On Black Notebooks, Blue Skies, and Dick
It’s day thirteen of my Coronavirus quarantine, I got up at eleven, drank two mug fulls of espresso, and I’m sitting in my childhood room in Montecchio, Italy, writing in a little black notebook, blank except for a handful of pages. The notes are a few years old and they are all about him—they are embarrassingly titled “My You”—but most importantly they are about her, the girl who was me, the girl who didn’t think she would survive heartbreak, humiliation and abandonment.
And maybe she didn’t. She’s as dead to me as he is now.
She didn’t survive his memory for long, after all. She thought she’d fill the whole black notebook with the sacred grief she felt about him; instead life went on in unwritten silence, and all of her dreams came true.
No, she’s not well-partnered or wealthy or published or even mentally healthy, not really.
She is (I am) over him, though. Over the one who came after him, and over the one who came after the one who came after him. She used to dream of her future self, gazing out the window at the blue Italian sky, not thinking about him—and look at her now! Look at me, now.
Thinking of everything but him: the apocalypse, the loud and pricey Brooklyn apartment I ran away from but still pay rent for, the fact that I could kill my parents if I hugged them…
Oh yes, and dick.
I’m thinking about dick, a lot.
It’s not what it sounds like, though. I haven’t gotten much dick in my life.
I’m actually not that much into dick.
“Dick” here is the part that stands for the whole—the toxically masculine whole, alas.
I’m what the kids these days call a demisexual—I almost exclusively experience sexual attraction
as a consequence of emotional attraction, and I (used to?) almost exclusively experience emotional attraction towards narcissistic men-children who masturbate to my poorly lit selfies yet are terrified of being annihilated by close interaction with my real-life womanhood.
He was one of those. Definitely not the last, but probably the worst.
Not all the men I’ve met have been pits of despair though.
Around the time I met him, I also met a friend, a Male Friend (from here on MF, for short).
We got close when I was at my lowest, me and the MF. All through these years of dicklessness and self-loathing he was with me, my MF, making me laugh like none of the men-children ever could. His hobbies included: crass scatological humor, etymology, taking the train in Los Angeles and not paying the train fare (anywhere).
He asked questions such as: “why do you keep chasing after men who don’t deserve you?” But also: “was he cut? Did he come on your face? Did his dick stink?”, when the occasional dick did get uncovered.
I cried and puked and bled over the undeserving men-children; then I thought about my MF, who had seen me pee in public—platonically pee in public—on a Paris boulevard, and as I licked my wounds I counted my blessings, felt lucky, felt warm, felt like friendship really was the most fragrant of all balms. I asked him if he wanted to grow old together—I texted him over Google Hangout, the only way he would communicate with me when we were long distance, which was for most of our friendship.
He did come to see me the last Easter I spent home (the last before the pandemic), three years ago: he saw my childhood room, met my parents and grandparents, ate their backyard chickens’ eggs. We went to Parma on Good Friday and had pizza and ice cream, then checked out a free museum; he was an atheist jew and couldn’t take renaissance painting seriously because all the baby Jesuses were so fat and blond and white. But on that day I discovered that Baroque frescoes were his favorite thing in the world and when I took him to the church of Santa Cristina he was so mesmerized by the clouds on the ceiling that he would have stayed there forever.
But yeah, concerning dick: a bit over a year ago something miraculous happened. The Tinder spirits took pity of my sufferings and made me meet someone.
I almost swiped left on him and to this day I don’t quite know what exactly made me swipe right. Yes, he was tall and handsome and in the man-child age range, but that wouldn’t have been enough. What I think got my attention was his Instagram artist profile: digital portraits of wide-hipped, big-breasted nude women, voluptuous like goddesses, strong like superheroes.
He wrote first, agreed on a sober date in full daylight, had unbelievably good manners for a pornographer. I was immediately sure he wasn’t boyfriend material, but within a few days I was also completely sure he was friend with benefits material.
Reader, I fucked him.
We had good communication and good times. He didn’t read and I didn’t care—books have existed for a very short fraction of the Anthropocene, and regardless of what The Strand fridge magnets say, the amount of written words someone hoards and consumes has no connection to their skillfulness as a lover or to their status as a more or less honorable fuck.
He played a lot of video games, yet our fucks were honorable.
Apart from a tragic lunch date at Applebee’s, I was happy when I was with him—happy to cook for him, walk with him, swim with him as he told me who was who in the Pokemon universe—and I didn’t think about him at all when we were apart.
I felt like I had grieved Him completely, after all these years.
I felt like my failure of a life was beginning to look tolerable after all; it wasn’t about the dick. The dick just provided the icing on the cake, so to speak. To have sex—to have healthy, semifrequent sex that didn’t result in emotional annihilation, and then to go about one’s day like a functioning, self-sufficient adult--that must have meant that healing was finally attainable.
I talked about it with my MF—about the dick, I mean, the only part of my life that seemed to really interest him. I don’t know when the shift happened, with the MF. Maybe I was unable to notice the shift because it wasn’t much of a shift from my perspective. He had always been a tad condescending, the MF. He didn’t want to read my writing: what was the point if I wasn’t going to take his notes? The Netflix show I had liked so much was unbearable to him. See, I didn’t know good plot. I was so obsessed with being in a relationship because I’d never been in one. My lover didn’t sound like he was good at sex. But I was clearly too inexperienced to tell. I was doing what over the weekend? Was that supposed to be interesting? In short, more often than not, he was a bit of a dick: but it was G-Chat or whatever it’s called now, we lived in different continents and we never even heard each other’s voices.
I didn’t give it much thought, kept my expectations low and focused more on my local friends (as one does), anticipating the time when me and the MF would meet in person and have fun and talk it out and drink it out and be besties.
