The Deteriorating Health of Mania

Chapter 1

I'm bored.

It's my 23rd birthday. And my friends are cheering me on. 

My friends. My lovely, sweet, supportive friends; glasses of cheap discount Prosecco in hands raised. The bar on the street corner with the low-key purple lighting and blacked out floor-to-ceiling windows is filled with familiar friends and acquainted regulars and stranger tourists dropping in. All of them cheering. All of them cheering me. 

I fired my therapist. 

I walked into her office, located on the top floor of a quaint apartment building in the 13th district, and fired her. It always takes me an hour to get there, and another hour back home to my badly connected corner of Vienna's shining poverty district. It was the only place I could afford to rent, without the barriers of bureaucracy, as early as I needed to. 

"I'm glad to hear you feel you're doing well enough to go on without me," she said, "though I must say, I'll be sad to see you go. I enjoyed our time together. I find you a quite powerful young woman. I hope to see you around some time. And please know that I am always here for you, if you ever feel you need support again."

Yeah. If I pay her 110€ for 50 minutes of compassion. 

I dumped her because I'm turning 23. Young for a midlife crisis, sure, but with the world decaying at the rate it is, I probably am about halfway through my life. Halfway through the part of it that will matter, anyway. I don't know. That, or millennials coined the quarter-life crisis for us. 

I dumped her because I'm turning 23 and I'm bored. 

The way my life is going, dear god. I'm getting everything I wanted. I've got my feet walking steady down a career path, I pay my own rent, I have a healthy, wonderful, supportive group of friends. I'm popular, well-liked, known in my area.

Dear god, the 13 year old I was would be so disappointed. 

I'm using the money I earn at my well-paying, optional-home-office job to buy these wonderful friends cheap discount Prosecco by the litre-load. 

Anna — a boring name for a magnificent person — walks up to me. I'm sitting on the 'stage' — a little raised platform in the corner of the bar, dusty with the infrequency of live entertainment — with a microphone poking at my mouth. I'm drunk. 

"Mania."

My name. Curious name for a nothing person. 

"Mania," she says, "don't just sit there. Give us a speech."

I adjust my short, tight, black dress — sexy, trashy, or elegant, based on how I style it — and twirl my cheap plastic pearls on a chain that leaves the back of my neck blue. Loose strands from my bobbed brown hair fall into my blurry eyes as I look down at her. 

"Alright," I whisper to her. Looking into her sweet, joyous, hopeful eyes, my heart bursts like one of those American '90s candies, a Gusher. Or a Nimm2, to localise. But those have to be bitten into, popped, snapped. Maybe I'm snapping. 

I lean into the mic. The mic crackles. My voice cracks. I miss cigarettes. 

"Hello, all."

"WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO," a crowd of drunks, with varying degrees of familiarity to me, cheer. 

"Thank you all so much for coming here tonight to celebrate me. Don't think it's not going to my head. I will be accepting absolutely no compliments for the next couple of weeks, or I will develop the world's biggest ego problem."

They laugh. They think I'm joking. I smile like I've made a joke. 

"Seriously, though. Looking over an entire bar, a bar I call home like it's a fucking sitcom or something, filled with all these wonderful people who love me. Or just wandered in."

I raise my champagne flute to the three drunk middle-aged Irish women in the corner. They raise their beers back at me and cheer.

"After a childhood like mine—"

Abused. Not worth getting into. 

"—to finally achieve the sitcom life I wanted so badly. The security. The stability. The found family."

My make up runs. I'm crying.

"I can't believe it."

My friends are crying. 

"So here we are, to celebrate the life I've managed to put together. Not just celebrate me, but the incredible people I've somehow managed to surround myself with."

My friends coo and strangers woo. 

"Anyway. I love you all. I hope your lives become as sugar sweet—"

Empty calories.

"—as mine has."

A toast. Then a hoard of young women attacking me with hugs and 'I love you's. 

"I love you, too," I tell each of them. 

A sitcom life. Yeah, that's what little me wanted. The little me that watched dubbed Friends reruns from the floor while my mother I wanted Carol and Susan to be my parents, and came to the strange conclusion that the reason my parents were unhappy was because they were of different genders. 

I grew out of that, though, the sitcom-dream. I entered my teens on an adrenaline high, seeking out hedonistic adventure in any and every way I could. My late teens, though, I saw adulthood quickly approaching and kicked into action. And by the time I was 22, I had a bachelor's degree, a job, and strangers for parents. 

But now, I worry. Where the hell am I going? I was running so intensely I forgot to look where I was headed, and now I'm here. A regular. Oh god, who am I going to become? Have I already become her? Is this really who I'm going to be? A regular? 

Chapter 2

I wake up with a murderous hangover. It's not fair. 

I wake up with a murderous hangover. It's not fair. Women in their 30s complain they've only now started getting hangovers, with their age. I'm not supposed to be getting them yet. 

I put my night together, all of it overlaid with shame and regret. That sweet hangover anxiety. I'm so tired of caring. This precious life I've built up, and the overwhelming terror that comes with the possibility of losing it. Watching every move, trying to be as healthy and productive — not in a getting-things-done sense of the word, but in a positive-outcome sense of the word — as possible. Always careful, oh so fucking careful, because at any minute I could screw up and lose it all. 

I put my night together. I find pictures on my phone I don't remember taking. I hate not being able to remember what I did. If I don't remember, then I can't analyse my behaviour and the behaviour of others; if I was good, if I made someone uncomfortable. I hate losing control. What if I lose control and it turns out I'm actually a horribly abusive nazi? 

"No," my friends always assure me, "if anything, you become even sweeter and gushier when you're drunk."

Those American 90s candies. 

There was crying, as there always is with drunk young women. I understand why the world hates us drunk young women so much. So fucking obnoxious and melodramatic, just like we'd been taught. 

The crying occurred, of course, over men. A big crisis on my part, as is customary, over the attention (or rather, lack thereof) from men. 

"I'm unlovable," I snotted to a flock of young women crowded around me where I sat on the sidewalk, hideous in my ruined costume of femininity. 

"No, you're not," the flock cooed back, arms wrapping around me and petting my hair and adjusting my dress for modesty. 

"We love you," they sang, as if that meant anything to a woman lacking in attention from men.

Bechtel test bullshit. There isn't a woman on earth who doesn't define herself by men. Even the lesbians, in all their liberation, are constantly in competition. There isn't a man on earth who doesn't define himself by other men, either. 

I was crying because I haven't dated a man since the man ten years my senior dumped me when I was 19. I was crying because the club we'd gone to afterparty at had this cute brunette boy sitting at the bar. He was drinking some juvenile two ingredient mixed drink. He was 18. I'd thought he was so pretty. He'd thought I was bothersome. 

So now a group of young obnoxious drunk women did their traditional ritual of comforting their friend crying over men, trying to empower by way of words like 'independent' and 'iconic'. 

Empty words. 

"Oh, dear god," I sigh to myself in the mirror. I look like a corpse. A corpse at the end of her youth, ripe and rotting at 23. And I can't even blame fermented make up. The crusty dark cotton pads scattered around my sink, amongst the mess I'd made getting ready last night, prove that I'd taken my make up off before falling into bed. 

Nina is real anal about removing your make up before sleep. More important than brushing teeth, more important than changing your tampon; if there is one thing you must absolutely do before you sleep, it's remove your make up. No matter what state you're in. To be honest, I've spent years smudging pillows with the leftover markings of a night out, but the evidence on the sink in front of me clearly evidences that Nina has drilled her make-up-removing ideology into my unconscious. Because I've done it black out drunk, apparently. On instinct. Nina's made her way into my instincts. 

I look at the time. 14:38. Waking up after noon. Hell. Self-hatred. My head is pounding. My soul is pounding. I take a painkiller. Then I take another one. Then I take my dietary supplements, like that'll do anything, because I'm so fucking healthy. 

And my stupid vegan porridge waits for me in the cupboard. 

I order KFC fries.

Chapter 3

On Monday, I arrive at work on time, venti oat vanilla latte in hand.

I spend ten minutes wiping my shoe on the doormat of the big soulless millennial glass building because I stepped in dog shit. I'd been distractedly staring at my phone, overthinking a post I'd made to my Instagram story about the half-decomposed rat carcass I'd slipped on while running after my tram. I took it as a sign to delete the post. Starting the week strong, disgruntled and disgusting. I miss cigarettes.

I work for the Austrian branch of the E.U. branch of an international company, in the marketing department. Those gen-z interns you all praise on company social media? That's me. I do TikTok. I don't have a personal TikTok, I hate the app. And I hate that it has infested every other social media, too afraid to compete in the market to have their own unique features anymore. Everything becoming the same everything. I'm getting paid to turn myself into an influencer. One way or another, we all end up having to sell our images to the masses of the internet. There are no job offerings, anymore, without the requirement of an audience of strangers.

I'm not on break when I'm on break, there's no spacial separation between on-mode and off-mode. We have an open work space. We're all family here. An office run by millennial managers and their leftover BuzzFeed Mark Zuckerberg entrepreneur Silicon Valley the-future-is-technology ideology. Think George Micheal in season four of Arrested Development. Lunch is a vegan pesto corkscrew pasta salad and a Coke Zero. Health lie. Chemicals over calories. Chemicals that lead to cancer. Microplastics from my container to garnish my meal. I miss cigarettes. 

I spend my work time trying to follow whatever trends teenagers and adults who don't want to grow up are following. I sit in front of a tablet, propped up on my desk, drowning in the endless scroll, with a notebook next to me to note down what I see come up frequently, the demographic doing it, how people are reacting to it, how people act in the comments. I'm observing human behaviour to mimic it as the company. It's absurd, or maybe dystopian, that company social media bypass the uncanny valley. 

I observe what other hip companies are doing, what people respond approvingly to, what people reject. My biggest fear is getting a reply with the "silence, brand" crab. I'm not sure anyone else in my company knows it exists. People respond best to things that seem genuine. The company type plays a strong role in this. People are most supportive of libraries, public transport, museums, and other authentically human beneficial institutions. This is difficult where the company is a global product conglomerate. In such a case, the best approach is to humanise the 'gen-z intern' running the account. If you don't have authentic humanity, store-bought is fine.

Comment sections on corporate accounts are full of people expressing surprise and awe at discovering that some strange degenerate meme they've come across while scrolling was posted by some company's official social media account. That's an important part; it must be authentic algorithmic accident. I've had several arguments with superiors that if we pay the platforms to advertise one of our fun quirky posts, it loses its value and will be ignored with hostility.

The sun starts to set outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. The daily 15:00 drowsiness hits and I refill my caffeine addiction with a sugar-free Red Bull. Caffeine isn't energy, it's a lie artificially telling our bodies to be alert. Food, actual nutrients, is energy. But, hey, chemicals over calories. I miss cigarettes.

My biggest professional role-model is Duolingo. It was ahead of its time in customer relations. It was one of the first companies to recognise that corporate professionalism is dead, that the era of the internet is the era of the amateur, that today's generations seek sincerity. For one, it offers a genuinely valuable service in a non-predatory way; anyone can learn one of the offered languages for free, without having to put too much self-discipline into self-teaching. It mobile-gamified language learning into small daily doses and engrained itself into the life characteristics of an average person. Within the app, it began establishing that scent of genuineness with the presence of cheekiness. It was the customers who kept its public presence alive, with memes and jokes about needing to do one's streak or Duo would come for your family.

First came, of course, the notifications from Duo the owl mascot, with its personified pleas that you do your five minutes. Then came the memes people made, charmed by those notifications. The company embraced these memes, leaning in to the threatening portrayal of their mascot, rather than attempting to combat it. Truly, the best thing one can do for the approval of consumers is embrace whatever direction they've taken your image. It makes them feel seen, establishes a mutual relationship, relaxes their usual guard as a consumer. Makes it feel like you're playing together, makes them forget your transactional motives.

The secret to this marketing tactic we have now all begun employing is that word-of-mouth is the most effective advertising campaign one can have. An unsponsored reference holds considerably more trust value than any paid advertisement could. Because it has no agenda, as something already accepted and integrated into someone's life. Hell, here I am, giving the company two paragraphs of free promotion. That's how effective they are. 

Looking at the comments of Duolingo's latest unhinged post, people are eating it up and the account is replying with fun banter. I fear my job has made me too cynical to enjoy the playful humour this marketing strategy relies on. It all seems so soulless to me; I don't see jokes, I see people like me, sitting with notebooks, observing and appropriating current human culture to sell it back to the people. Sure, not all of the playful nature is a facade. But us 'gen-z interns' are only having fun being facetious in the channels that reach gen-z consumers. The older folk, who still believe in '80s professionalism, are getting a different, more classic marketing campaign, in the channels where they will see it. Like everything else in a world run by money, playfulness is only present in as far as it is profitable. 

Work ends and the daily 17:00 depression hits. Walking home in darkness. I miss cigarettes. 

Fuck it. Like this country gives a shit. In New Zealand, they've banned cigarettes for anyone born after 2008. Austria has vending machines for cigarettes and weed everywhere (boringly, only CBD, of course). I go up to one of them and hold my bank card up to the little reader. It confirms that I'm over 18.

"Yeah? Fuck you," I reply to the little screen, which is now asking me to select a pack. 

Lucky Strike has started selling eco-friendly green cigarettes; degradable filters, fully recyclable packaging, feel good about your bad habit!

"It's Lucky Strike, they're good for you," Fräulein Elsa tells a nurse in season four of American Horror Story. It's been my brand ever since. That's the only reason it is. The trust we put in word of mouth. 

Of course, Lucky Strike is still selling their regular cigarettes, wrapped in a thin layer of plastic that will end up floating down the grimy streets of Vienna until the 48er pick it up and move it to another place to pollute institutionally, different than litter because it's organised, different than litter because it's out of sight.

The little pack thumps to the bottom of the machine. I reach under the flap that's probably been touched a thousand times or more today alone, by every kind of diseased person who smokes, and probably never been cleaned. I should wash my hands when I get home, I think to myself. I probably won't.

