MY GIRLFRIEND IS RETARDED

CAN LOVE BLOOM ON THE SHORT BUS

My girlfriend doxxed me over the weekend. She saw my latest note about dancing with some young woman and we drove to a wooded trail to go for a walk and when we parked she said we need to talk and she asked me if I danced with someone at the gala I attended and I said yes. Then she started crying and she recited what I had written about dancing with some young woman and she asked how I could do that don’t I respect her and I said well clearly not if I danced with some strange woman. You stupid bitch. (The woman I danced with was also a dumb bitch.) I hate women. Genuinely. Actual misogynist here. (Eternal souls are misogynists. (They’re also misanthropes.)) She kept crying and I said let’s break up and she started hyperventilating and freaking out and I don’t care because I don’t care about women. It’s not even that I hate women I just don’t care. I don’t fucking care. I’m so over crying women. I’ve ruined my life by listening to crying women. I’m stone cold now. Cry all you want. Dumb bitch. She said how could you do that and I’m thinking to myself: who cares how I could do that, if the act of me dancing with some bitch is the problem then I do things that are problems and who cares how or why if the fact of the matter is it’s an issue that I danced with a strange woman and that means I don’t respect my girlfriend then I danced with some idiot redhead and I don’t respect her or you, probably both, and I’m evil or a narcissist or a sociopath or a misogynist (probably all) or whatever label you want so you can keep feeling some kind of way and have a clear sense of me and yourself and the world. She told me that she saw the pseudonym I use on Substack so she went and read it and the first thing she saw was my dumb, silly little note about dancing with some random woman and she started freaking out and she couldn’t continue reading. So I’m in the car with my crying girlfriend who’s crying about me dancing with some dumb bitch and I’m thinking to myself: I hate women. Like I might as well have asked for the redhead’s number and fucked her. At the gala I thought I was pushing it a little bit, dancing with a stranger while I have a girlfriend, but I only danced with her for one song and then I went home. I thought it was a little inappropriate, without a doubt, but I also thought it wasn’t that big of a deal. Not cheating, not a dealbreaker. I never do anything ever, I go to work and go home and buy groceries, I don’t have any friends, I never talk to anyone, to a large extent I hate every second of every day, perhaps I’ll dance with a cute lady for five minutes, a little reprieve from the hellfire of every single second of every day. Haha. Maybe write about it, embellish some things, have a little fun on the internet. Haha. I’m not allowed. While my dumb girlfriend was crying next to me in the car I also thought: it would be funny to gaslight her and say that she actually breached my trust by reading my pseudonymous internet writing and that was the actual breach of trust. Wondered if she would say “you’re gaslighting me!” Wondered if I could stop myself from laughing if she said that. I didn’t say that even though that’s how I felt, although I veered into the territory slightly. I said that when I write online it’s an opportunity to shed my sense of self and not consider anyone I know and there’s a certain spiritual and mental space that a person can access when they’re anonymous online (anons understand this) which is unavailable otherwise and it’s important to me and a necessary part of my art and what I like to do. And now I can’t do it anymore. Because I am aware that you have read my stuff I am no longer able to enter that space anymore. I thought to myself: that’s probably how someone who has been cheated on feels. They probably feel like some sanctity and trust has been eternally violated and really there’s no getting it back. I really felt like I had been cheated on. Which then became even funnier because my girlfriend has been cheated on by her previous boyfriend and she’s felt that genuine betrayal and I’m feeling it in the car with her crying about me dancing with some woman. I really should have tried to gaslight her. She said that she loves and respects me so much, she only read the one note and it disturbed her so deeply that she couldn’t read anything else and if “it’s like that,” my needing to be pseudonymous online and be unconnected to anyone I know, then she swears she will never read anything else. I said I can’t believe her. Not that I don’t, but that I cannot. And I really can’t believe her. Which then made me think maybe I’m just incapable of love. I don’t deserve her. I can’t believe her because, I thought to myself: if I were in a relationship with someone and I found out that they publish writing online, I would have to read it. How could I not. She said that she loves me so much that she will not. Maybe it’s easy. I think it would be impossible for me. Maybe it would be easy if you love someone. And it’s incomprehensible to me because love is incomprehensible to me. She said she just won’t read my work and besides she’s more interested in my visual art. She called my writing a “creative outlet.” She won’t read it because she knows my “creative outlet” is important and I already seem fairly unstable and she thinks I would go actually insane without it. I didn’t say this because I didn’t want to encourage her to read my stuff (and I also can’t believe that she will not because I’m so delusional) but my visual art and my writing are part of the same thing. That’s how they feel to me anyway. That’s part of why I like Substack. How could you love someone and be in a relationship with them and like their art and not read what they’re writing online. I cannot believe it. She can do it because she loves me and it’s easy and I’m a monster incapable of love. Or she’s fucking retarded so writing is unappealing. That was another thought: she doesn’t care about my writing because she doesn’t care about writing generally because she is retarded. But if she’s out here loving and I cannot then it’s actually me who’s retarded. I cannot continue but I must. And maybe love is something you do all the time, a choice made over and over. I thought it was supposed to be like breathing—automatic, a non-choice. I think love is some automatic reflex, a fish incapable of seeing the water he’s swimming in, because I am retarded. And my writing and my visual art are part of the same thing, an extension of my self, because I am so obsessed with my self because I am a narcissist and narcissists are incapable of love and love is the offering of the self, over and over, and I’m unwilling to do that and I’m literally writing about it for the internet instead of talking about it with my girlfriend who loves me so much because I am literally retarded and I’m not some genius writing some great piece of art I’m writing some extended blogpost and I have a totally distorted self-image because I’m a fucked up retard. Or I reject contemporary psychological labels and I humbly accept my eternal soul’s temporary confinement in an illusory world of psychological states and I, very humbly, accept that an artist can actually see and love the world and offer himself to it and it’s his duty to do so and he can explain some more details about the gala to his girlfriend that he doesn’t tell the internet and his girlfriend forgives him because she would have done the same thing given the circumstance. Or maybe I take my creative outlet too seriously. Artists are insufferable.