Meanwhile, I checked in once in a while. I knew one reason why our conversations were monosyllabic now was that he was in the process of ending things with his long-term girlfriend—something he had been thinking about doing for years, something we had discussed thoroughly, something he had asked me not to ask about anymore (what did I know about relationships anyway?).
He eventually told me about the break up months after it had happened. We chatted about it for a bit, I asked him if he wanted to talk about it on the phone, but he said no. He had been traveling and hanging out with friends in Europe, he seemed to be processing things and was probably having all the unattached sex he’d been wanting to have. Things went on as before: him never initiating conversation, me getting in touch when I had news to share.
One day in the fall, I had dinner with my fuck buddy and he told me he wanted to be exclusive with another girl he had known for a while. We parted amicably and I started texting friends to process the change. My birthday was only a few weeks away: I told my MF I was sad I wasn’t going to have birthday sex—for once, I had been so close! That wasn’t going to happen unless I found “another dick” before then, and that was highly unlikely—again, demisexual.
“Don’t say that”, the MF wrote, “that’s insulting. Reducing men to their dick. That’s sexist”
Was it though? Was I objectifying men in general because I wished for birthday dick?
He went on to say that he “spoke to a lot of feminists,” and he found the way they talked problematic; the fact that they co-opted the offensive language traditionally used by men to refer to women was “dumb”, in the MF’s opinion, and “childish.”
In my opinion, he didn’t understand where women came from when they talked like that. I wrote it (this was all still G-Chat) and the MF lost his shit. How dare I say he didn’t understand women? Just because he was a man, he couldn’t understand women? He had no idea I could be so sexist. He couldn’t believe it! He read a lot of books about women. He had never felt more misunderstood (he was allowed to tell me I didn’t understand).
The G-Fight went on and on and it wasn’t pretty. Explaining mansplaining to a man is never pretty, nor is it easy, especially when said man is a little knot of anger. I suggested he research ‘reverse sexism’ and why it’s not a thing. I tried to use reverse racism as an example, pointing out that a man being angry at a woman because she says he doesn’t understand the female experience is like a white person being angry at a black person who tells them they don’t understand the black experience. He replied he did understand the black experience. He had a lot of black friends growing up. He grew up in a tough metropolis, not in a sheltered little town like Montecchio. I just stared at the screen while he lashed out at me. He concluded with “good luck finding dick”.
The day after, the “apology email” came. It did not come as a shock to me that there was no apology in it (we both were Louie CK fans).Yes, he had been aggressive. But was never aggressive towards women nor was he angry at women in general. He was just angry at me because I was horrible. I was self-involved, went on and on about my problems, always started conversations by talking about myself—G-Chat conversations, mind—I was a disappointing and inadequate friend.
I took up all the space—all the G-Chat space—while he patiently listened to me like an overpowered girlfriend—trembling in a corner of the G-Chatroom.
I had insulted all the men in the world by saying I needed dick. He had read so many books about female anatomy and knew where the clit was and the name of the dude who had discovered it in the 1600s and some guy in a bar had recently called him a “fucking feminist.” He couldn’t be a misogynist! If anything, he hated himself for being a man (the one thing he said I agreed with).
I replied almost immediately—I wanted to get it over with, bury the pain—and my reply wasn’t an apology email either. Even though I was furious, I didn’t tell him I never wanted to talk to him again. I told him he had to work on himself and get his shit together if he ever wanted to come back into my life. I was going to block him for a while, but the door was sort of open.
I have since unblocked him—I felt the contradictory need to open the door all the way to achieve a real sense of closure. I had a suspicion he wouldn’t try to walk through it and back into my life, and he hasn’t: not on my birthday, not on New Year’s, not last month when the area around my sheltered little town was declared a COVID-19 red zone and people my parents’ age started dying by the hundreds.
Us “drama queens” (a dismissive term for people who care) are guilty of fantasizing about times like these—I used to do it when I was going crazy over Him: what if there was a war, what if there was a plague, what if he heard a volcano erupted near me? Surely then he would care, surely he would want to know, if I lived or died. Surely then he would come back.
Now the plague has come, and I couldn’t care less if he cared or didn’t care. I have grieved him completely; I have grieved the version of myself that wanted to die over him. I thought I had grieved my MF, too, and the version of myself who considered him her best friend. But this Good Friday, when there wasn’t any pizza or gelato or going to the city, when there wasn’t any occasion for transgression since no one was allowed to go anywhere, not even church, I found myself alone with my grief, and realized I hadn’t even started dealing with the loss of the man I considered my safe space—the man who ended up lecturing me about feminism while accusing me of taking up too much space.
I was tempted, I was so tempted to reach out to him. Then I remembered those harsh words Jesus said: “Let the dead bury their dead”. Every single one of us knows at least one person who has died of Coronavirus at this point. I’m among the lucky ones who haven’t lost any close friends or family (not yet) and haven’t had to deal with the unthinkable—to let the beloved dead go without a last loving touch.
For us—the lucky ones who are stuck waiting and thinking—quarantine is a unique learning opportunity, and I’m not talking about baking, knitting or Duolingo. I’m talking about learning to grieve, I’m talking about learning to mourn: the one skill we can never master all the way, the one skill we should never stop trying to acquire. Let’s not pick up that phone, drama queens. Let’s not re-read that email. Let’s not check that Facebook profile. Let’s look up at the blue sky and be sad and be still. Let’s not go back to what life was when we were a previous version of ourselves. Let’s grieve our dead selves—and then let our dead selves bury their dead.
-Esther Di Raimo
Esther Di Raimo is a writer and scholar of the human experience. She was born and raised in Italy but normally lives in Brooklyn, New York. She spends most of her time thinking or walking.