I miss my tram because of my smoking detour. Gives me a chance to smoke another one, I think to myself. The nicotine buzzes through my little withdrawal body. I feel it move through my body; starting at my chest, down the arms, out through my hands, down the legs, into my feet. Like meditation. 

The next tram comes and I let it pass. I could be waiting for another one that stops here, I justify in my head to strangers that don't give a shit. I smoke another one. Oh, dear heaven above, why, why, have I been denying myself this pleasure? Cancer? Lung cancer? Like the leading cause of lung cancer isn't becoming living in thick smoggy cities. I could go for a run and take deep refreshing inhales of air pollution, this and that toxic gas irritating my poor fragile bronchia. This way or that, my lungs are going to rot. 

Chapter 4 

This way or that, my soul is going to rot. 

My mind is rotting from all this bullshit I'm putting inside it. My organs are rotting from all this bullshit I'm putting inside them. Empowered femininity; femininity repackaged, repurposed. Green, recyclable, eco-friendly cigarettes. But at least it isn't dairy.

I'm not vegan for the environment, or for the horrible ways the animals are treated, or for health reasons, or for any normal reasons. I'm vegan, because then at least I'm vegan; I'm doing one thing better than everyone else. Because then, at least I can say: 

"I'm vegan."

"I can't eat that, sorry."

"Do you have any vegan options?"

"Is there a plant based option?"

"No, thank you, then."

I eat exactly the same as you do, it all just tastes slightly worse and is artificial with labels declaring 'eco', 'fair trade', 'vegan', 'gluten free', 'paleo friendly', 'keto friendly', 'organic', 'bio'. All of us, on our stupid little "this is the healthy way to eat" fad diets, just eat the same stuff you do, made out of different things. Yeah, I definitely think our ancestors were eating cauliflower-crust almond-cheese pizzas.  

Life has become monotonous. I count down the days to Friday, then I go to the same bar I'm always at and get drunk with my friends and spend the weekend regretting my choices, and then I count down the days to Friday again. I wake up Saturday morning feeling that I'm wasting my life and promising I won't drink this much again, and then I reach Friday evening, without having noticed the week pass, and channel all my stress into an exasperated sigh:

"I need a drink."

We do shots of rum and sip on Cuba Libres (with Coke Zero, of course). Mixing alcohols isn't healthy. 

Health. That's the light we're all buzzing around, the star we're all orienting our life energy towards. Healthy bodies, healthy souls. Healthy minds, healthy relationships. 

Leah is reflecting on the last girlfriend she had. They broke up two weeks ago. They'd been together for about six months and Leah was miserable the entire time but wouldn't admit to it. Her girlfriend, her ex, was nine years older. Weird, in my opinion, but I never said anything. Lily keeps telling me that queer relationships are just built differently to straight ones and that it's not my place to say anything about something I don't understand. I mean, from where I'm sitting, it seems to me that queer people tend to end up in questionable relationships. But then, so do straight people, don't we? 

I sip my drink and listen to Leah rant herself into more and more realisations about everything that was so so wrong. To be fair, I dated a 28 year old when I was 18; maybe a 32 year old when you're 23 isn't so weird. To be fair, he completely ruined me.

"Yikes, that's so toxic," Anna's angelic honey voice yelps in response. Her golden blonde hair is tied up in two lopsided space buns, most of it falling out in rogue chunks at this point. Leah just revealed that her ex would cook for her only to guilt her into doing all the cleaning up to "even out the labour".

Toxic. That's demonic threat in the shadows that keeps us up at night. We've replaced religion with our own doctrine. Health is the god we seek to please, and toxicity is the devil we fear. 

"It was, wasn't it?" Leah answers. Leah's long, straight, chestnut brown hair falls down her shoulders, framing her sharp face, as she stares sheepishly down at her drink, "I know it's toxic to feel this way, but—"

"You're allowed to be a little toxic sometimes. Be a petty bitch if you're feeling bitter. You need to give yourself the space to feel your emotions. Constantly policing yourself isn't healthy," Nina chimes in, assertive and assuring. Our health obsessed little minds are even aware that our health obsession isn't healthy. 

Nina is the confidence queen. She carries herself like she's already figured everything out, like nothing is missing or off in her life. Like she has all the answers, like she has figured out the perfect formula for a perfectly healthy and balanced life. 

Leah lifts her emerald green eyes in a murderous glare and, in a strong dark voice, says, "I want her to burn."

Symbolically, green is the colour of both health and toxicity. 

Leah breaks into laughter and we all laugh with her. 

"Omg, is that evil?" She giggles, hand over mouth, bashful and modest. 

"Girl, you were like," a speechless Anna searches for words. Nina finds them for her.

"A femme fatale."

Lily starts pulling at her collar and fanning herself.

"Babe," she says flustered, probably joking, possibly not, "that did something to me."

Chapter 5 

I say I need to pee. 

"Go piss, girl," is chanted. 

I go outside to smoke. Nina follows me out. I turn to her, guilty and scared, like a dog caught chewing on her owner's couch cushion, lit cigarette in red hand. 

"Mani!" She exclaims, a satirical motheresque shock in her voice, "what are you doing? You've gone a whole year without smoking!"

I throw my arguments together in my head quickly. I always speak with intention. I always watch my words carefully. 

"To be fair," I say, "it was my new-me resolution for my 22nd birthday to quit. And I achieved my goal. I didn't smoke a single day that I was 22."

Her shoulders slump in relief. 

"Oh thank god we're smoking again," she sighs, reaching her hand out to grab the cigarette from between my fingers. She places it elegantly between her vaseline soft lips. She takes a deep drag and she looks like a 1950s actress smoking it. Not a real '50s actress, with all her flaws and struggles and humanness. I mean our romanticised idealised concept of a '50s actress and all she stands for as an aesthetic. 

This perfect Nina, skin my favourite shade of my favourite colour, this radiant walnut brown. Taurus, confident and steadfast and knows. She always knows. She knows who she is and what she wants and what she needs. She knows what needs to be said and what needs to be done.

And she's smoking. So maybe smoking isn't that bad. Maybe the guilt I beat myself up with for indulging myself this one thing isn't fair to myself, isn't healthy. 

She purses her lips and blows out a cloud of smoke emphasised by the cold late January air. I'd describe it as frosty, but we probably won't see snow until April. How is a woman meant to keep her mental state in order when even the weather is out of order? 

She looks to me, her deep woodland brown eyes sinking into mine. She has that effect. It's incredible that she's my friend. In fact, it's incredible any of them are my friends. If my friends are so godly, then surely I must be pretty good myself. I work very hard on that, being good. I watch myself, my words, my actions, very carefully. 

"Mania," she says to me, "I'm proud of you."

My heart pulses.

"Thank you," I say.

I don't know how to answer something like this. I appreciate it. In fact, I crave it. But when I actually receive it, I get flustered. What is the appropriate way to react? What's the humble, elegant, grown way to react?

"No." She takes my hand in both of hers. They're warm. I'm cold. "I mean it. I'm so proud of you. You've come so far. You're going so far. I just know it. You're one of the most impressive people I know. I just know you're going to achieve everything you dream of."

Her faith in me scares me. What do I dream of? Money and independence, those were my dreams. But I have those now, don't I? Growing up, all I dreamed of was getting out of that torture chamber of a home. And somehow, I did it, without turning into a serial killer, which would have been almost inevitable had I been a man. I've worked very hard. On the life around me and on the life inside me. 

"Thank you."

I don't tell her that she's the most impressive person I know. 

Chapter 6 

Saturday afternoon and my head is pounding again. My life is pounding. Someone's pounding at the door, I realise. 

I open it. 

It's him. 

No. 

I close it. 

32 year old creep. 

Is it any worse than me wanting the 18 year old at the bar? Who knows. 

Fucking creep. 

He pounds at the door again and yells through it. 

"Mania!"

I go into my bathroom and rinse my face. I can still hear him. Who the hell let him into the building? 

"Mania!"

I walk back to the door. 

"Fuck off."

"Mania, come on, open the door."

And I do. Because I think I can fend for myself. I think. I think too much. 

Because I miss him. There he stands. Scruffy, adolescent beard; curls around his sunken eyes that are a little wrinklier now. I haven't seen him in years.

"What the hell?" I demand. 

He lets himself in and I take a step back. He closes the door behind him. I feel myself press into the wall behind me. He's my height, but I feel like the size of an ant. 

I'm an adult. 

I was told to remind myself about this by my therapist. My therapist, who I fired.

I'm an adult, and I can fend for myself. 

"Mania, listen. I want to apologise for some things. See, I'm in this program now, and we're supposed to make amends—"

"Are you in Alcoholics Anonymous?"

His drinking wasn't that bad when I was with him. He drank about the amount that any kid around their early twenties does. He was almost thirty, though, I guess. Maybe it got worse since.

"I'm also in therapy," he says, "and I've realised some things about our relationship."

Fuck it. I roll my eyes and lead him into the kitchen. I make us both coffee. With vanilla-flavoured almond milk. 

He sits there, wet heap of a man, and apologises. He apologises for the physical intimidation and he apologises for the emotional outbursts and he apologises for the manipulative games and he apologises for the coercive sex. 

"I wasn't acting like that intentionally," he says, "I was struggling a lot, and it all came out on you."

"I believe you," I sigh. Oh, wether I do or not doesn't really matter, I think, as I realise I don't know if I mean it. Either way, it's weaponised incompetence. He didn't know better than to traumatise me. Bullshit, either way. 

He leans a hand over the table and takes mine to hold. Every hair on my body that I haven't shaved off stands on end. My heart starts preparing to fight or run away. Or beg for mercy. He shoots his slimy greasy eyes into mine. 

"Most importantly, you were way too young to be dealing with all that. I've realised I should not have been dating in that state at all, especially not someone so young and vulnerable. It was wrong and I'm so so sorry."

He sounds genuine. 

Oh, fuck him. 

"Thank you."

And then I kindly shoo him out. He stands earnestly in my doorway and looks at me with that sick benevolent kindness. 

"I'm really glad we had this talk, Mania," he says, "I hope you're doing well."

I shut the door. 

Chapter 7 

I shut the door. 

Fuck that guy. Fuck him. What does he know? Who the hell is he to assume what I could and could not handle? Who the hell is he to feel bad about my past?

I would call Nina and Lily and Leah and Anna. I should call them. They'd come over and we'd order gross vegan pizza and drink tequila. I don't. Instead, I put on an angry-ex girl -ower playlist curated by Spotify's algorithm — who knows human emotion and art like a musical intelligence software, eh? I shower and get into the sluttiest dress I have and keep an eye on the time. 

Fuck him. Who the fuck was he to force himself back into my life and rob me of the last thing I had, my anger. Who the fuck was he to conclude things? Who the fuck was he to make amends? Now he gets to feel a weight off his chest, a sin forgiven. But my chest is heavier now. My soul is a gaping wound, stitches ripped open, fresh blood breaking through old scabs.

When men get angry, they blow up the world. When women get angry, they blow up themselves.  

I don't call the girls because they'd tell me that what I'm about to do isn't healthy. Isn't how we're supposed to react to these things. Maybe I should be grateful to have this closure forced onto me, one last rape to tie it up. Or maybe I'm right to be angry, but throwing myself away isn't the answer. 

Fuck the answer. I down the tequila by myself and look at the time. I sizzle my hair with a curling iron, which isn't healthy for my hair, and plaster my face with layers of moisturising vitamin-rich foundation. 

I wish my anger was sexier. Blood and rage and flexing masculinity. I look at the drunk mess in the mirror. I wish my anger was sexier. 

When men write angry women, they write as if our rage manifests like theirs. Blood and murder. Violence. Carrie and Kill Bill. But, unlike their ego-fuelled rage of entitlement, we've been humbled our whole lives. We could never. We watch movies written and directed by men about these women and fantasise about acting it out; and then we put on pretty dresses and pleasant smiles for the men around us.

It's not fair. It's not fucking fair that he gets to fuck up so massively, destroy another person, and then grow. Why are men allowed to grow from their mistakes? Women wear ours as scarlet letters. A man with mistakes to admit is a good man, a grown man. A woman with mistakes to admit is an unredeemable shameful hag. 

If I was written by a man, I'd wield a knife, all sexy like, on a string under my slutty dress. I'd act like the offence was personal, not the result of a society grooming it to be like this. I'd murder the man. I'd murder many men. Seduce them, then penetrate them with my phallic knife. Reclaim the situation or whatever.

But I'm not. 

If I was a man, I'd build a bomb.

But I'm not. 

If I tried to do anything, the men would probably kill me. 

I just wish I could deal with my anger the way men do. Join a fight club; self harm via half-naked buff guy. Or follow some misogynist right wing extremist, who tells me my failures are not my fault, into domestic terrorism. I guess I could join the army, but then I'm almost guaranteed to get raped. 

What does a woman do when she wants to blow up the world? Where's my radical male leader charming my impressionable mind into committing acts of violence by giving me the answers to my misery that I want to hear? If I joined anything, I'd, at best, be sexually taken advantage of, at worst, sexually abused. 

When the time is finally late enough to excuse my going out like this, I go out. I miss my tram and have to wait ten minutes. Enough to smoke two cigarettes, I think to myself. Men stare at my bare smooth legs poking out of my sack of a coat. My tram arrives. 

Chapter 8 

There's a corner of Vienna we've dubbed the Bermuda Triangle, subway station Schwedenplatz. Cheap bars with sticky floors filled with teenagers. Your dignity goes missing there. When I'm standing in the fluorescent light of the McDonald's M, the landmark beacon where friends meet up, I reevaluate. I feel like a teenager again. 

In November of 2020, there was a terror attack here that the internet cared about for two days then forgot about completely. A madman with a gun ran rampant in the popular drinking corner of Vienna on the last night before one of the many lockdowns that promised to be the last one. An early November Monday, and the bars had been full of people enjoying the last of their temporary freedom. Four people died. 

We held vigils. We hailed heroes. We put roses in bullet holes. We yelled at Muslims and we yelled at Nazis. We jerked ourselves off about our unshakable grumpy town spirit — schleich di, du oaschloch; we empowered ourselves in invocations of the understated bark of annoyed dialect one of the witnesses that filmed the event from their apartment window yelled out at the gunman; fuck off, asshole — to be Viennese is to greet life with nothing more and nothing less than irritation. 

