So Sad Today by Melissa Broder Read Free Book Online Page B

Empire and romantic emails. Then I said goodbye again. He got back in touch. Then I said goodbye for good.
    What happens to the space that two people occupied together? How can it just disappear? Why can’t it just become something else?
    What I maybe miss most is being able to lapse into spaceland and fantasize about the sex with him. But it is no longer safe for me to do that. The fantasy is no longer safe. It is a death valley. Reality killed it. I also miss the many months of uncertainty of not knowing whether we could be. The nebulousness. Now I know we could not.
    I want to text him and say:
hi
    I want him to text back:
Hi
    I want to say:
i am writing a personal essay about not knowing what love is. can i ask u some questions? were you in love with me or was it just the fucking? was i just an older woman who was so grateful just to be getting fucked by a younger man? (or other things I have read about older women fucking younger men on websites from the perspective of younger men?)
    I want to say:
was i real to you? could i have been real to you? why wasn’t i?
I want to say:
when r u coming back to me in the way i want u?
    But he cannot answer me. My longing is not for him but for the stars. No, my longing is for him. Why is my version of him not real?
    We got to be magic together. But is magic even real?
    I want what is unreal to rescue me from the world. I want to be a shadow of myself dancing in a hotel room with his shadow. I want to be free.
    I see him now in a dream and he has fallen for someone else. He comes to me in the dream and tells me he is about to be married. I ask him what I didn’t have. Is it that I am old? Is my skin a crocodile? Was it that I am already married? Perhaps it is that I am of the stars and
he
is of the earth.
    Who is the woman who has his whole being now? Does she have his whole being? Do I still live in there at all? I want to vomit up the whole thing and say, “But it was love.”
    When we think of our old lovers, and the people they are with now, we wonder what we did not have. We wonder collectively, as people, what other people have. A collective unconscious is formed, a cloud, and we laze around it and lie to each other. We tell each other we are better than one another, better than whoever he is with now. We tell it to each other, because we are well-meaning people. We tell it to each other in friendship.
    Our single friends say they are going to be alone for the rest of their lives and we tell them they are crazy. Wetell them they are definitely going to find someone. But how do we know? We know nothing.
    It is our single friends who keep us in our marriages. They remind us that being single is sad. Dating is sad. Online dating is sad. Attending holidays and weddings alone is sad. Marriage, too, is sad.
    But love, lust, infatuation—for a few moments, I was not sad.

Honk If There’s a Committee in Your Head Trying to Kill You
    T HE OCEAN GIVES ME PERFORMANCE anxiety about being at peace. The moon is definitely judging me. Dogs know the truth. Babies see through me. Anything natural, anything pure: judging me.
    People have said that I’m no better or worse than anyone else. I’ve been told that the universe probably wants me here. Still, I choose to feel that I am being judged as a piece of shit by some cosmic arbiter. The thing is, I’m self-centered. I guess I’d prefer some cosmic judge thinking shitty things about me, rather than nothing thinking about me at all. There are so many people and we’re all awful in our own special ways; yet somehow, I’m the most profoundly, existentially awful. It seems unlikely that would be the case. But that’s how I roll.
    In an attempt to manipulate this elusive judge, onething I like to do is play games that elevate superficial bullshit to the level of life and death. My favorite game is the one that I play with calories. Like, I pretend the cosmic arbiter is deeply concerned with my calorie intake. If the arbiter is judging