with that guy or what?”
“Something like that.”
“But you realize he’s probably not asexual.”
“Definitely not asexual.”
“Then why do you wanna ruin his life?”
He tugs at his beard in a pensive way, completely oblivious to how offensive it sounds. He is in fact one of the least annoying hetcismales I’ve known in my life, and yet he tosses this sentence at me, and it resounds and echoes in my memory.
I have indeed wasted the time of a bunch of men – and women (for the brief period when I hoped I was lesbian), starting from my first crush who thought he was dealing with a regular case of a shy virgin, but then rode off into the sunset when he realized his magic wand didn’t work miracles on me. I moved on to several others some of whom harbored hopes of my recovery. One of them was nudging me towards psychotherapy and had kinky ideas of giving me some electroshock treatment. They just couldn’t cope with the idea that I did not long for their bodies the same way other girls did. It didn’t mean I didn’t long for them at all, but what I had to give was never enough for them. One of them said he had a rape-y feeling afterwards, and I totally get it. I suck. Or rather, I don’t.
And yet I cannot get still get why this is such a deal breaker. I mean, sex is something even slugs can do. We have evolved beyond slugs, we have more complex needs, like the need to be understood and accepted, even when you are not in the best of states. We as a culture have invented unconditional love, intimacy and trust. We can understand the pain of others and feel it as our own (even when it comes to the irritating sobs). We have all these thoughts and inner conflicts and shit. We have also created this complex social hierarchy which almost doesn’t leave any choice to people but finding a partner. In the recent years, the idea of partnership has broadened up to include same-sex couples, but it is still about two damn people. Who fuck each other. Like some slugs.
And like I said I don’t mind being fucked. It’s okay. I can take it. But I hate being attacked for not wanting it – which is not my fault. I tried my best. It doesn’t work. My friend opens his mouth:
“You see, the real fun part about sex is knowing how much the other person wants it. No... Needs it. They drag you into themselves slashing your back with their fingernails. They beg you to go faster and deeper. It’s like that.”
He says it in a calm and measured way, but this revelation blows a hole through all my reasoning. It’s just something you cannot argue against. He has this glazed look in his eyes, like he’s reliving the fond memories of women who begged to be banged by him, and there is really nothing left to say. I can’t take it anymore. I was seriously hoping for a piece of advice, a safe place we could talk things over and be rational. I leave him without saying a word almost submitting to the urge of throwing a glass of beer into his face.
I get into a fight with a rubbish can on my way home. I can’t contain my negativity anymore. I’m seriously thinking of cutting myself again, but I know it’s a bad idea.
+++
When I get home, Miriam is in a state of ecstatic frenzy. She moves so fast from one place to another that she becomes a blur at the periphery of my visual field. She’s trying on clothes of equally appalling shades of pink and swirling around in them. I am broken inside, but I am afraid to be alone in my room. I am a danger to myself.
Miriam tells me she’s going on a date with that guy from the grocery store. I couldn’t care less. Apparently everyone in her store was so tired about hearing about that crush, that they found him for her and asked him to come to her fish counter. And then everyone in the supermarket burst into a coordinated song and dance routine while the clams at the fish counter opened and closed to a joyful tune of the reunion of the star-crossed lovers. I almost threw up.
“Miriam, I am not feeling well. I think I cannot be left alone tonight. Do you mind if I sleep at my sister’s?”
“Course not. We’re about to have wild animalistic sex here anyway.”
“Good for you.”
+++
Sisters are awesome. Small babies – not so much. I didn’t kill myself or anything that night, but I realized that there’s only so much wailing and sobbing I can take. Even if this is my nephew. My sister didn’t have much time for me. I didn’t want to talk, all she wanted to talk about was the baby, but at least I got some supervision. I have poor impulse control, so I didn’t want to end up cutting myself the way I did in my teens. It’s pathetic. I hate it. I hate the part of me that wants it.
+++
I came home and made a beeline to the shower. When I pressed on the handle, I heard a familiar voice from within. It wasn’t Miriam.
It was my crush.
I stepped away, numb and terrified when Miriam wrapped her arms around my waist. She was wearing her transparent night, so her soft heavy breasts made a sad wet noise against my leather jacket.
“I know that guy,” I whispered to her.
He came out of the shower wrapped in a pink fluffy towel and gave us both a quizzical look.
“That’s my flatmate, Linda.” Miriam said, “She is my cuddle-buddy. We’re very close that way. Wait, I got an idea would you be up for some cuddles? Like, all three of us?”
+++
It’s all good. It’s all good after all.
