Elizabeth Strout was on Brad Listi’s podcast and she said she imagined her characters thoroughly. She imagined her characters and with that same muscle she imagined her audience too. I can’t imagine shit. I mean, I can imagine a lot of things but not characters and not an audience. It feels like some other act if I do that, some act that’s not writing. I know how demented that sounds…Oh, oh interesting. Who am I talking to in that last sentence? I think I do imagine an audience. The audience is the small group of malcontents who opened the Twitter link. Right now it’s Taylor Napolsky because he commissioned this piece directly. But that really slows me down, thinking about him specifically. Because what do I know about what he likes? He seems to like everything I write, which is like liking nothing.
II
Sometimes I long for a grade school essay contest where you write about the most important person in your life. I want to write that essay about Marc Maron. That’s the unadulterated level of naive verve I feel for him. In my head, I think of him as Boyfriend Daddy, for I claim his love so deeply, I would take it in any form he’d see fit to provide. A love so pure and eternal it can cross lines, both physical and spiritual, and still remain its essential self. I am his audience now and forever. I would be absolutely mortified if he read this because I’m sure it would really ping his parasocial radar in a bad way and all chances of that deep love would go out the window. So please don’t show this to him.
III
I wrote this book called The Bottomfeeder and right now it is homeless. It had a home with Pig Roast for a while and then that home vanished and I was left to doubt, exploration of self, punishment of self, dating, moving all the clothes out of the store, painting the small room green, reconceptualizing the space, deciding to get serious about losing weight and then abandoning that one night to gorge on french fries, sugar coated black licorice, half a Milka Oreo bar, and Saag Aloo. And then Derek Maine asked to see The Bottomfeeder and I sent it to him. And Derek has had it for two weeks and hasn’t written me back. And now I’m like, does he hate it? And I almost sent him a DM that said, Anything fun planned for 9/11? But I couldn’t bring myself to write it because it’s a cheap joke. Also, what if he saw it as a pretext to get him to acknowledge that I sent him The Bottomfeeder and felt obligated to write back? Won’t obligation turn his reading experience into distasteful homework? Are winners just people who don’t think this hard?
IV
I know my audience at the store. They are known to me. Every time I walk into the store, I am opening myself up to the performance of being a store owner and so my actions are intentional. The space is designed to reach my audience. But here is the sad truth, my audience is me. It’s me trying to trust my own taste as I buy two antique painted milk jugs. It’s me saying to myself, this is cute, you can put umbrellas in it. It’s gonna sell. Sales are my proof that I was right about my audience. The store is a seeping wound and every sale is an insufficient tourniquet. It can be incredibly reaffirming, this feedback loop in the form of cash or card payment. It can also drag out for months and mock me. Like this fucking mushroom marble table, which isn’t selling and may never sell. Or the orange chair I’m sitting in that looks like it belongs on Star Trek. These are the dogs getting old at the pet shop and they stir something like hatred in me. I want to punish them for remaining here. I left a yellow wooden table out in the yard for a week. I let the rain damage it. I lowered its value before bringing it back inside. Let that be a lesson to you, my marble friend.
V
I worry that I will never have sex again. It feels hormonal. It feels fearful. It feels queerphobic. It feels like my romantic heart is closed, a constriction that extends to my limbs, a cutting off between the head and the body. Yesterday Jiji put on a new Eminem song where he brags about his familiarity with clit rings and it was like a totally foreign language to me. Just the clarity of desire and having a compulsion to satisfy it. I imagine Eminem locked between two tan legs, rolling his tongue on a clit ring with a tiny amethyst in it. Something cheap and purple and shiny. I’m trying to imagine Eminem between my legs now, regardless of whether I really want him there. My legs are thick and dry and flaked with hair. My pubes are the same year round. I wonder if a deserted island is the only setting that would spark my sex drive. I’d get tan and lean and wild with starvation and during a manic hunger induced episode, I’d go at Eminem’s dick like it’s a straw that will yield a calorie rich milkshake. Survival sex. Fear of death sex. Cannibal sex. Nothing about me feels normal or feminine anymore so I’m seeking out the edge, hoping to define the boundary so I can pull myself back toward the middle. But this is all moot. Eminem and I could be trapped in a Lost situation and I’m pretty sure he’d still never lay claim to me.
VI
Hari was at the store to pick up some fabric for the quilt. We have been working on the quilt together for months. At one point, it got heated. He accused me of being insensitive to BIPOC people and I said, Why are you talking to me like I’m some white bitch? and he said those were my words, not his, which is true, but there are always words behind words. In the face of this accusation, I felt helpless and confused. I tried to accept it. I said, What should I do differently? He suggested therapy half heartedly. No one has enough money for therapy. From that point on, I killed Hari with kindness. I made it impossible to find fault with me. But today, when he was at the store, there was also a Swedish customer—a rare occurrence—and she was buying our precious books and I was preaching the gospel of indie lit and Hari was getting grumpy on the couch and we started talking about accents and whether Germans can identify where you’re from when you speak, and I thought, a BIPOC friendly person would bring Hari into this conversation and so I did that. I said, Do people usually know you’re American when you speak Hari? and he said Usually. But then, without any prompting, he said, I was talking to my Desi friends about how much we code-switch for y’all and you don’t even know it. And of course this was a defiant sentence and of course it was meant to separate us from one another. I was now being grouped with the Swedish woman, even though I am certainly more like Hari, who is queer and grew up in Vegas. But in this moment where Hari threw an ax, I simply said, What do you mean by that? and he said, I don’t really have the energy to explain it right now. And I mollified and of course of coursed so Hari would feel safe after throwing an ax in my beautiful store. Because I do know how dangerously lonely it feels to be around people who are not your people. And I know how much stronger that feeling is when you’re an immigrant. I don’t begrudge Hari his anger but at the time, at the time I was thinking…Yep! This is misdirected rage. All of it. All of his anger towards me that day when the quilt was still not ready and he sighed in a patronizing way and told me to be more sensitive to BIPOC people, to think more about their experience and my whole body got hot and my brain burst like a cuckoo clock. I left that interaction with a familiar sense of dread and defeat, that I keep getting it so wrong, that I don’t understand the rules of engagement and how will I ever untangle the bad parts of me from the good parts of me so I no longer offend people? And then come the periods of attempted self reflection and withdrawal, but instead of strengthening and building confidence, the time alone leads to more clumsiness. Later that day, when I was home from the store and making bolognese to eat on the couch alone, Hari sent a message with a link to an article from The Harvard Business Review titled, "The Costs of Code-Switching." And it made me sad to think that he left my store and probably wanted to cry because he threw an ax and then couldn’t stop thinking about it and sent me this stupid article, which he has certainly never read and which I will certainly never read.
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Sabrina Small writes, hosts the podcast Self Exposure, and runs the book store Tinker and Borrow in Berlin.
Sabrina is on X @foodandfootage
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