And now we piss on these streets like it never happened. But the bullet holes still scatter the building exteriors.

In hindsight, I don't know who the victims were. A teacher, maybe. And foreigners, I remember. In hindsight, we weren't mourning their deaths, so much as taking offence at the attack.

I go for a cigarette in my too-small purse and realise with annoyance that it's my last one. I should've paid attention; have I smoked this much already? Me from a month ago would be so disappointed. Whatever. Me from a month ago hadn't seen him in years. 

I head to a cigarette automat and on the way decide to to drop by the ATM for cash; a lot of places in Vienna are cash-only. Saturday night, the line for the Schwedenplatz ATM is long and trashy. I'm stuck behind a group of teenagers; the boys with all the confidence of a teenage boy and the girls daring the late January cold to show off their new assets gifted by puberty. 

Girls try to look older until they're women trying to look younger. 

I observe them, nervous with that (not so) irrational insecurity a teenager's judgemental presence arouses in any adult; ashamed and feeling lame, just because I'm not a teenager. Their youthful recklessness, curious and hostile, is a bitter contrast emphasising my absolute pathetic loser situation. Standing behind them, alone and jaded, they make me feel aged out and lonely.

Cash and cigarettes prepared, I sit down in a bar and have a drink. 

I sit down in a bar and have a drink.

I sit down in a bar and have a drink. 

In the basement of a pub all my classmates used to go to, back in high school, I start to really hate myself. What a pathetic show. Made myself an object of flesh, a slice of cake to be eaten, and nobody wants to eat me. If I wasn't getting attention as a person, at least I'd still be a person. But getting no attention all done up like this with intentions like these, I'm an outdated sex doll discarded by the side of the road. 

I go upstairs and outside for a smoke. I brave the cold and the strangers, and leave my jacket. My phone's with me, and that's my whole soul. If anyone wants to steal the nothing that's left in my wallet, they're free to. Fuck it, at this point. I'm drunk and ashamed and filled with self-loathing enough that nothing has value anymore. Nothing matters. I just want my cigarette.

I stand outside the pub and think about how the shivering and regulating of body temperature is burning calories.Back when I'd been here once or twice in high school, it was still legal to smoke inside bars. Back when I'd been here, the smoking age was still 16, which is still the drinking age today. This country doesn't give a shit. 

A man walks out of the pub entrance and my gaze turns to him instinctively for a moment, before I dismiss it. Men's eyes aren't on me, anymore. I'm expired goods. I'm old. I've realised this tonight. 

Then he turns to me and says, "Could you spare me a cigarette?"

His accent is some flavour of British I can't distinguish. I look to him but don't face him. He's a about a head taller than me. 

"Brave, speaking to a random person in Vienna in English."

"Don't most of you speak English anyway?"

I exhale smoke, turn to him, and lean my shoulder on the wall. 

"Yes. But most of us are very rude."

"Are you?"

"What do you think?"

He looks me dead in the eyes and pulls a cigarette out of his pocket. His eyes wear the beginning signs of aging. His hairline is threatening to recede. His hair is brown. His eyes are brown. Brown is my favourite colour. 

"How old are you?" I ask him.

"35. Here celebrating my birthday with a trip through Europe."

"So you're an Aquarius too?"

"Leo rising," he smiles. All men are Leo rising. 

"I see you know how to talk to women." 

He nods proudly. 

"How old are you?"

"Would you like me to lie about my age?"

"About being younger or older?"

"Which would you prefer?"

That sparks a familiar flicker in his eyes. He knows that, at least for tonight, I'm his fantasy. Fuck. Have I really come to this again? I guess I have. There's no escaping now, just resignation to my fate. 

Which would I prefer? Which would be more shameful? 23 and still pulling the nymphette act or 23 and spending a Saturday night at home crying into tequila and vegan pizza?

Man, fuck him. He had not right to show up and demand amends and maybe I wasn't fucking ready to give him amends just like I hadn't been ready to give him consent. Letting himself feel like a good person by violating my trauma. My damage wasn't his to voyeur, to self-flagellate. If grown men are going to ruin little girls, the least they could do is not repent. His guilt stole my anger. The processing was no longer on my timeline, it was his, and he now deemed it over. He could feel reformed while I still feel deformed. Fuck him. 

The anger flaming up inside me turns to sheepishness as the man where with me right now answers.

"I'm not really sure I can answer here without incriminating myself," he says somewhat shyly. 

"Your perversions are safe with me," I wink. I sound like a hooker — which, by the way, are legal here. Oh god, I hope he doesn't think I'm a hooker. 

"I'm not a hooker," I blurt out, breaking my sexy femme act. 

"Good, I can't afford one," he jokes, then stumbles over his own joke, "wait, shit— I do have money— "

I start giggling. He does too. 

"I mean, I have enough to buy you a drink. If you want one."

"Sure."

There's a bin right next to the door but we crush our cigarette butts into the sidewalk with our shoes anyway. As we start to head inside, he stops and grabs my arm. 

"You are 18, right?"

You humble me. 

"Not a day older," I answer. 

Chapter 9 

It turns out he and his pals had been sitting at a table nearby, eyes on me. 

A hot young woman alone at a bar. 

Easy prey, a gazelle on her own. 

"What was a pretty lady like you doing on her own?" One of his friends asks when I join them, coat jumbled in my arms. 

"My friends left 'cause one of them got too drunk," I lie. 

"Everybody, this is," the man I met outside who doesn't know my name introduces me. 

"Anna," I finish for him. 

Sorry, Anna. My name is too google-able. 

"Anna, nice to meet you," his friend shakes my hand. Names around the table: Edward, Tom, Tim, and Andy. My guy is called John. 

"Anna's having her birthday, too."

"Oh, that's nice. Happy birthday, Anna," Edward says, "how old are you getting?"

He sounds like one of my dad's friends at a work party. 

"However old you want," I answer. And in that moment, the men turn into what they really are; Edward raises his eyebrows, Tom smirks slyly at John and John grins back. Fucking pigs. 

So I sit there, as women in slutty dresses do, and listen to the men talk about their real, important, men topics, only once in a while remembering that I am a real person, and not just a table decoration, and asking me a question. John's hand is on my thigh the whole time. I'm wet. I hate myself. 

Well, at least there's birthday shots. Mixing alcohols isn't healthy. When was the last time John washed the hand he's inching into my panties under the table? That's a serious risk of infection. I'm wet. I hate myself. 

"Well, Anna," Edward asks. He's the one sitting across from me. John and Tim and I are sitting on the bench, across the table Edward and Tom and Andy are sitting on high chairs. I'm making direct eye contact with Edward while John has his hand up my skirt. I feel like an animal, a cheap plastic toy. I finish my spritzer. Maybe, if I let go of my dignity as self worth, I can just enjoy this. 

They say this and that is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. The truth is, the most fun a girl can have is taking her clothes off. The most fun a girl can have is only when she lets go of her humanness, strips off her pride, regresses to object, toy. Give up trying to play and accept being played with. 

It's exciting, I coerce myself. It's fun. I'm erotic. 

"Well, Anna?" Edward, who doesn't really care, has asked, "what do you think?"

The topic was wether you could separate the art from the artist. Obviously, they were all in agreement that a director being a rapist could not possibly influence the film artistically and therefore you could enjoy that film without once having to think twice about it. All self-jerking idiots. I bat my eyes. 

"I don't know if I would have anything to say on this matter," I answer. 

In truth, I think the artist is the art. I mean, you can't ignore that who made the thing very defines the thing. The art comes from the experiences and beliefs that someone felt like sharing with the world and if that someone is a horrible person then those beliefs are going to be sown into the fabric of the work. 

"I think It would be interesting to hear a woman's perspective on this," Tim, who is the local feminist guy of the group, who shakes his head disapprovingly at the other men's behaviour to absolve them of the guilt, asks, "since it is often women that are victim to these directors."

"When you watch The Shining, you're watching a footage of a woman who's actually being abused. It's a snuff film," I say.

John's hand leaves my skirt. The table is quiet. 

"So what about when a stunt actor gets injured during filming, huh? Does that mean we shouldn't watch the movie?" An offended Tom asks. 

Tom's tone implies that all stunt actors are men. Of course. Everyone is men. Everyone else is women. Uma Thurman's Kill Bill injuries, ignored. The obvious tendency that self-important male directors with their dicks in their hands view actresses not as capable human beings with skills they've trained and been hired for, but as props to be exploited for their vision, ignored. To Tom, those injuries don't count. Women's pain isn't real human pain. We are to be moulded by men. Women's suffering is a necessary part of the auteur process. 

Tim tries to defend me a little, in his protector-of-women act. 

"I think what Anna is trying to say," the feminist man says on behalf of the woman, "is that we have to look critically at the creation process of the movies we love."

No thanks, Tim. I hate The Shining. It was so boring I couldn't finish it. 

I make doe eyes and smile sweetly at Tim. 

"Thank you, Tim. I couldn't figure out how to explain it."

John's hand is back on my thigh. 

Chapter 10 

We get back to his hotel room. A decently nice hotel not too dar from the bars where your dignity goes missing. He even gets us an uber there, and spends the whole time nearly fucking me in the backseat. I feel so bad for the uber driver, but to both of them I'm just a nicely dressed piece of meat. 

Third floor. Double bed, white bed sheets pulled tight. He is ripping at my dress. 

"Dude. Dude."

He stops. He looks into my eyes, worried. 

"What?"

"My dress. You're gonna rip my dress."

"Oh. Sorry."

Before I started having sex as an adult, I didn't realise that I had autonomy during sex. That I could say things and that I was equally in charge. There are so many moments in my sexual past that I wish I could take back. Moments that I wish I'd known I had the power to say no to. I wish I'd known that I didn't have to accept every pair of male lips that landed on mine. 

The first skill a sexually active girl learns is how to leave the situation, mentally. The body becomes an object of sexualised flesh the men view it as, you become as empty as they perceive you. Your soul, to protect degradation, evacuates. Let what happens happen, while you're thinking about that one episode of your favourite tv show. 

The last skill a sexually active woman learns is how to leave the situation physically. 

I take a moment to asses my safety in this situation. He doesn't know my age. Far as he knows, I'm still one of those girls who thinks she doesn't have autonomy and becomes non-conscious meat pile to be fucked. 

"Actually, you know what?" I say, as I start to peel off my dress, "I'm drunk and really tired. Do you mind if we just sleep?"

Wow. I'm taking back my consent and adding "do you mind". And if he does mind, what? Just rape me, then? Women asserting themselves are still sheep begging consideration. 

He doesn't respond. He's lost in my boobs. 

"John?"

His attentions snaps up to me. He registers what I said. He looks disappointed, but replies, "sure. I can give you one of my shirts, if you'd like. To sleep in, I mean."

My dress falls to the floor and I fall onto the bed, place a hand over my head, and say, "god, John, I'm so drunk."

I close my eyes and when I open them, the world is hidden behind a translucent white veil. John's shirt has landed over me. I sit up and pull it down. John stands with a glass of water ready for me, holding one for himself. Alright. Safe man. 

I take the water, down it, then hand the glass back to him. He walks back to the little table with the complimentary water bottles, and I approach him from behind. I press my bare chest against the back of his pale blue shirt and wrap my arms around his torso. I start to life his shirt. 

"Hey, Anna," John says, a little unsure, "What's this?"

"Changed my mind," I mumble into his back. 

He cooperates and I lift his shirt over his head. He turns around and I push him against the little desk thingy as I unbuckle his belt. I get on my knees. I pull his zipper, now at level with my face, down. 

"Are you sure…?" He doesn't even bother to finish the sentence. I don't think he cares about the answer anymore, my hands are in his waistband. He respects a no, I'll give him that. He deserves a medal. 

One orgasm between the two of us and one used condom in the hotel bin later, and I get up. I rub my neck and stretch my shoulders and the night is getting older so I decide to search for my dress. I'm naked. He's watching me. 

"I'm 23, by the way," I say, casually. 

His face drops.

"No. I'm kidding. I'm 17."

Fear flashes across his eyes. 

“No, I’m kidding.”

He watches me climb into my dress. 

"You're not gonna stay the night?" He asks. 

"No, I have my own place," I look him in the eyes, "my parents aren't home."

He throws a pillow at me and I giggle. 

"Stop that," he says. 

"You should see your face," I laugh, pulling my dress over my shoulders. 

"Seriously. Stay. We could be in love for one night. This place has a killer breakfast buffet."

If this had been a hostel, like every 20-something tourist I'd fucked as a teen, I would've felt trashier. But he's 35. And the hotel is nice enough. If I fucked older, maybe I'd get an even nicer hotel. A Hilton or something. When you're a man, your age and your quality of life are a direct positive correlation. When you're a woman, your life shrinks as you age. I know my youth is valuable and fleeting, but the problem with youth is that you're too young to know what to do with it. I cannot wait to have my life behind me. Out of the way. I know that I'm wasting my youth wishing for it to be over. Youth is wasted on the young, or whatever old people say. 

I consider my options. Wake up in the arms of a semi-attractive older man with free professionally cooked food, or go home and wake up to shame and wet cinnamon porridge. 

"Do they have vegan options?"

"I'm sure they do."

"Alright."

He grins and crawls over to pull up the bottom of my dress. 

To be fair, then there were two orgasms between the two of us. 

Chapter 11  

The next morning, I lie there, head resting on his bare chest, tracing circles around his right nipple. Like this is normal. Like we're both just adults. Which, I guess, we are. Maybe this is normal. I'm too young too tell. When I'm 35, I'll know, in hindsight, if this was normal or weird. Healthy or toxic. 

"How long are you going to be in Vienna?" I ask.

"About a week."

"Wow, Mr. Big Shot. What do you work as that you can afford to spend weeks travelling Europe in nice hotels?"

"I'm a cinematographer for an advertising company."

And then he goes on to namedrop companies he's shot commercials for, like capitalism impresses me. Leftover millennial entrepreneur ideology. 

He doesn't ask me what I do. 

