"We fuck because we are lonely"

This is a short story I wrote when I was in high school. I was inspired by an Andrew Jackson Jihad song with a chorus I couldn't get out of my mind. When this writing was found, I was subsequently sent to the school counselor. Despite the embarrassment, I was flattered that someone would mistaken it for anything autobiographical. I am no Kerouac, but I have always liked this story.

"I had my fingers knotted in his hair. I kissed his neck and his hands and his face, tracing every sumptous curve of his body with my mouth. Little girlish sighs would escape my lips and I would blush. My heart beat so fast I could feel my body shaking. I stared longingly into his big dumb beautiful eyes and worshipped the empty curve of his smile. I burried myself in his hairless arms, breathing in a mixture of isopropyl, musk, and vanilla extract. "You're so beautiful" I whimpered, "I love you, I love you." I confessed. I felt him go limp between my legs. 

lifted his gaze from my breasts and stared at me in confusion. Those beautiful eyes were lost in his skull, roaming from left to right trying to piece together the words I had just said. "What?" he asked. I looked away ashamed. "That wasn't in the script." Someone cleared their throat in the background. My cheeks were hot and beet red. His brows were arched. "How about we take a break?" I volunteered, jumping to my feet and scurrying to the corner. A camera man chuckled and offered me a robe. His face was red too, but holding back laughter rather than embarrassment.

I draped the robe over my shoulders and took a seat on a sprawling newly rented sofa. The room was so sterile and white I felt like a spotlight had been cast upon me. "It's okay," came a voice, "cheer up." A pair of chubby hands patted me on the shoulder, and a boy of about twenty took a seat next to me. He was lanky and awkward, like a bundle of string beans, but his face was warm. A camcorder rested on his crotch. "Oh, I'm fine about it." I lied, giving him my best smile, "shit happens, right?".He inched closer to me and crossed his legs; I refused eye contact. "Are you new to the industry?" he enquired."A little. This is only my fourth actual film." "Why did you get into it?""Money. I guess. Why does anyone?"He continued probing me. "Well we're all unique creatures, with our unique motives. I figured you might have a story. I'd be interested to hear it.""Sure." I felt his eyes on me, waiting for me to elaborate, to entertain him some more, but my mind was already wandering.

I watched my beautiful coworker as he stalked the appetizer cart. He posed against a wall, naked and glistening, feeding himself donut holes. Powdered sugar fell from his lips and he giggled. He licked his fingers clean and proudly assesed his anatomy in a mirror. I stared at him in wonderment and disgust, wanting to hold him and to curse him. I meditated on how empty and how impermeable he was. This was a man I had known every physical inch of, and still never encountered any proof that something existed beyond that chiseled exterior. When he felt a body, all he was aware of was the sensation. When he looked into someone's eyes, all he saw was a reflection.

Every person he had ever been inside of, was just another piece of furniture. I knew he wasn't any better, 80% water, and not much else. But everytime the cameras were rolling and he started confessing sweet and scripted nothings, I wanted to love him; to be head over heels with another innanimate human being."Alright, break over!" The director called. His little brown toes peaked out of his birkenstoks like mushrooms. "Well, it was nice talking to you." I bullshitted, standing up and handing the boy my robe. "My pleasure" he replied, "Maybe we can chat more next time?" I peered behind my shoulder to find him watching me again, smiling like a child. His sincerity made me uncomfortable, as did the warmth of that smile. I waved back, too nervous to form a verbal reply, and walked away. "Ready?" I called to my coworker across the room, interrupting his moment with the full length mirror.

He looked to me sternly, the smile melted and his brow furrowed as he prepared his game face. It was the first of many expressions he would experiment with throughout the shoot, all of which he had been rehearsing for weeks. "Ready!" he called, taking me in his arms and giving a triumphant thumbs up to the stringbean boy. Everyone's cameras were poised, and little red dots blinked at us.We made our way to a Queen sized bed with checkerboard sheets and closing my eyes, I let the whole thing unfold. He kissed my neck and my stomache, grunting savagely. He contorted and tossed my body in all sorts of unnatural positions, groping and biting me as he usually did.

