I wake up from a dream in which Biden walked in on cheerleaders from my school changing in the locker room.

I wake up from a dream of attending an East Coast private college I can’t remember the name of but you would be very impressed if I did.

I wake up from a dream. He walked into the public bathroom with his girlfriend in front of me for a quickie. I sat outside with the kind of best friends I have never had in real life. My best friend from very young, Carly, taunted him for it. She would never do that either.

He walks out of the bathroom five minutes later because he can’t get it up.

In my dream, this is very funny.

My idea of funny has changed. There was time I never would have laughed at him, or at something like that. Even in my dreams.

There is not much I do not know about his body. Once I studied him as you would a painting you love very much. And women have always had good reasons to want to know precisely what a man’s dick is doing. Just in case.

Once upon a time, he could have trusted me. With this information. With anything.

Once upon a time, I was an innocent girl in every sense of the word. Too innocent even to know how to project innocence because I did not know what he was so afraid I might not be innocent of.

Now I know. And I wonder sometimes if even if we had ever been together, if I would have learned these monstrous truths about him, and fled.

No one who is a survivor of what I am a survivor of ever gave a fuck how well men perform at the ritualized humiliation that is Western masculinity. Or the male performance of sexuality.

But he..once upon a time I waited for him for a night and then wrote him a love letter that he never read on a tiny rickety aluminum platform. Last night I wished I had thrown myself off the hotel balcony instead. More dignity in that. A more coherent artistic statement.

He will marry the pretty blonde milquetoast girl who would never talk about his dick on medium, I suppose. Men like him like girls they have no reason to be afraid of. Too many secrets she might share if she could. Too much shame.

In the end he sacrificed me instead of himself. And ritually humiliated me instead. For trusting him, I guess. Or wanting him imperfect dick and all.

I wake up from a dream in which in a previous dream he sat across from me on a park bench and said as patronizingly as he would in real life, you will find somebody. We both know that’s not true. I joined an exclusive Jewish dating site and it is becoming increasingly clear that exclusive means no fatties and I slipped in undetected. To everyone’s chagrin.

I know my value on this market and every other. That has nothing to do with self esteem. I am not the one who constructed these rules.

I wake up from a dream in which he has appeared in my hometown, inexplicably. Only it is not my hometown. It is the hometown I might have had in the life I might have led, if I had eaten and fought back. I did neither.

It seemed to me there was no point.

This past year I have been fighting retroactively and there is no point to that either. The life I might have had is dust. I did not have the tools to fight for it. I did not have the words.

I wake up from a dream in which I wander after hordes of men shouting fuck me when what I mean is fuck me up. I wake up from a dream in which I am turned on for ten days straight, but no one cares, sorta like in real life. I wake up from a dream in which every time I think about the things I want to do to him I find someone to fuck me until I bleed externally instead of in. Where he does not think of me at all. Sorta like real life.

I wake up from a dream in which he thinks sex is rape and lust is rage and he would never do that sort of thing to me.

I wake up from a dream in which I eat and eat. Hunks of bread and pounds of meat. In my dream, I am so very, very hungry.

I try to eat in real life but I ask angry. I try to eat in real life but my stomach is sore with hating him. I try to eat in real life but my belly is bloated with wanting him. I stare balefully at my vibrators. They stare back at me.

Men afraid vibrators will replace them oughtta get a load of this. I still can’t get turned on thinking about anyone else.

I had sex with a man for the first time in the interim between real life and dream. I came, many times. My body was ready since the day I met him. Little good it ever did me.

The other guy did not come. After a while the sex was boring. After a while I wanted to go home.

See I thought maybe it was my innocence that was the problem. I guess I was just waiting for someone I loved but when I met him he was uncomfortable with my sexuality. So I threw it away on whoever. Everyone else is just whoever to me now. No matter how many orgasms they give me. I close my eyes, and dream of home.

Maybe everyone has a story like this. Maybe only women like me. You must be this close to the center to stay alive in this world, the way you must be this tall to ride a roller coaster safely. I am just too far away.