At brunch, his friends all grin at him. At me, in his clothes, with him. His boxers, too — not risking that yeast infection or UTI —, but they can't see that. 

Do men not know that we can see them? We're not oblivious sex robots, not yet at least. It's so obvious that we're personal achievements they're proud of each other for getting. It makes me feel icky. Like I'm not in the room. 

When I sit down with my orange juice and vegan banana pancakes — I'll give John this, this place does have a killer breakfast buffet —, Tom is ranting. 

Tom is ranting about the secondary father figure. About how the western civilisation is failing because we no longer have trusted systems of secondary father figures pushing young men to be their best selves. 

When I was in school, I was really close to my fourth grade teacher. When I turned 16, my boobs grew into double-Ds and he stopped talking to me. What about father figures for girls? Where are the father figures for girls? Why are men so fucking obsessed with themselves that they never once stop to recognise that maybe girls have just as much humanity that needs to be fostered as they do?

No, the fact that I might need a mentor in my life never occurs to Tom. He just knows I'm that questionably young bird his friend scored. 

The utter dehumanisation of being a woman. Girls aren't even on his radar as human beings. Women are afterthoughts to men. Men are women's point of orientation. It shouldn't be like this, but it is. 

Fatherless behaviour, that's what they call it, what I'm doing right now. When men don't have enough father figures, they're allowed to become Neo-Nazis and start riots at music festivals, but god forbid a woman wants attention from an older man and does it the only way she knows she'll get it. 

I could just stab them all. 

Were I a man, I would jump over the table, tackle Tom, and stick his fork in his eyes screaming,

"WHERE THE FUCK ARE OUR FATHER FIGURES? DO WE NOT DESERVE TO BE THE BEST PEOPLE WE CAN BE, TOO?"

But I'm not. So, instead, I smirk and give Tom a flirtatious look. Listen real intently. Nod. I don't know why I think fucking him would feel the same as stabbing him. Empowered femininity and whatnot. Eco-friendly cigarettes. 

Men, I guess, need not one, but two strong male leaders in their life to become men. Men creating men, oh, it's exhausting. You try to include yourself, to think of yourself as one of the "men" being discussed, take "man" to mean "humans", but the truth is, you don't even cross their mind. They can say they're not being sexist but by reducing anything down to the state of young men, automatically included is the implication that young women are supposed to have other affairs, become other things. 

But. If men are meant to become the best men they can be — and here the first "men" refers to male adults and the second "men" refers to a fully rounded human being — what are women supposed to become? 

Wives and mothers. Creating more men. 

Men are so caught up in the affairs of how young men are doing, are any of them thinking of the young women? The young women are sitting next to older strangers in the stranger's clothes. Tom is so concerned for the future of men my age. He's staring at my tits.

The world is a boys club and you're here to decorate it. 

Chapter 12 

After brunch, I return to the hotel room with John. We have a discussion about wether I do the walk of shame in my tiny, dirty, tight dress, the stains of last night harsh against the fresh daylight, or wear his clothes home. He insists I take his clothes, big and baggy and boyfriend on me.

I catch myself in the mirror. My femininity seems almost a screaming neon in his clothes. Masculinity, but worn incorrectly. Masculinity, but ill-fitting. Emphasising that, under the crumpled button up and belted pants, there's a woman underneath. 

He tells me this is insurance that I'll see him again. I ball up my dress, fail to shove it into my undersized purse, and begin accepting my fate of having to carry home my dirty laundry openly in my arms, when he takes it from my hands. He tells me it's a trade — I take his clothes, he takes mine — and that he'll have the hotel laundry service clean it for me. He gifts me a kiss for the way home, and I leave him in his hotel room. 

Tim, the chivalrous feminist, walks me to the door of the hotel. Why it's him, and not John, chaperoning me out, I don't know. In front of the hotel, Tim pulls out two cigarettes and offers one of them to me. The early noon sky is wearing a facade of early morning in the crispy, misty winter cold. 

"John seems to really like you, you know," he says, exhaling smoke. 

"I'm wearing his clothes, I figured he wants to see me again," I respond. 

"He's had a rough going of it. I know he seems like a womaniser, but he really is sensitive. He doesn't let just every girl go home in his clothes."

Men care so much about each other. Why can't they care about women the way they care about each other? 

"I'm honoured," I say blankly. 

"And I know," he continues, "that for a young woman —"

I have never felt the age of these men stronger than in that statement. 

"— it can be really intimidating to be alone with a bunch of men, so I hope we didn't make you too uncomfortable. I know that Tom can be a lot."

Men who think they're one of the good ones are the worst ones. 

I think of when Nina and Lily and Leah and Anna and I went to watch Promising Young Woman. The cinema was filled with women and their feminist boyfriends. Lily brought her cuffing season boy, this sweet chubby guy with a bushel of blonde curls and an endless supply of brown knit sweaters. After the movie, we were all on fire, and the boy, in his apologetic self-hating male guilt, bought us all bubble tea. 

She dumped him because she found out that he had taken pictures of her naked without her knowledge or permission. She threw his phone out a 5th floor window. He just sighed remorsefully and said that that was fair, he deserved that. See, he admitted fault, "took responsibility", and accepted his punishment, so we weren't allowed to be mad at him; he repented. The good ones serve their sentence. They still do the crime, though. 

I try to make myself look as young and childlike as possible, look up at him, really emphasise the righteous-man-protecting-vulnerable-girl fantasy he has, and say, "and you're the one who's on my side, right?"

"You shouldn't be so cynical," Tim says. 

Oh, fuck you, Tim.

"I'll keep that in mind."

I give him a kind smile and put in my earphones. He goes back inside. 

I smoke my cigarettes. I think. I don't tell the girls. That's how you know it's bad. You should never do something you wouldn't tell the girls about. 

Chapter 13 

Monday morning and the cycle continues. All of life is just cycles continuing. The water cycle, the cycle of abuse, laundry. 

The adult thing to do, the thing adults do, is find ways to fill the evenings between Monday and Friday. Nina and her activism. Lily and her movies. Leah and her queer events. Anna and her classes: spin on Monday, embroidery on Tuesday, Lindy Hop on Wednesday, tae kwon do on Thursday, and on Sundays, she goes to church. I asked her once why she does so much. She said it's to get to know as many various expressions of humanity as possible, to explore who she would be as different people. Anna in embroidery on Tuesday nights and Anna in tae kwon do on Thursday; Anna with her Lindy Hope friends, Anna at the church brunches. To get to know every kind of person that exists, explore what exists of humanity. 

God, life is monotonous. At least sometimes you get to have a man's jizz drool down your leg as you walk home. At least sometimes you can go to work in that man's clothes and pretend it's like a boyfriend-shirt. At least sometimes a post you make for your company gets a couple tens of thousands of likes and your boss, who's like family because we're all family here, brings you a donut you can't eat because you're vegan. At least you're vegan. 

I smile at her, my boss. She's a sweet well-meaning late millennial, with her hair permanently in a sloppy bun and flannel spilling over her skinny jeans, short converse exposing bare ankles. She's got a seven year old ginger cat named Ron, who she refers to as her son. I forgive her for it, the cringe. 

Millennials were right about how hard "adulting" is, and it's the right of every generation entering their 20s to be as repulsively obnoxious about it as they want, because it's a horrible, near-unsurvivable experience. I didn't get that when I was a teenager. I thought they should just grow up already and stop acting so childish about it. I get it now. 

Now, I find it somewhat refreshing that 30-somethings are so openly immature. Millennials seem to me the first generation to not fall for the lie that adulthood and misery are  necessarily synonymous. To carry that youth, that childishness with them, that's a virtue to me. Inner child and whatnot. As my boss walks away, and I throw the donut into the bin under the desk I'm working at, I almost admire her.

Maybe I shouldn't be fucking 30-something year old tourists to escape the existential terror of my issues. Maybe I should be watching Barbie movies and eating overpriced ice cream (directly out of the tub), this time without my parents yelling in the other room and my ears on high alert in case they're coming. This time, actually be able to focus on the movie. 

Maybe I should be asking 30-somethings, 30-something women, about life. About how to stop despising my body hair and how to achieve self-actualisation. How to find myself and my inner value.

I almost think, the way men do; think without it revolving around men. But then, men's whole identity revolves around men, around being men. Is women's liberation in an identity revolving around being women? But then, what is a woman if not just the opposite of a man? Is there no personhood I can strive for, to find myself, not as a man or a woman, but as a human?

 I need a Mr. Miyagi, a Mr. Feeny. Why do boys get all the father figures? Women mentoring women is just unheard of in the models they present to us in stories, the stories around which everyone here and now bases reality on. I try to think of any tale I've been told about a woman reaching the next step of self-actualisation, without it involving a romantic partner, almost always a man. 

I can't think of a single one. 

I'm screwed.

Maybe I should ask my boss if she feels content; with where she is and, more importantly, where she's going. If she had dreams, and if she still has them, and if this is part of it. If it's better to have a dream and feel constantly unsatisfied trying to achieve it or to have none and stumble through an empty life, lost and aimless. And here's the existential question haunting our generation: how are we supposed to dream of a future when our future is in flames and under water? I almost ask her how I'm supposed to feel at 23, but I don't, because I fear the answer is going to be 

"exactly like this". 

I'm 23 and I've already settled into a routine. Sitcom life. At the end of the 20 minutes, all returns to the status quo. Oh, dear god, am I comfortable with that? With this, on repeat, the same every day, the same every episode, for another 60 years, until the worlds burns up?

Suddenly, the sun has set, and it's time to repeat that cyclical commute. I start heading home, but on the tram, I change my mind, and find myself at John's hotel instead.

PART TWO — EXPLOSION

Chapter 14

The next time we fuck, John slaps me. 

He doesn't ask me if I'm into that or anything. He just does it. 

To be fair, at least he respects a no. I don't tell him not to, though. 

Women are sexual masochists because no one will fight us. They'll only hurt us while they're fucking us. While we're being fucked, anything is on the table. We're no longer women, no longer people, while we're being fucked or when we're thought about as being fucked; we're objects. Human respect does not extend to the sexual woman. If we want bruises, it needs to be from a submissive sexual position. One where the man is prewritten to win; consensual sexualised violence reaffirming the order of things. 

The two most unsatisfying feelings a woman experiences are being attracted to men and wanting some blood on her damn knuckles.

Afterwards, we order room service. My big man is paying for me; reaffirming the order of things. I think it makes him feel big, successful, to be able to pay things for the pretty young thing he's got. It makes me feel like a pretty young thing; like I can't afford a hotel vegan burger, like I'm helpless and being provided for. Oh, his pretty little vegan bird, found in a hole in Vienna. A little bit of role play; daddy, little girl. Just like any of your standard heterosexual romances. Oh, big man, father me, fuck me; I'm just a little girl. 

Ick.

And yet, here I am, on his hotel bed, pantsless in his shirt, stealing his fries and giggling in my (false) high little pitch. 

We find a channel halfway through playing Poison Ivy (1992) in cheesy German dub. We watch Drew Barrymore seduce, and I think about how ridiculous it is that women are expected to enjoy what men do. Or, at least, pretend we do. 

Once again, our inner life must be empty. We don't consume media the way they do. Women's silly little melodramas are superficial enrichment. But when men, so obviously, so gratuitously, indulge their fantasies, instructing naked actresses to do this and that, we're meant to understand that it's art. 

Yuck. 

Sometimes I wonder if I feel this lost because I'm a girl trying to sit at the boys table. 

I haven't quite denounced nor reclaimed my femininity. My friends and I listen to Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, we watch Gone Girl and root for Amy Dunne, we talk about removing body hair like it's not a demeaning act to remind us that we're high maintenance Extra Humans, we sip skinny bitches and yell about how much we hate men. 

Once a week, one of us will text the group chat about some uncomfortable experience one of us shared with a man. Like when, on my way home, a strange man at 10 pm on a Thursday tried to ask me for drinks, then sat down next to me and put his hand on my thigh, until I told him to fuck off. Or like when Leah met this guy at a party and got along with him great and thought she'd made a new friend, until he found out she's lesbian and spent the rest of the night ghosting her. But I, also, secretly, listen to Eminem and watch Tarantino movies.

All my dissociative feminist feminine rage is in competition, trying to keep up with the boys. 

(Although I'm not sure I count as a feminist, not anymore. I'm more like an egalitarian, in the negative sense; equally misandrist and misogynist, all genders are pathetic scum. There's a mis- word for that, too; misanthrope.)

It's been like this my whole life. I was listening to One Direction while playing Minecraft. I laughed along with my 13 year old boy friends when they made kitchen and sandwich jokes at me, and I had a poster of Taylor Lautner on my bedroom wall. I have been obsessed with men, in every way, my whole life. And my whole life it has been so clear to me that I will never be one of them. That they will never admire me the way I admire them. That they will never respect me as one of their equals. 

I wish I could give you the satisfaction of telling you that I was one of those "not like other girls" girls. Pick me girls, they've been renamed. But those "not like other girls" girls are just girls who have internalised the messaging that internal awareness is a male trait, that they are unique to the women around them in the sense that they have a second layer of thought, their own desires, an identity within. But I am just like other girls. I am just as empty and vapid and braindead — and just doing exactly the same as everyone else — as everyone else. My internal intelligence is nothing unique to me, I've just learnt to hide it, just like every other woman. Some even try to repress it. I think the patriarchy really won over those women. 

When I was younger, sometimes I used to wish that I'd been born a boy. I thought that was the simple solution to the full boyish experience that was being denied to me by my pink dresses. But then I realised that would have made me a feminine man, and that's way worse than being a masculine woman — a masculine woman who knows to play that masculinity to the approval of the male gaze, anyway. 

It's not that there isn't already a whole history of angry woman content I can actually find myself in. It's not that I should be surprised when I consume angry man content for and by angry men and find myself an afterthought, or even an enemy. It's that men's feelings are feelings, and women's feelings are feminine feelings. Men's rage is rage, women's rage is feminine rage. It's that when women humanise ourselves through our rage, it is in direct opposition to masculinity. 

