“Drugs are amazing,” I said.
One of our first conversations I remember. He was sipping a cream soda and I had a canned margarita. I was trying to convince him and Autumn to sneak into the Salisbury lake and swim. It was cool that May and I felt like porch trash in plastic lawn chairs in their backyard.
Sawyer had three sheets of acid in the freezer. He dosed them out to us and then went to bed. Autumn and I started our trip watching Robert Pattinson movies like Twilight and this insane one called Remember Me where he dies in 9/11. We wanted Sawyer to come and hang out with us but when Autumn called him he cursed her out for waking him up. Moody bastard.
I saw tesselations, the infinite arches of the doorways through their apartment, I saw red, I heard birdsongs all throughout the night so loud and chaotic like they were being played on a speaker, psyop birds. We walked to the fine arts museum barefoot and baptised ourselves in the waterfall pools of koi fish. Stared at the new huge art installation in the field, christened it with our moon eyes, this overbearing warped bust of a woman, white and creepy and ancient looking.
“You are like new women now,” she told us.
It really was the beginning of the end for me.
Autumn and I watched an entire season of Terrace House the rest of the night and the next morning Sawyer told me one of the contestants had killed herself the day before. We viewed it as a manifestation. I went home with a promise of a shooting range date because he had just bought a pistol, a small but girthy mass of metal he probably saw as an extension of his virility. It was dangerous and sexy.
In June he picked me up and took me to a Pipeline river spot I irrevocably consider “ours.” My beloved hometown is cursed with them now. Dead spots of saccharine pain.
i really can’t be in richmond any longer, there’s just too much violent nostalgia everywhere. every road and park and streetlight reminds me of a thousand memories with a thousand different people and it makes me feel like dying…
That was the diary entry I wrote the last day I saw him. I get so poetic and cute when I’m sad so it’s great that I’m a writer. It was a good spot though, a flat prideful rock jutting out above the river surrounded by cattail pools on one side and rapids on the other, nestled under the train tracks with a clear view of the Mayo Bridge. Whitewater, baptism, a Southern vista and wet skin on wet skin: summertime! We laid on the rock like dead lizards. This was when he was openly pining for me, transfixed by some online persona of mine for years, before he had made me forget about Henry.
He had slept with all my friends before and was community dick in Richmond, but I really didn’t care. He was so good at kissing me for the first time, masterful, grabbing my neck with a tender choke (a habit he dropped in a month). This delighted me, a man with the prowess and confidence to assert genuine dominance so early on, or so I thought. I think they’re all a little scared now. It’s so rare to find a man under age 25 who isn’t either pornsick or witholding preferences so unoriginal and compulsory they might as well have copy and pasted the Pornhub homepage into their brain. This was just apart of his stupid pseudo-sigma male charm. We were kissing on his bed for so long he pulled back and just looked at me- Ah... here’s his bad habit. Those eyes testing me, looking for my real intentions and any submission to capitalize on. I really just didn’t fucking care.
He always lit a cigarette after sex with the fan on low and the ashtray on his chest, he said it makes him feel like a Vietnam soldier. We would watch movies and fuck and watch movies then fall asleep on repeat. We would fuck and I would watch the pistol on the bedside table. We would lay in bed naked and stroke each other. His ears were sensitive. He wasn’t the most generous lover, but sex never hurt with him and he was good at foreplay. Bastard. I’ve learned I like to constantly touch someone, or pet them, as a replacement for words but also as a reminder to them that I’m present, I want to touch you, it’s okay, I like being with you. My mother said I was making myself too available. I didn’t think that was the case at the time.
It was easy for me to embrace roles in our relationship that reflected the precedents I’d witnessed as a child. Sawyer drove me absolutely everywhere that summer, just like my mom’s boyfriends, my mom, my babysitters. He bought and cooked me food when I asked, my caregiver, my provider, my boyfriend. He fed me drugs like a baby. I fed him physical touch and listened to him bitch about his heroin addict dad. I really can’t help that’s what draws me to people, for I am woman. A pussy with legs. What even are daddy issues anyway, or was I searching for my mother’s love in a partner? That’s all I had known outside of fishing excursions and golf lessons and extravagant ski trips to Vail provided by my mom’s ex. I guess it was all pretty transactional.
A woman from Autumn’s halfway house went to rehab so she was housesitting for a few months. The house was beautiful as most Virginia colonials are. It was in my favorite neighborhood in the city and had a pool. We went there with Sawyer and a couple of their friends and larped as wealthy private school teenagers (which I was but they weren’t). Marlboro reds and shrooms and chlorine, pink then purple then black sky, more shrooms. I stared at him chain smoking with his friend and their chest tattoos exposed and bare, the amalgamation of ink his tattoo artist ex-girlfriends gave him on full display, almost entirely engulfing his right arm and trickling down onto his legs dipped in the pool. “MOM” on his forearm. The Brand of Sacrifice on his ankle. So many girls have marked him, I thought.
We went on precariously enamored with each other for a long time.
“Do you have a crush on me?” I liked to stir him up.
“Yeah. I like you. I talk about you to my coworker, nice things.”
“Do you like me?” he asked.
“I worship you.” I ran my mouth to see his reaction or because I really meant it, probably. He hugged me after that. Started talking about our damn fight.
“You didn’t have to scream ‘fuck you’ at me last night.”
“You didn’t have to tell me you never wanted to see me again,” I said. An uppercut.
That shut him up for the first time.
I let a lot of shit slide because I was so attracted to him. I let him fill me with words because he was good at talking and had a lot to say but did not let me fill him back. He did not ask me questions. He did not let me flesh out my personhood or let me prove myself as a woman with interests just as cultured and varied as his. He made me a bit of a bimbo. He made me feel genuinely beautiful yet he made me feel like I was entering the next level of mental retardation. He was pretentious in the way only hot people can get away with. I thought he understood the burden of being hot- through the boy pathology- and understood the baggage that came with having a slight God complex. He also satisfies the running social theory I have that most genuine sociopathic tendencies I’ve encountered are in objectively sexy people. Sawyer is not a good person. I think he has Narcissistic personality disorder, but spending any more time psychoanalyzing him would be a jaded waste of life. He was a decent boyfriend- but not a good friend, burning as many bridges as possible. Oh, but he’s just so tortured and broken- I can fix him!
I can fix you male manipulator poster child, I can fix you skater white trash, I can fix you teenage alcoholic, I can fix you terminally broke manwhore. Because I’m different and I’m obsessed with you and I can be like your mom. All you have to do is call me baby. It’s that thought pattern again, the obsessive and spiralling one. I was the one that left Sawyer when I moved to New York at the end of the summer but I think it hurt me harder and longer. I left him with a letter that he probably threw away by now.
I like the person I like to be inside of me all the time, hands inside of me, tongue inside of me, hair inside of me, skin inside of me, groin inside of me, words inside of me, thoughts inside of me, everything they care about inside of me. I still wear his clothes sometimes.
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