Cameras hovered above and behind us, preserving our mechanical display of passion. The man-child wriggling ontop of me yanked my hair, guiding my neck. I was disgusted by him and by fucking him, but I somehow enjoyed it. I needed the emptiness; I was exhilerated by immitating intimacy with an absolute nothing. He spat on my back and dug his nails into my shoulder. That was my cue to pretend to enjoy it, to shout and to moan. He stayed silent, playing with my body like a marionette.

My mind began to wander again. I pictured his empty eyes, which didn't seem to be a part of him at all; rather, they floated unknowingly between his ears. I pictured the stringbean boy's eyes too, brown and dull and busy. They were mysterious and threatening for they had the ability to actually see me. My man-child muttered obsceneties into my ear, loud enough for a few cameras to hear. His lips so close to my neck made me shiver. I wanted to arch my body enough to kiss him, but I knew it was wrong. I would always be anonymous to this man. I was disposeable to him; but I felt comforted by his presence. The spitting and the cursing and the fact that this was all just a job, were irrelevent. All I wanted were these moments to feel someone was touching me, and at least so long as the cameras rolled, wanting me

I left the studio somewhat frazzled; I would occassionally peer over my shoulders expecting to see my stringbean boy spying on me. I found it difficult to explain the sudden pang of dissapointment every time he wasn't there. I climbed into a gray Honda Civic under a tree, and solemnly drove away. I was the last car to leave and the only car to journey the road all night.

Rain clouds were gathering and the smell of wet earth was already permeating my nostrils; the town was moments away from becoming a muddy wasteland."Today was awful." I muttered, tapping my index finger against the steering wheel at every red light. "What kind of psycho am I?" I was still so humiliated; the fact I had sex, on film, naked, and made a living off of it, never phased me for a second. What really set a feeling of shame in my gut, was acknowledging that I enjoyed it. I was in love with it. Having all the passion of intimacy without ever once experiencing the commitment of it. Most days, I felt so lonely and so frightened of ever encountering an alternative to that feeling; it was only on set I ever felt differently. It was only with the cameras rolling that I felt normal, or that I felt at all. 

Even if it was just a lie, it was the only touch I could feel and the only semblance of closeness I could stand. My coworker and I had more in common than I ever cared to admit; we were both pitiful, broken, lonely human beings fucking to feel, touching because we are selfish."

Neglect

I was frozen. I felt trapped in some sort of vacuum. I couldn't feel a thing, even though I knew if I could that the pain would  be crippling. It was as if I had transcended the realm of ordinary pain and into a world where it hurt too deeply to feel. Stunned. Emotionally anesthetized. It was like getting hit in the head, and so I floated in existential free-fall, existing and only existing. For a month I was lost in a perpetual daze that I could not even sleep through to escape.

I had stopped being able to decipher the hours from weeks; twenty years felt like one sleepless night. I have not lived. I have not seen days. I have not experienced time. I have only watched as the boxes on my calendar collect. I begin to believe that I am impermeable; perhaps if  I continue to disregard time, it might disappear.

Drowning

The internet is a really interesting, if not potentially problematic, sociological landscape. The Digital Age has welcomed the obsoletion of privacy and deterioration of interpersonal skills. Ours is an age in which "social networking" is not what the word implies; our hearts imagine closeness with people we only know as an assimilation of pixels and lights on a computer screen. That is not a person, but we think it is. We yearn for it to be, and we pine after these idealized caricatures. The internet incubates individuals in this fake little world. We build identities and personas, and people flock to them. People become enmeshed in them until it feigns intimacy.

If a percentage of what we see and think of the world is projection, what then is the virtual world? Can only part of that world be understood? Can that world be real at all? Are the things we hate and love in internet personalities merely extensions of what we hate and love in ourselves?