There's two options: try to be one of the men or pride yourself in being a woman. Revenge femininity, this feminine of the divine bullshit. I don't think I'm divine. I'm not some fairy in the woods, in touch with the universe in a way men never could be. There is no goddess in my sexuality, just an exploited bridge troll. There is no pure light at the centre of my heart, just stiff hardened rage. Feminine of the disgusting, that's me. Fuck breaking the glass ceiling, I want to break the glass floor. 

Oh, who was I kidding? Why am I trying to find who I am, who I want to be, when I am never going to be more than a woman. Men get to figure out who they are going to be in this world. Women have to figure out who we are going to be in this world, as a woman. 

It's almost instructions, I realise, watching Drew Barrymore bat her eyes on the TV. Everything I watched and read as a little girl was instructions on how to be for men. A generation raised on post-'90s-crisis-of-masculinity, on girlie pop magazines and pop music teaching us how to be girls, be girls forever, thinking we liberated ourselves from this conditioning through 2010s girlboss feminism. They've brainwashed us. They taught us how to act then convinced us that we act like this by choice. Like we just prefer the violence we put ourselves through in our bathrooms, like we enjoy the selective starvation, for completely benevolent reasons. 

I lose interest in the B-movie and straddle John. His dick is way more entertaining than Drew Barrymore's legs. Leah would probably disagree, I think to myself. 

Leah doesn't know I'm doing this.

When I feel his hard-on pressing through his boxers against my crotch, he flips us over so that I'm under him again. So that he's the active one, and I'm just lying there, being fucked. 

Chapter 15

I wake up in John's hotel bed on Tuesday morning, confused for a first second about why my surroundings don't match my usual first view upon waking. Slowly, I reorient myself, sitting up, stretching. I'm in a hotel room and a man is sleeping next to me. I check my phone for the time. I could still go to work, but I'd either be going in yesterday's clothes or be late to stop by my place first. 

Or I could just not go. 

John's half-asleep hand strokes my lower back softly. 

"Hey," he mumbles. 

"Hey," I answer. 

"Wanna show me and the boys around Vienna today?"

He doesn't even bother to consider the possibility that I might have a life I might need to attend to. 

Alright. I can play tour guide.

I don't call in sick. I don't go home. I brush my teeth with the complimentary bamboo toothbrush wrapped in single-serving plastic. I shower with the little complimentary bottles of vegan, cruelty-free, useless wash stuff. John joins me. 

"It's like a honeymoon," he says, hovering close. I look up at him. 

"And we don't even know each other."

There's mixed reviews on shower sex. Some say it's a godly experience, wet and slippery, naked human touch all lubed up. Others complain about the taste of soap and cramped spaces. Both sides of the argument are correct. Perhaps the balancing act required to not slip and die is distracting, perhaps that's exactly the erotic element. 

Either way, when I get out of the shower, the time is about when I'd be entering work. Yesterday at this time, I was entering work. Tomorrow at this time, I'll be entering work. Life is just a fucking cycle, isn't it? I almost feel like I've done that commute so many times, the time is tied to the place. Like I'm standing here in a hotel bathroom, not the building entrance of my workplace, so it isn't really nine o'clock. Like there's a ghost of me chained to the tram seat, doing my commute right now, damned to haunt that journey at nine and five everyday. 

For breakfast, I take them to a bakery. My trusted favourite chain, my beloved Anker. This one's in the first district, so it's big and fancy. The funny thing about chains is how obvious the classism of a city's infrastructure is made through their locations. The shitholes in the wall and the elegantly decorated restaurants that both adorn the McDonald's title. My local Anker doesn't even have a chair to sit down, and here we are, crowded around a large table in pleasant lighting on clean floors. I only get a coffee because the vegan options at a classic Viennese bakery chain are, let's say, not varied. I watch the men indulge. It's no breakfast for me, but at least I'm saving calories. At least I'm vegan. 

At 10:48, my phone rings. It's my boss. I don't pick up. My phone dings. It's my boss. 

> Hi Mania, just checking in, if you're planning on working from home today. You haven't checked in online. If you don't check in by noon, I'm going to write you out sick. Please let me know ASAP if you think you're going to be out of work for more days. Hope you're doing alright. Lisa x 

It's my boss, who is so lovely. We're like a family, my workplace. The sound of the men's banter gets distant as I stare at the text. I'm skipping work and my boss isn't even mad. She's writing me as out sick, unprompted. Amazon workers are pissing in bottles. I've done it; achieved the middle class dream of working for someone else, but for someone else who is nice. 

Next stop is a Käsekrainer hot dog from a classic Viennese sausage stand — my grandparents had one in the '60s — and a beer. I get them to get Ottakringer. I don't tell them that most Viennese I know despise the stuff. I've been conditioned for it, I suppose. It's what we drank in high school. Once again, no food for me, but a stomach full of bubbles. It's filling, but alcohol on an empty stomach gets my head spinning in the daylight. Daylight under the influence always feels surreal. A moment mismatched. Like being awake when you're not supposed to or being in a public space after hours. 

The sausages stand is in this square hidden in the labyrinth of two-story buildings, next to a grand fountain and a large old mechanical clock, the Ankeruhr, bridged between two buildings. It has these doll figurine things on a slow spin mechanism, so that every hour there's a new figure. At noon, the mechanism spins in what a tourism website we looked at — because locals rarely actually know anything about their own attractions — adorably dubbed "a complete bonus rotation". As the pointer above the figure slowly moves towards the big '60', the square filled up with other excited tourists. In high school I once fucked a guy who lived in the penthouse of one of the buildings the clock is attached to. His family has more money than I could ever be bothered to dream of having. 

I watch the dolls do their dance and once again I am grateful to live in a city where I can simply drunkenly look up and, given I'm in the right district, see what many spend their wages to come see. I remember watching the clock drunk many times before, in high school. I have a photo of my school friends, none of whom I speak to anymore, sprawled over the fountain. My friends and I would climb all over the fountain to sit and drink and watch the fancy architecture that the soulless mirror window skyscraper architecture of our era seems to want to suffocate. At least there's laws about that in Vienna, keeping those beauty-guzzling human-resources-factories away from the historical architecture. This country doesn't give a shit about its citizens, maybe, but, as I'm sure you're well aware, it cares a whole lot about its cultural identity. 

Here I am, doing the same thing I have done many times before, and probably will do many times again, just with another group of people each time. Life is repetitive. The clock cycles. My life cycles. Same things, different people. Lily makes playlists for every partner she's had. I feel that it loses its romance and just becomes routine at that point. I feel like, at one point, you've experienced all new experiences you're going to have, and then it's just the same ones over and over again, but with new people. 

"Come on," I pull at John's arm, when the figures have stilled. 

"Where are we going?" He asks. 

"To the most important part of Vienna, at least as far as tourists and rich people and the subway map are concerned. Can't believe you haven't been there yet."

"Alright. In my defence, I met you almost as soon as I landed. Haven't had much of a chance to do anything without you."

Chapter 16

The St. Stephen's Cathedral, the Stephansdom, is the centre point of Vienna. Literally. The first district is built around it, and the rest of the districts spiral out around it. If you look at a map of the subways in Vienna, in the centre is a little black symbol of a church, to help tourists locate the shiny parts we want to show them. When you live in a tourist destination, your infrastructure is built for foreigners. 

I don't think I've ever been inside it, the church. I avoid the area around it at all costs. It's all elite stores and tourists. Just, filled with tourists. If you ever want to know what it would feel like to suffocate in a sea of people, please stop by Stephansplatz during peak hours. I pass it sometimes, drunk at midnight, making my way from Schwedenplatz to Karlsplatz, from one trashy drinking spot to another. 

Once, during the pandemic, at some point between the various lockdowns, when tourists were nowhere to be seen, my friends and I were making this familiar journey, and we paused by the cathedral. Like this, quiet and empty, I could, for the first time, actually enjoy this place. I stood on one of the concrete benches, nursing a beer, and gazed up in awe. The best part about growing up in Vienna is that when you got drunk you just had to look up and count your blessings that you were throwing up behind some of the most gorgeous architecture you'd ever seen. 

The tourists have since returned. I am arm-in-arm with one of them. But, on this random late winter Tuesday noon, the square is only lightly sprinkled with people. Early year tourism is more west Austria's thing, skiing and that. As the year goes on, the tourism moves east, arriving at Vienna's Christmas markets.

The cathedral is open. I've never been inside, and neither have John and Edward and Tim and Andy and Tom. So, beer bubbling in our stomachs, we amusedly decide to go in. 

Inside, I feel like a living embodiment of a sin. My father's mother was a devout catholic, but not like a fire-and-brimstone catholic, a God-loves-all angels-are-real catholic. My dad had heavily rebelled against religion and spirituality, searching for meaning in cash and masculinity and control. He never did have much of any of those. 

The cathedral is large and wooden and quiet. Whispers are carried by the walls, and all the respect for a loving God my grandmother spoke into me comes rushing back. I let go of John and bow my head. I forget about the men for a moment and walk to the rows of candles. I drop a coin in the little collection box, grab a candle, hesitate. Then I feel silly for hesitating, because it's obvious who I'm lighting a candle for. Anna, Lily, Leah, Nina. I light the candle with my cigarette lighter and place it next to the others. My wish blends in to a tapestry of other wishes for other loved ones from other struggling souls. 

I sit down in one of the pews and think about giving prayer a shot. That's what people do when their souls are lost, they attempt to ask a higher power. Maybe I should ask God for guidance. Maybe I should turn to the ultimate father figure. A secondary father figure I don't need to show my tits to to get his attention. I'm about to start when a hand on my lap startles me. Harassment, my instinct screams. It's John. I don't agree with my instinct, but I'm not sure I disagree. 

He grins at me mischievously. His hand starts moving up my pants. We're in a house of God, in the cultural heart of my city, and he's rubbing me. Disrespecting our cultural staple, tourists do that. Tourism is a disrespectful ogling of your home. You and your home and your culture and your family and your friends become a petting zoo to be (mis)understood. Women are used to the dehumanising ogling, which might be why the angriest about tourism are always old Austrian men. John's hand works up my leg so confidently under the eyes of believers and tourists and God and I'm wet. I hate myself. 

Eventually, I have enough and get up, all the echoes of God I had felt wafting through the air dissipated by John's wandering hand. I walk out and, like ducklings following their mother, like tourists following their tour guide, the men follow me into the sunlight. 

Well, God, I gave it a shot, but my carnal vices ripped me away. Maybe my soul is hopeless. Maybe I'm too far gone for salvation. Maybe I don't have a soul to be saved. Maybe I'm empty. "We don't have genuine souls," is the opinion of Nick Dunne in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. I think some of us do. But I'm not sure I'm one of them. 

Chapter 17

There's a reason Europeans hate the English. Well. There's several. 

We spend the rest of the day barhopping until I'm a drunk fish being held up by John's arms. Don't worry, I did eat eventually. I just drank a lot more. We're all leaving up the stairs of some basement pub when John pushes me against a wall and begins making out with me, his hands creeping up my torso. I'm drunk, but sober enough to think to myself that I'm too drunk to fuck. I wonder John hasn't noticed, or if he just doesn't care. 

"Drunk," I mumble into his lips. He pulls away and inspects me, still pinning me against the wall. He moves some hair out of my face. 

"Yeah, you are. We're gonna get you some food and water, alright?"

Then he wraps his arms around my waist and leads me to the door. Hey. Look. At least he knows consent. You just have to remind him of it. Would-be-victim reminding the would-be-rapist that he doesn't want to be one.

When we get to the open door, there's men yelling outside. English in English accents and English in Austrian accents in a chaotic cacophony. John places me down, sitting on the stoop, and runs into the mass of men. I sort out the blurs in my vision and realise that it's my men. Edward and Andy with their arms up trying to keep peace, negotiate. Tim is holding back Tom, who is making the whole situation worse with his penis-sized ego. 

I watch the blobs argue with each other, constantly threatening to up the level of violence from verbal to physical, and I ponder about men and their violence. It's always been weird to me that men think of women as somehow less violent or gross. Sometimes I think men are so desperate for violence because they are trying to make up for something they're missing, something women have. I think men envy that, to women, meeting blood and pain entangled with the reminder of life is part of our cycle. I think men envy that blood and pain are signs of health for us. I think men are desperate for physical reminders of life from their own bodies. Why would I envy a penis? Gore is built into my very body, I don't have to go picking fights to meet my guts and smell iron. 

I think about the boys at school, who used to get into fights for fun, pissing contests to assert dominance in an arbitrary hierarchy. They'd all talk to us girls about it like we were all strangers to violence, especially violence as affection. They seemed to be under the impression that we were all squeamish and sheltered. The girl I sat next to in 10th grade English class would pinch me and twist my arm. That was her way of showing affection, she'd say. The girls — my girls, now — and I made a bet once, while we were still in university. We were all burnt out and positive affirmation just wasn't motivating us anymore, so we made a bet. The person who got the lowest grade on their upcoming paper or exam would get their coochie waxed by the person who got the highest. Nina, of course, won the bet, and Leah lost. 

We crowded around Leah's bathroom, her pants in a pile on the floor, and watched Nina smear hot wax on Leah's vulnerable, trimmed pubis. The only one of us who had ever waxed before was Anna, and that had only been her legs. We all waited in anticipation as the wax cooled, Anna giving the instructions. Then the moment came. A bone-chilling tearing noise rang through the small bathroom, followed by an agonised yelp from Leah. In the adrenaline of the moment, we all burst into laughter. Tears flowing down her face, her pubis burning bright red. Leah laughed along with us. 

Men think their toilet speak and grossness is unique to them, that us ladies are sheltered of such matters, as if we don't shit. As if my friends and I don't keep each other updated on the status of our poos. As if my friends and I don't sometimes joke about our periods being so heavy and clotted that we suspect it might be a miscarriage. 

Men have it wrong. It's the other way around. It is we that are sheltering them from our grossness. 

Of course, this is all very cisnormative thinking, and I have enough queer friends to recognise that, but I don't think I've ever had a single thought not deeply entrenched in that stupid, life ruining, dictatorial binary. I'm not free. I'm not liberated. I'm a cishetero woman who has gained enough consciousness to feel the chains constricting her. 