I used to wonder what everyone else did to be loved that I just could not do. Then I majored in Sociology and learned about whiteness and sexism and ableism so now I do not wonder any more. People in movies say things like, a life without love is no life at all. They never mention that love is a function of power. And I have none.

Men want a woman they can trust implicitly. A woman who will never lie. But theirs is the only perspective when it comes to determining such things. Women manipulate men every day and men fake it right back, with each other’s tacit approval. And my entire generation would like to witch burn women like me. Nobody gave us permission to tell the truth.

My life is one disaster after another that no one bothered to prepare me for. The Greek Chorus narrating my life is made up of men speaking a dialect I barely understand. Telling me everything I am doing wrong, which is everything. Expecting me to fix it.

I finished The Shock Doctrine yesterday. The shit rolls downhill. The shocks do too. People like me are the last to stop fighting disaster capitalism because we are fighting for our survival. Men like him are among the first because what does he have to gain from fighting? And everything to lose.

I could have loved him, but I didn’t know how. By the time I learned, no one cared anymore.

My curse is to always care more about everything than everyone else does.

I mumble and mumble, if you would only listen to me. But that is a stupid thing to say. If only men like him would listen to women like me, the world would change. They don’t listen precisely because they really don’t want it to.

I wake up from a dream in which his dick is all wrong, size shape and color, according to himself. I wake up and my eyes are still rolling with contempt. Because I finally found my person, late is better than never, and he thinks I would leave him over something that stupid.

I wake up but no one gives a shit what I think about that or about anything else.

He wakes up in a world where I’d slit my throat trying to prove how much I care what he feels, and very nearly did.

I backed away whenever his posture stiffened. I. thought I was being respectful. I didn’t know enough to know that for a man, stiff is good.

I wake up and I am bleeding red lust from every orifice and both my eyes but I am sitting two rows back and to the left and he can’t see.

I was raised in a world where you are not supposed to tell men these things.

I kept thinking, tell him the truth, but I told the wrong one. I said, I am broken, here’s how. What I meant was, would you please tell me how to get you naked, respectfully. I thought if I was casual about it he wouldn’t think it was a big deal to me. I think my plan worked. This is called overcompensating. I had never really wanted a man before. Not for what I could make his body do, not for the power. But because of what he could make mine do just by looking at me.

I rediscovered my sexuality. Turns out it begins and ends with him. Who knew?

I just didn’t want anyone else to know. Fat women’s sexuality is tragic or disgusting. Everybody knows that. And from what he said apparently he knows it too.

I wake up from a dream in which he will never stick his cock in my mouth in a public bathroom and I will never get a chance to tell him exactly how much I want him to.

He fucked someone else’s mouth, that night while I waited in an empty hotel room. He didn’t bother finding me to tell me. My friend had to.

Sometimes falling in love with a man is a ritual humiliation in itself.

He has not hurt me so much that I don’t want to fuck him. But he has hurt me so much that I would stare at the wall while he did, and wish for giant men with giant dicks to fuck me until I was bleeding and raw and too torn up to want him or anyone else ever again. To punish him by punishing myself. Like women are taught to do. I hate my sexuality now as much as he hates his. If I could tear it out of me with both hands then walk away clean and sanitized as he already believes I must good-girl be, I would.

I wake up in a world where men destroy women because why not. I wake up in a world where men destroy women because it’s fun. I wake up in a world where sex is a game I lost by loving him. I wake up in a world where men rape women then send us off to a therapist in lieu of a loony bin to get shocked back into functionality. I wake up in a world where he thinks I should spend my money on therapy fixing what he did to me, because that is definitely a thing therapy can do. I wake up in a world in which he is baleful and contemptuous in the way of a man whose parents always loved him and whose community always supported him, who is always at the center of whatever love there is to give. I wake up in a world in which he mistakes men pawing at me to be their mammy as something tender or sexual or romantic when it is the opposite. I wake up in a world in which he never once asked me what I thought about anything.

I wake up. And women are not supposed to talk about suicide or blowjobs in bathrooms or men who sexually betray us while hating us for doing the same thing even when we have not. I wake up wishing I had never met him, and instead had stayed asleep.

I wake up.