Pic @ The Saudis
“I’ve been having this reoccurring nightmare,” says Hamilton, pacing back and forth across his kitchen in an awkward lurch. He has dark, sunken eyes and a long beaky nose, the combination of which makes him look like a deformed bird. “It’s horrible,” he says. “I wake up in a cold sweat almost every night.”
“What’s the dream about?”
“Well it starts with me in bed, and I can sense there’s an intruder in my apartment. So I grab a knife and search the house, but there’s no one there. And then I discover that someone has folded the pages of all my books.”
“Yeah,” I nod, urging him to continue. “And then what?”
“What do you mean?” he asks, face scrunched. “And then nothing. That’s it.”
“That’s it? That’s the nightmare? What’s scary about that? Who cares if the pages of your books are folded?“
“Oh my god!” he gasps, horrified. “Don’t tell me you’re a page folder. Are you? Are you seriously a page folder? Do you have such a minute respect for books that you would sooner destroy them than exert the minimal effort it requires to use a bookmark?”
“Uh…” I blink an uncomfortable amount of times. “No?”
He takes off his sweaty T-shirt and drops it mindlessly at his side. There’s no flesh to him. He’s so skinny and pale that in certain lights you can almost see his insides through his skin—veins, small movements of muscle, the outlines of his bones. I stare at his pigeon chest and all I can think is I want to combine my body with your body. But not even in a sex way. The urge is more rudimentary than that, like I just want to slam myself into him as hard as possible or something.
“I don’t understand when people are neglectful of their things,” he says, stirring spoonfuls of wheatgrass into a pitcher of green health goo. “I also don’t understand why people wear underwear. Men in particular. Why would I want to wear another smaller pair of pants underneath my pants? It’s nonessential.”
He wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and I get a sudden and intense tingling sensation between my legs. This is what I like to call “The Feeling.” When I was younger and less sexually aware, I thought The Feeling just meant I had to pee really bad. As I got older, however, I learned The Feeling is actually my body’s response to a very specific type of visual stimulation. It’s my body saying I want you. I don’t know what getting a boner feels like, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s a very similar sensation to that of The Feeling.
It is considered an almost forgone conclusion that men are more “visual” than women when it comes to sex. Men, we’re told, view women as objects of desire, while us girls need to be cuddled and petted and told “I love you” in order to want someone’s dick inside us. This is retarded. Sure, the mainstream media objectifies women far more than it does men (and I’m not trying to sound like a militant feminist when I say that, it’s just a fact), however, I find it very difficult to believe that, on a personal level, men look at women differently than women look at men. Does it honestly seem weird that a girl would see a hot boy and think, I want to fuck the shit out of you? Because I definitely have that thought at least four times a day. Like, hello! We can be lecherous too! And we can have feelings! The two are not mutually exclusive.
“So,” I say, taking a sip of the newly prepared green goo, then covertly gagging into a napkin, “when was the last time you jerked off?”
“Uh… today,” he recounts with mild apprehension. “In the library. I was so horny, I couldn’t wait until I got home.”
“Interesting…”
My ex boyfriend used to freak out when I folded pages. But he was someone who rarely read and left books on shelves collecting dust for years. Surely they’re both forms of neglect? People are weird.