I try to make out what they're arguing about, but I can't even untangle the languages being thrown around. Suddenly, though, I can make a sentence out clearly. One always has a tendency to hear better when it's about oneself. 

"Schau dir mal die an," one of the men, skinny and young and wearing track pants, says to his buddy, pointing at me. 

Oh no. My presence has been acknowledged. The most dangerous thing that can happen to a woman amongst men. 

One of the Austrian men, he turns to one of my Brits and says, "prostitution legal here, brother."

He says this with a wink. John almost punches him. I don't know why. Well, male ego, obviously. Somehow wrapped up in defending his woman's honour, even though I'm not even his woman. Or maybe the accusation that he can't get laid without paying for it. Anyway, he doesn't. Tim calms him, speaks to him, and gestures towards me. John comes to get me, to escort me away from the situation. 

One of the other men, not the one that pointed me out, nor the one that implied I'm a whore, says something to Tim that I catch on my way past.

"Beruhig dein Hawara, wir spielen ja nur," in a mocking tone, pointing at Tom. 

"What'd he say?" Tom insists. 

"Calm your mate, we're just playing," I translate dutifully. Unhelpful in this situation. John yanks at me.

"Schlampe!" One of the men spits — literally spits — after me. 

Austrians spit a lot, is my only thought about that. 

John's leading me away from the kerfuffle when I hear a crack. We turn around and Tom is holding his nose. Edward and Andy are dragging a berserker Tom away from the battle while Tim surrenders diplomatically, weak hands waving through the air. 

My group of drunk men and I take the tram home. I sit next to the window, which I quietly stare out of. 

In Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, the protagonist gets accused of being mad because she's a woman. She denies it. I am mad because I am a woman, though. I think men, with all their open flaunting of their big masculine struggles, don't realise that every woman is silently harbouring that same anger twofold. Men don't realise that inside every woman is a man, suppressed. A full human being, like them, with dreams and ego. A full human being that can never break out of the restrictive shell containing it. I don't think they realise that if the anger contained in a woman were ever able to find its release, its power would be thousands times more destructive than their bombings and their shootings and their violent temper tantrums. The anger of dehumanisation. 

"I told you the Viennese are rude," I mutter to John next to me. He just looks back at me with tired eyes and gives me an agreeing smile and nod. He puts his hand on my leg. 

Men are so afraid of losing their status as human beings, as man, they don't even bother to realise that the half of humanity they decorate their worlds with might want to gain that status to begin with.

You ask them for humanity. They answer: wear a dress, carry my child, and I'll view you as an almost one. Prove to me your value, your value in relation to me. 

Chapter 18

In the late hours blurry on some bedside screen, I ask John the question that has been violently bouncing around my aching skull, that I can't dodge forever. 

"John."

"Hmm?"

"Do you have a dream?"

I'm lying on my back on his hotel bed, the ghost white hotel sheets crumpled up around us. He turns onto his stomach and props himself up on his elbows, looking into my eyes from above. I return the gaze. 

"Money, Anna. That's the dream. That's everyone's dream."

But I have money. 

"But what do you do after you've obtained money?" I ask.

"Make more."

This isn't helpful. 

He continues, "and after you've made enough money, you use the money you've made to pursue power."

I think about it. I don't want power, though. I want love. I look up at the man looking down at me. Is that even attainable for me? Love, I mean. Is it even attainable, for anyone?

He lies back down on his back and I stare at the dark ceiling. I don't have a dream. Women like me, with childhoods like mine, tend to dream of being mothers, until they become their own. Or, they fear becoming mothers, and place their dreams in career achievements. 

Neither of those matter to me. I don't have a dream. I don't have a vision. I don't have a goal. There is nothing in my future waiting for me. 

In Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, he posits that man (and here I am supposed to feel myself included under the umbrella term 'man') lives for the future. The inner structure of a (hu)man who has no ultimate goal to aim at, no end to look forward to, no future to live for, changes, decays. 

Which is why, along with things like isolation and fear, so many of us lost our minds during the various lockdowns. Leah had said, "living with absolutely no stimulation does something to you."

And I recognise disrespect in a comfortably privileged young Austrian woman with everything she'd ever dreamed of comparing herself to concentration camp prisoners, but I can't help but wonder if the fact that I've achieved dreams that were so small has left me with no future, no finis. I've reached my happily ever after, and I'm only 23. There's no end I'm working towards, there's no aim to my life. It's the housewife's purgatory. What else is there to do but rot?

I quote Frankl:

“With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis […].”

Here I lie, next to a stranger, avoiding my loved ones, disappearing from my career, alcohol swimming through an empty body. I've stepped out of my own life. 

“He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him any more.”

Chapter 19

That night, I dream that I'm sitting in one of the only parent-teacher conferences my parents went to. I was 17, and the topic at hand was my future. It was mandatory. That's why my mom showed up. My mom, high wired, tight hair, strung out on Ritalin, sat beside me, eyes glazed over and focused on rushing thoughts, as my homeroom teacher talked to empty ears about my potential. 

"She really is intelligent," she praised to an inattentive audience, "a stronger student than anyone else in my class. I really think she could change the world."

God, that fucking potential. Oh, I'm so hard working, but I'm not working towards anything. Nina's words, I can achieve anything I want, but I don't want anything. 

"Yes, we're very proud of our daughter," my mother's hoarse voice came through. My sleeves hid my father's grab marks, my mother's cigarette burns, and my own self-harm scars. My mom place an arm around my shoulders and I tried not to flinch too obviously. I knew it was bullshit, but it was still nice to hear, and my eyes watered against my will. 

Briefly and suddenly, in my dream, my homeroom teacher, Ms. Bauer, turns into my fourth grade teacher, and I am 9, and my mom is younger and my dad is there, and they each have a firm tight grasp on one of my shoulders, making sure I behave. I'm in my favourite knee-length boy shorts and a graphic tee with a dinosaur on it. 

My fourth grade teacher, Mr. Nikolas, is talking about my potential. What a rarity, for a man to see a girl's potential, not as a mistress or a wife or a mother or a homemaker, but as a human. I almost cry when I think about it, being seen as human potential. Being seen as human, as potential, for those first couple years.

"Really, I think you two have created something special, a real gem to foster. She could really turn into quite something. She's got so much potential…," he goes quiet, distracted by something. 

I've started to grow, right there in my seat, but Mr.Nikolas' eyes remain looking down. Looking down on me but also looking down at… his gaze is focused on my chest. I'm still in my childhood clothes, having outgrown them, like Alice in Wonderland, poking out and exploding, my womanly fats vomiting out of my seams. The worst thing a girl can do is grow up. 

My mother looks horrified and my father slaps me across the face — for two seconds I am 9 again — and yells, "what the hell are you doing, Mania?"

Now Ms. Bauer is the one sitting behind the desk, hands spread defeatedly across the top, looking at me with deep disappointment. Above her, standing, with a hand on her shoulder, is Mr. Nikolas. 

"What a shame," Ms. Bauer is weeping, "what a shame that she's wasting her intelligence."

"You had so much potential," Mr. Nikolas is glaring at my body. I try to cover it up. I'm crying. 

"Why would you waste yourself like this?" Ms. Bauer cries. 

I haven't said a single word the whole dream. 

I wake up panting, next to a sleeping stranger man 13 years my senior. Why am I wasting myself, indeed. I crawl out of bed. I'm in his damn shirt, soaked in his damn sweat. I stare out of the window at the cobblestone street below. Nice location, hidden in a back alley of an expensive district. I look back over at the sleeping stranger. What am I dreaming of? What is all this for? Why am I doing any of this? Am I really that empty? Am I really wasting myself? Or did I lose my potential when I grew my boobs? What does John see?

The boobs, obviously. He doesn't even know how old I am. He doesn't even care what I do, what life I'm skipping to suck his dick. I look back out the window. I built, with my own two hands and a sprinkle of privilege, the life I wanted. Friends, job, apartment, degree; more than most 23 year olds with better starts can dream of. I fucking did it. So why am I throwing it all away to feel young to an older guy? What's missing? Am I really that broken? 

The worst thing that can happen to a girl is growing up. 

Chapter 20

We decide to take Wednesday in. It's snowing outside. We spend the day ordering alcohol to the hotel through foodora. This country doesn't give a shit. You can order palettes of beer at three in the morning right to your door. This country is a drunk, chain-smoking, grumpy one. It flaunts its toxic traits proudly, fights tooth and nail against every attempt to better itself. We're Austrians. We're assholes and no one can take that from us. 

We're all scattered around Ed and Andy's room. They're sharing university stories because I asked them how they met. I hate being young. I listen to their stories, nostalgic for a decade ago, and I cannot wait to be them. To at least know how my life is going to turn out. Though, I stare at my near-empty lukewarm beer bottle with the label peeling off, where the fuck am I going? I've already settled into my life routine. I'm already fucking content, and I'm only 23. 

I look up at them, so lost in their reminiscing they forget that they started telling to stories for my benefit, only turning to talk to me directly as an active audience to strengthen the inside of their inside jokes by explaining them, as knowers, to me, an outsider. 

Oh no, I realise, is this going to be me in a decade? Me and my girls, still referring to ourselves as girls despite having been adults for over a decade, pulling at our skin and fighting against our bodies in fear of the 34 ageing burst, all still unmarried, using our leftover income on sex tourism trips to South America, picking out younger hotter Brazilian men and women for each other. 

I do some math. 35. That means they'd have gone to uni — I've always been bad at math — during the late 2000s. I play that sequence at the beginning of The Social Network in my head. It occurs to me briefly that, just like my boss — my oh so classically millennial boss — is a generation above me, so, too, are these men. 

"Oh man, Ed didn't talk to him for a month," Andy tells me, laughing. They're all laughing. Tom fucked Edward's girlfriend. She, of course, is a cheating whore. Tom is Edward's best friend. 

"Ah, but I couldn't stay away from that charm," Edward says, wrapping an arm around him and roughing his hair, "with that irresistible charm, I realised it didn't make sense to blame him."

Andy slaps Tom on the back, proudly, and continues telling me, "Tom was quite the womaniser back at uni."

Womaniser, the much kinder word they used to use before fuckboy entered the mainstream. User, date rapist, piece of shit. The word 'womaniser' made it look like an achievement and not a sign of a personality disorder. 

"Most women at our uni thought he was a dirtbag, actually," Tim comments, resting the lip of his bottle against his own. 

"Until they were drunk," Tom brags. 

Tom brags. 

Oh no. 

They come from a generation raised on movies where the guy gets the girl by tricking her, pressuring her, or, yet, forcing her. They don't know better. 

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most of us, most of us who've fucked while young anyway, have engaged in dubious consent. Most people have been victims to it, but also, most people have been perpetrators. Young, dumb teenagers don't know how to recognise these things, pay attention to boundaries and comfort and whatnot. Well. Maybe today's Twitter-righteous era of teens do. But those of us who grew up with confused innocent eyes exposed unsupervised and unrestricted to the Wild West of early 2010s internet — two girls one cup, guy with the glass jar, google hammer, woman and horse — before we'd ever had an adult even tell us what sex was, certainly didn't. We had to learn through trial and error what healthy sex was. I'm not sure I even do, yet. 

Because — and now I pose you a question — there isn't a clear binary between consensual sex and rape. If I invite a guy over, with the intentions of fucking him, is that problematic? If I give us both a bottle of wine, what then? If I ply us both, until we're drunk, then? Is there a difference between seduction and coercion? Is one-sided premeditation inherently coercive? 

Let me rewrite a moment for you. Back, during that first night with John. After, under false pretences, I had given John the impression that sexual activity would not occur, I approached him while his back was turned. Without asking for his consent, I pulled his pants down mid-sentence. And, all the while, I accused him of being the pig. Or, did an older man take advantage of a mentally distressed drunk young girl? 

Or, did two people fuck.

And here's another uncomfortable truth. Most women, women who fuck men anyway, don't say no often. Because we're afraid it will be ignored. Or worse. A lot of women avoid being raped by simply by agreeing to sex. There's a lot of 'consensual' sex happening that would still have happened wether or not she had agreed to it— 

No. Not all rape is gendered. 

— wether or not they had agreed to it. 

"It was awful, we all had to sit there and listen to it," Tim is complaining dramatically, laughing.

"It's not my fault the best parties were held in a house with paper walls," Tom defends, smugly, fading evidence of last night's humiliation still bruising around his nose. 

"Yeah, but you didn't have to go and fuck four more girls after we told you we'd heard everything the first time," Tim answers. 

John, whose legs I am sat between, nudges Andy on the shoulder. 

"And this little virgin still hadn't even had his first blowie," he teases.

Andy shoves back playfully, and the motion knocks me aside, too. I pick up on something that John doesn't, though, in the facetious way Andy rolls his eyes. 

"Must have sprung quite a boner, listening to all that live audio porn," John continues. 

Tom, smirking smug, wiggles his eyebrows at Andy, "is that where you fucked off to? To knock one out in the bathroom?"

Andy, sitting sheepish, his gaze drifts to Edward. There's a tension in the way they're shifting and looking timidly at each other, while this party is discussed, that I recognise from Leah and Lily. Something happened between them. Something neither of them can acknowledge.

Tim sits patiently, listening and adding nothing. He's paying small attention to Edward and Andy. I can imagine one of them — I ponder… Edward, probably — coming to Tim, the big feminist, in crisis. Tom doesn't know, obviously; he'd never let them live it down, or repress it, as they seem to be doing. Neither does John. John and Tom are blissfully ignorantly chittering away about the party.

John leans in to me and explains over my shoulder, "one of the great mysteries of that night is what the fuck Andy got up to when he went missing."

"It wasn't that long," Andy rolls his eyes dismissively. 

"It was hours," John replies. 

"Peak party hours," Tom adds.

"He won't tell us," John continues. 

Andy shrugs, "I don't remember."

"Bullshit," Tom calls his bluff. 

"Get this," Tom says, "Eddie, here, goes missing, too. I come out of the bedroom, and the lads tell me Ed and Andy are missing. Night goes on, I'm getting girls. Then, when the party has become just the last few people 'cause the sun's rising and nocturnal partiers are pussies, I come out of the bedroom, and there's Ed on the couch, talking to John, neck just covered in kiss marks." 

He makes a gesture waving his hand over his neck. I'm being detailed a much more vivid image of what happened between Eddie and Andy than I'd like to be privy to.

"One bird in the time it takes Tom to fuck five," John comments.

Edward grins, with a hint of discomfort the others don't seem to pick up on, "what does that tell you about who lasts longer?"

"Fuck off," Tom hits him with a pillow.

"It was this prude from our marketing class that he managed to bag," John informs, confidently wrong / incorrect.

"Only if I promised not to tell anyone," Edward tells me. 

"So we told everyone," Tom boasts, smiling, and takes a sip of his beer. 

"She denied the whole thing, of course," John adds.

I don't say anything. I just observe, silently. None of them are really paying any attention to me at all, anyway. I don't really have a presence in this room, to them. Men don't seem to know that we watch them, too. We see them, too. We perceive, too. We gaze back. Men don't seem to realise that there is a life being experienced inside us, too.

When I was in elementary school, I used to wrestle the boys. I'd always win. I was a big girl, and so I'd always have some crush of mine or other pinned under me; his legs between my legs, his wrists under my palms. I always got in trouble for it. They never did. I used to love to wrestle boys. 

I miss that. Being a little girl, you got away with acting like a little boy. Not from adults, no. They would always scold me for not being a little girl. And the media I consumed and the toys I was given and the expectations placed on me, they were all begging me to be a sweet pink mild little girl. But, when you're a child, you don't see the difference until an adult tells you there is one, so to the boys, the other children, I got away with acting like a little boy. To them, I was one of them. But I'd never really be one of them. 

And that rift just grows bigger and bigger as we grow older, until eventually you're 23 and no matter how much anyone calls you 'one of the guys', you are a decoration piece. You are not part of this group at all, you are an outsider — eyes on you; dehumanising, womanifying you. 

I become suddenly very aware that I'm a drunk young woman alone in a room with older men. Every true crime podcast I've listened to, every documentary I've watched, every woman murdered on the news; they all flash through my head. So I do what women do when do when we take Ubers or go on dates. I text the group chat my location. Just in case I don't show back up in my own life. 

Chapter 21

The sun is setting when Leah shows up at the hotel. I'm already wasted when Leah shows up at the hotel. 

There's a knock at the door and I get up to peak through the peephole, being the one sitting closest. The men and I are all half-dressed, scattered throughout the room. They've been explaining how to play strip poker to me for the last couple hours, giving each other smug looks every time I loose an item. 

"We've got the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door," Andy complains, eyes on my naked legs, "don't we?"

Tim does a better job of at least trying to pretend like he's not ogling me all the time. 

"It's my friend," I answer, seeing Leah through the fish eye. I pull at the little door chain so I can open the door. 

When I open the door, I open the door to Leah standing there. She seems a bit surprised to see me, like she wasn't really expecting me to be here. She does a once-over at how I'm dressed, then scans the room of half-naked adult men behind me. She gives me a disappointed look. 

Why did I clarify adult men?

Quietly, Leah says, "seriously, Mania? What the hell?"

I'm not a teenager anymore. I am an adult, too. 

I roll my eyes like I'm being scolded by my mother, and return briefly into the stomach of the room to put some pants back on. 

I am an adult. Spending time with other adults. This is allowed. 

The men all give Leah sheepish smiles and awkward waves. She just stares back.

This is how it's supposed to be.

"Be right back, guys," I say, and, barefooted, I walk out to join Leah in the hallway, closing the door behind me. 

"What the fuck, Mania?" 

I'm drunk.

"What?"

"What what? Your work calls Anna, —"

She's my emergency contact at work. 

"— saying you haven't shown up to work in two days and haven't given a reason why, asks her if you're okay. We go to your place and you're missing, not answering your phone. First text in three days, and it's just an address and a room number!"

Then a scary thought flashes over her eyes and she leans in and gets quiet.

"Are you okay? Are you being trafficked? Who are those men?"

I dismiss her, waving my arms and rolling my eyes. 

"No, no. They're just some tourists I picked up at a bar."

"They're — what? You're skipping work to hang out half-naked, —"

She smells me and grimaces. 

"— drunk, with a bunch of men you don't actually know, that are — how old are they?"

I shrug, "like mid-30s."

"Mid-30s!?"

"Stop repeating after me."

"Seriously?! After what happened?! What we had to put to you together after?!"

"Are you really the one to scold me about that? After Maria?"

She's taken aback. 

"What the fuck? Yes. That's none of your business. 

"Like hell, it isn't. You're my friend, of course it's my business. But I'm not allowed to say anything, because you're gay, and I'm straight."

"What the fuck?" Her voice drops. 

"When some creep a decade older than you tries to pressure you into an open relationship so that she can cheat on you and get away with it, that's fine. I don't get to point out that some freak is taking advantage of my friend."

"That's… that's not the same."

"No. Because you're gay."

She doesn't answer. 

"You only have a problem with this because it's men."

She looks at me like she can't believe we're having this conversation. 

"Yes. Kind of," her pitch goes up. 

"Maybe you're just heterophobic."

What the fuck am I talking about. 

"Are you — are you seriously using that word unironically?! What the fuck is wrong with you?!"

"My sexuality, apparently."

"No. What the hell? You — No. You don't get to say that. Not —," then she stops talking. She gives up on me. 

She's right, though. I don't. I'm speaking like I'm not best friends with a lesbian who has called me in panic in the middle of the night, crying, asking me if she's a freak of nature, a disappointment to god. But I'm pissed, in both the British and American sense of the word. 

Me, who watches my words so carefully. I could've chosen better words to express what I'm feeling. But it wouldn't have been healthy to keep the feelings from her; it would've built resentment. 

"Sort your shit out, Mania," she says quietly, and leaves. She leaves me, standing alone in the hallways, barefoot. 

Well, I finally fucked it up. 

I knock on the door to let me back in. 

Chapter 22

The energy in the room is tense and awkward. The men are watching me with big eyes. 

"I, um, I know where to get some drugs, if you're interested," I offer, to compensate for the intrusion, to make me a worthwhile presence again, "everyone does coke in Vienna."

Coke, speed, and ketamine. 

Andy smiles with a chuckle and rubs the top of my head, "I like the sound of that." 

So I reach out to a dealer I haven't needed since high school on Snapchat. I haven't used Snapchat since high school either. John has to go to an ATM — the men aren't carrying any euros in cash. Unwise, in a country still as cash-based as this one. Many places you can't pay with card. 

I meet up with the plug around the corner. We shake hands. I'm holding 200€. He's holding two grams. Then he's holding the bills and I'm holding the baggy. We both shove them in our pockets. 

Then he says, with a big friendly smile, "Mania! How have you been? It's been years  I swear. You look so much older."

Gee, thanks.

"Yeah. I've been good, thanks. Cleaned up, got a nice job. What about you? You're still doing this?"

He shrugs, "nah not really, not as much as a source of income like at school. But I still hook people up sometimes. Out of the goodness of my heart."

He smiles at me stupidly, and I laugh. 

"I would've given you a discount, you know? Old friend discount. Nice to see your face again."

"Yeah, thanks. But I'm ripping off these tourist men from England, it's not my money."

He grins wide, "nice. Smart as ever, you."

What a flirt. I roll my eyes.

"Seriously, Mania. I'm glad you're thriving. I always knew you had a head on your shoulders too good to go to waste."

I just force a smile, politely. 

"Yeah. I'm trying my best."

"Well, Mania, listen. If you ever need anything else, don't hesitate to hit me up. Good to see you again."

"Yeah, George, you too."

And we part ways, and I return to the hotel room with the goods. 

The hotel room is small and stuffy and tight and claustrophobic. Black smudgy phone screens, licked for residue. When have any of us ever washed our phones? Worse than licking a fucking bus pole. But I take another line of dust and drugs off Edward's phone through a 50€ bill John pulled from the ATM for this purpose, anyway. The room's bright. I'm smiling. 

Andy comes up to me and noogies me again. 

"Great idea, great woman," he turns to John, "great find, John."

John looks at me, then just says, "yeah."

There's something in his look. Something different. 

"She's a pretty one, too," Edward says, taking back the phone he was holding for me. 

Oh god, I'm the decorative centrepiece. But I don't mind. I'm glowing in the attention. I spot Tim in the far corner, watching me, with less glee on his face than the rest of us. I get up to go the bathroom. On my way out, Tim catches me. 

"Anna," he says softly, his hand on my arm. 

I look up at him, unamused, "Tim."

"Can we chat for a second?"

"Sure?"

He pulls me to the corner by his grip on my arm. John is sitting in the cuck chair across the room. Tom and Edward are perched on the corner of the bed next to him and Andy is standing behind him, leaning his hands on the backrest. Tim and I sit down  on the floor behind the unoccupied bed, tucked away and hidden. 

"Hey, so, wanna tell me what that was about, earlier today?"

"What do you mean?"

"Your friend? Just showing up at our door like that?"

My stomach knots. I hate this. This type of reality-confrontation, when someone just names the unspoken to your face. 

"Yeah? I'm sorry about that."

"No," he readjusts his position to face me, with his legs tucked to one side. A softer type of pose only a man comfortable with his masculinity would assume. "Why was she here?"

I stare at time for a second, wondering how honest to be. Tim, of all of them, would have the best chance at getting it. 

"Well, Tim. You understand the precarious position women find themselves in when alone with men?"

He nods, knowingly. I continue. 

"I sent the address to our group chat."

He nods, sternly, "I understand. It's like sharing your uber details."

I have to hold myself back from rolling my eyes. This is him, showing me, he knows. Men love to share with you every piece of knowledge about the reality of women's lives they've collected, when you bring it up to them. Like I don't already know. It's almost mansplaining, but it's always done with such awe and disbelief, it's far more innocent than the usually condescension. It's more like a five year old at show and tell, sharing the discovery they made when they went for drinks with their female coworker or growing up with their sister. White people do this, too. 

We love to signal our own virtue over ignorance.

"But her showing up…?" He asks. 

I shrug. 

"I don't know. I guess I accidentally worried them," I look him in the eyes, "you know. Young woman alone in a hotel room with a bunch of older men."

Something in Tim's face grimaces at that. I'm not sure this man is entirely comfortable with himself and the situation. I don't think he wants to be a participant in the reality of what's happening. But I don't think he can wake up his internal cognitive dissonance enough to take himself out of the life that passively slides him into positions like this. He looks serious. He looks concerned. 

"You know you're safe, Anna? We're not going to do anything. We aren't like that."

I nearly snort. Like they hadn't proudly boasted about Tom's rape-streak just earlier.

"What about Tom?" 

"Tom won't touch you. You're here with John, we know that."

"He slept with Ed's girl."

"That was a long time ago. We were young."

"Like I am now."

"Yeah."

"Tim?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I ask you something, honestly?"

"Sure, Anna."

"Do you think this is a good position for me to be in?"

He looks at me for a moment, considers. 

"I think you're a capable woman, Anna."

Woman. The word they only use for girls when they want to offload responsibility. 

"Thanks, Tim."

The rest of the evening, I spend thinking about her. I see her reporting back to the group. 

"Fuck her," she's saying, "if she wants to put herself in unsafe situations, that's her own shit to deal with."

Friends are fickle and leave the second it becomes harder than convenient. 

No. That's not true. 

Leah, all of them, are amazingly sweet and supportive. I mean, she followed me to a mysterious address just to check on me. She's probably swallowing her anger and turning it into concern. 

"I'm really worried about her," she's probably saying, "she's never acted like this."

What does she know.

When I was 15, my friend took me to a shisha bar where they didn't card. I made out with this 14 year old boy. Then, later that night, his 18 year old brother, who was not privy to my encounter with his little brother, stuck his tongue down my throat. He didn't stop until I told him that it was his baby brother he was tasting on my lips. He hadn't stopped when I'd asked him to. The older brother told the friend who'd brought me, the friend who had a crush on him, that I was the one who had made the move on him. Men and boys always spread lies to protect their egos. Women and girls always believe them over other women and girls. 

Ultimately, women will always betray one another for a man's lies. Ultimately, our Victoria's Secret bag-paper thin friendships dissolve in the male gaze. Ultimately, men are toxic and manipulative and childish and disgusting and ultimately evil, and, ultimately, women will always give up every faint inkling of health for them.  

As Lana Del Rey said, this is what makes us girls. 

I watch the man-babies, these 30-something children, engage in what they think are endearing brotherly rituals, but in actuality are pathetic displays of stunted youth. I watch them with disdain. I hate men. I hate women and the braindead ways we act around men. I hate myself. 

I watch them. Men freak me out. Because how do they have so many years on me, yet still act like this? Still think like this? It's like they're told when they're boys to be boys, and then remain boys for the rest of their lives. It's sad. It's pathetic. For a brief moment, I feel like I'm the one taking advantage of them. Like I'm the mature party, and they're the young children. Being involved with men always feels like babysitting. You have to explain their own emotions to them like they're three. 

God, how boring, how repetitive my thoughts are. I have exactly the same thoughts and complaints as every other young woman. Bla bla, men are so immature. Bla bla, a man abused me :(. And all of it, just girlish drama. Not to us. 

No, to us, it's existential anger. But to everyone else, we're just little porcelain dolls with little pouty faces painted flush. Our reality-defining experiences reduced to "catfights" and "drama". 

And men think their emotions are oh so important. 

When I was 14, I tried to kill myself. 

You know that quote from The Virgin Suicides? 

"What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

"Obviously, doctor, you've never been a thirteen year old girl."

I spent a week in the hospital. 

In Austria, we almost never go to the hospital. We seem to avoid it as much as possible. 

We have affordable healthcare, but not really accessible, because there's a shortage of doctors. To see a doctor, you need to have connections, otherwise none of them are taken new clients. To find a doctor, especially a specialised one like a gynaecologist, dentist, or god forbid you need a psychiatrist, is like finding a new drug dealer. If you lose your plug, you gotta start asking around if anyone has connections. And, unless you're lucky and have good connections, in the end it's always some unhelpful angry old white male deeply-Austrian doctor with his office in a random apartment building. 

But for a suicide, you still end up in the hospital. 

There was this woman, one of the staff taking care of me. She was this young nursing student. About my age now, if I think about it. She was getting some practical experience in or something. To me, she had seemed like an angel. 

She had light brown skin and piercing eyes and sharp features and silky black hair that insisted on falling out of her bun. There was a slight accent to her German. We spoke a lot. Unlike the other doctors and nurses, who all chastised me or pitied me or questioned me for my decision, she understood me. Whenever she'd be in my room, delivering medicine or replacing my IV drip or checking my vital stats, we would have a little chat. 

To me, she was an angel, because she was the only light of resonance, of recognition, in the clinical, fluorescent judgement I'd woken up in. She'd been there, in the emergency room, when I was brought in. She was there when they pumped my stomach. She was there, in the days I spent surviving in the emergency care unit, next to other patients who were dying or just barely surviving. She was there, talking to me, understanding and recognising me, when I was moved to my own room to recover. 

During one of our conversations, she had said to me, "teenage girlhood is one of the worst things a person can go through. But it's a war we need to wade through, try our best to survive. To get to the other side."

"What's on the other side?" I asked. 

"Womanhood."

"Is that really worth it?"

She shrugged.

"It's better."

Chapter 23

There's a feeling of relief when you wake up from a dream where you've ruined your life. There's a feeling of devastation when you wake up and realise that it wasn't a nightmare. Those early minutes when you have to sort out reality and delirious fantasy. Did he really text me? Did he really dump me? Did I really have a fight with my friend? I'm in a strange bed and wonder for a second where the hell I am. I turn around and see the sleeping figure next to me. Did I really throw my life away to fuck some douchey cinematographer for a couple days?

Waking up before others in your vicinity is a special kind of loneliness. Before even the sun has woken up. In the darkness and the quiet, you are all alone. Your physical presence, who you are to the world, becomes irrelevant. You confront yourself as a spectre of space time. I grab my hair for support and sigh. 

I feel I should take advantage of this moment, to sort my thoughts out. Contemplate my behaviour. But I just feel annoyed at the forced intervention held by the universe. Fuck you, I think, I refuse. I refuse to confront whatever deep psychological issues are driving my abnormal behaviour. I fired my therapist. 

She used to tell me that, to get an overview of my life, I should occasionally take a step back and observe my thoughts and actions like from the outside; I did this. How did this make me feel? What reasons could I have for doing this or feeling that? That kind of bullshit.

It forces itself into my brain. I fucked a stranger. I ghosted work. I fought my friend. How does this make me feel? 

Before my brain can answer, I panic and smack myself in the forehead so hard my head hits the headboard, which wakes John. 

He gives me a look of groggy confusion.

"What…?"

I'm rubbing the back of my head. His eyebrows furrow suspiciously. 

"Are you okay?" He asks. His voice is raspy, morning unused. His hair is messy, his beard is scruffy and growing in. 

"Yeah," my voice breaks. Morning used, I'm sure. 

Chapter 24

It's snowing today. And, as if with the weather, John has gotten colder. I know the reason for his distant behaviour; I slipped out of his fantasy and became real. There is baggage attached to me, I have become more than just his entertainment for the night. 

Still, I wear his clothes and take his hand and walk to breakfast with him, pleading, with my behaviour, for his attention. He throws me dismissive scraps. I take it. 

None of us, or maybe because of my presence, had the desire to do anything today. So we just collected in Edward and Andy's room to silently waste time in each other's presence. Occasionally, they'd shoot the shit with each other. Or Tim would start a little conversation of curiosity with me. I think he knows more about me than John does. John's not cuddling me anymore, when we sit in the group. There's a slight sense of bothered-ness about my presence radiating from him.

I, like every other teen girl in the early 2010s, fetishised the hell out of gay men. All of us have, of course, as is custom for this reflective era of human beings, regretted this behaviour, and spent a whole lot of time reflecting on why we did it. Many queer women have put forward that it was a way to engage with queerness without having to confront their own, directly. But I'm not queer, so what's my excuse? 

It's simple, really. Every relationship between a man and a woman is inherently unbalanced. Any relationship between a group in power and an oppressed group is, but heterosexuality is such a specific tool of the patriarchy, straight women are, basically, doomed. There's a couple options that come with this truth: you can paradoxically deny and embrace it, wether that means becoming a dutiful housewife or a woman who has it all, you lie to yourself about the (lack of) choice or balance you have; you can try to fight it, like Lily in all her unexpected bisexual secretly-powerful glory, who I've never watched date a man who didn't seem like the rain would crumple him; or you could remove the imbalance entirely, steal the objectifying gaze back, and fetishise, from a distance, a relationship without the inherent unsafe power balance. 

I did that last one. And, hey, I actually went the whole mile, don't accuse me of homophobic fetishisation! My first boyfriend, back in early high school, as it turned out, was bi. You can't say I didn't give back to the community I was fetishising. I gave him a whole lotta head. Show your local queer community some love by giving a bisexual some head. 

Plus, all my friends are queer. 

There's a fourth option. Most straight women jump to it directly. Embracing the victim position. Finding eroticism in the being hunted. Just look at all the most popular romance tropes. Men, violating women, painted over with roses. Every story of abuse and control in the romance section of the bookstore. 50 shades of grey defining sex for an entire generation of curious middle school eyes. Women are submissive, sexually, romantically, because the best we can do under these circumstances is convince ourselves we are enjoying it. So we find eroticism in the vulnerability. Fetishise the power imbalance.

I tried to fight it, but eventually fighting it gets exhausting. And what other option do I have? Lily can be picky because, of course, she's got a line up of strong, tall women she can pick from, too. What do I have? A deteriorating self-worth. Eventually, you break. You give in. Whatever, you think, fucking take me, I guess. 

I can swear off men. All heartbroken women do. Just like every hungover university student swears off alcohol. But what am I left with? I haven't exactly got an alternative. I'm sorry, Cher, but I do think men are a necessity. Forgive me for being weak. But do want to be loved. To be desired. I want love. 

Chapter 25

Scattered across Andy and Edward's hotel room, we play a game of truth or dare like we're middle schoolers, like we're not a bunch of 30-something men and a 23 year old girl. 

There's a knock on our Do Not Disturb door again, and I go to open it. 

Behind the door, there stands an intervention of young women. Lily, Anna, and in the centre, Nina. Concerned sympathy across their faces. Kind expressions, not hostile. Leah isn't there. 

I don't say anything, I just close the door. 

I close the door on them. 

"What the fuck?" I hear an angry Lily react, her instinctive exclamation muffled by the pale blue door. 

How unfair it is, that avoiding conflict — protecting your peace — will lead you into more, worse conflict. 

"Mania?" Anna asks quizzically through the door. 

"Anna," I answer flatly. 

Nonsense to the men watching us with alarmed and curious eyes, but I couldn't have them learning my real name. Maybe I'm just being manic. Maybe I really am. 

Each man has an expression of his own, expressing the exact same as each other, but expressed through each man's unique flavour. John, with frustration, and a hint of possessiveness. Tim, with the most care and concern. Tom's almost enjoying this. 

"Dude, who the hell did you bring us?" I hear Andy whisper too loudly to John. 

"I'll be right back, guys," I tell them, and go out into the hallway, to join my friends. 

"Mania, what the hell is going on?" Lily asks, almost demands. 

"Leah told us what happened," Nina says softly. 

Anna just looks at me. She looks at me like she really wants to hug me.

I really don't know how to handle this situation. I mean, what I'm supposed to do. I don't know how to save it. I don't know if I can. I feel completely out of control, and everything falls apart. The act has fallen and now life is catching up to who I really am, when I can't uphold the performance anymore. 

"Nothing, guys. I didn't mean to concern you. I'm just- I'm just having a time. Living my life. I met a guy, that's all. And I sent the location like how we share our Uber information with each other. I didn't mean anything by it. It was totally innocuous. I'm sorry about what I said to Leah. She just caught me in a bad moment, is all. I'd had a bit to drink and was just bothered to have someone show up like that, interrupting my fun."

To my surprise, I find it as easy as ever to be honest with my friends. 

Anna says slowly, "you're having fun?"

"Yeah. Fun. I'm actually getting laid. With men who actually want me. I'm desired. I'm happy."

The looks they give me don't seem to believe me. 

"You're just…," Nina searches cautiously for the words, "you've never acted like this before, and we're worried about you. We love you. Please know that we love you, and we just want you to be okay."

I feel like I'm going to start crying.

"I'm sorry for what I said to Leah," I repeat. She isn't here. I start to cry. 

"Mania," Lily says, a little softer than she'd been before, "Mania, it's okay."

"No it's not. Look, she didn't even want to come."

"She didn't come because she felt bad for how aggressive she had been to you. She thought it was better if she didn't come today, because she didn't want to…," Lily gets interrupted. 

"She was just concerned," Nina adds, "she didn't mean to be so harsh with you."

"And she didn't want to push you away," Anna finishes. 

Oh, aren't women just angels? Always so apologetic, so considerate, so caring for each other's feelings. Always watching our own behaviour, catholic shame for an imperfect smile. 

I'm properly crying now, and the girls hesitantly move in to hug me. 

"I don't know what's happening," I cry into Nina's shoulder. I move my head and smell Anna's neck. Lily strokes my back. 

"Come home with us," Nina says.

"No," I say harshly, and pull away. The girls pull back, a little shocked. I don't know why I say no. 

"No?" Lily says, a little aggression growing in her tone again. 

"Mania," Nina says softly, diplomatically, trying to contain the situation. 

"No. No, fuck you guys. Fuck," my voice starts rising, "I can't do this! I can't do this anymore, I'm suffocating! I can't live like this, I need a break! I'm alive, damn it, and I feel like with you guys, I've become a doll! We're a cult of perfect dolls! Idolatry of the serene and ideology of the stable, and I can't do this! I'm fucked! I'm fucked up, I'm not like you guys. I have a soul, a spirit, a fucking need to fuck around and exist a little. I can't do this. I can't do this perfect little life with you guys. I'm fucked, okay? I grew up fucked, I got fucked in development, and I am doomed to lead a life that's fucked."

I'm hyperventilating. Anna and Lily have taken a few steps back. Nina moves to rub a hand on my back calmingly. I swat it away. 

"No, Nina, fuck off. With your perfection."

"Mania, I'm not perfect," she cuts me off. 

Of course she's not. These are my friends. They're human. I know they are. But it's like I've forgotten every flaw they've let me witness. 

"Just fucking leave. Leave me to it. Let me hit the bottom so I can stop living in fear of the fall. Let me just live on the bottom, where it's safe. Where I don't have to work so damn hard to keep myself afloat. Where I can just lie, stable, on the ground that was made for me."

They look at me. There's a moment of silence while I catch my breath. 

"Have you talked to your therapist?" Nina asks. 

"I fired her."

"Oh," Anna says. 

"Yeah, there, see?" I reply, "I want this. I want to fall apart. I'm done running, I just want to embrace my fate. I'm not like you guys. I'm not made for your group. I'm just an intrusion."

"You're not an intrusion," Nina says. Anna is crying. Lily looks angry. 

"I'm sorry, guys, alright? But the sooner you let me go, the sooner I can stop infecting your lives with my destined dysfunction. It's in me. It's coded into my hardware. I'm not allowed to thrive. That life isn't mine. The destiny of who I am, the prophecy of my fucked up childhood, it lives inside me. And every moment I spend faking functionality with you guys, it sits in agony, desperately itching to get away and explode. I'm done. I'm done! This is me running away. Stop coming after me."

No one says anything for a moment. 

Then Nina silently says with a sigh, "okay. Okay, if you feel that way, okay. We'll leave."

Slowly, hesitantly, they start to leave. 

Nina turns back and says softly, "but we're here for you. If you ever want to come back."

And that's the last time I'm ever going to see them, I think. 

When I walk back to the room, the door opens without me even needing to knock. Edward is standing behind it. All the men are shuffled up close to the door. Eavesdropping. Watching through the peephole. 

"Everything okay?" Tim asks. 

"Yeah," I run my hand through my hair, "yeah, I'm sorry for the bother. Just a miscommunication got my girlfriends all unnecessarily worried."

John walks up to me and possessively puts an arm around me, pulling me away from the door.

"They can't seem to leave you alone," he says, with an annoyed tone in his voice, glaring at the door. 

Tom laughs and slaps John on the shoulder, "well, you know how women are."

They see the pestering bitches, the nagging. They only see my nagging friends like nagging wives and nagging girlfriends, an obstacle in the way of what men want. The way Skyler White is a bitch because she won't just shut up and submit and support her husband's ego trip destroying the lives of everyone around him. 

What they don't see is the many ignored texts and missed calls on my phone. What they don't see is the group chat gone silent after I didn't answer their confused worried responses to my text. What they don't see is my friends texting each other, then calling each other, getting increasingly concerned. What they don't see is my friends creating an impromptu intervention, worried about their fellow human being who is very vulnerable right now and in an unsafe situation. 

What the men don't see is that, to me, to my friends, I am in an unsafe situation. They don't see that, from a perspective in which I am the protagonist, they are villains. Threats. What the men who have decorated their vacation comedy with my young body don't see, is that they are the monsters in my horror thriller. 

No, all they see is that I am what they want, and that my nagging friends are getting in the way of that. 

John pulls me down to the floor. He's now touching me again. Not affection, ownership. 

The game continues.

Chapter 26

It's Tom's turn. He calls me out. I say dare, wanting to avoid confessing any truth about the girls in the hallway. 

Tom grins at me, ulterior motives painted blatantly across his face. 

"Make out with one of us other than John. The choice is yours."

I am a used up sponge, wring out what's left in me, then dump me.

I wonder who they expect me to pick. If they expect me to protest, to assert loyalty to the man that fucked me first, who I barely know. I wonder who wants me the most. I wonder if any of them want me at all, as in attraction, not just a prize hunted for the ego. I look over them, as if my decision isn't already made. Not by me, but by some fucked up primal instinct instilled in me. I try my best to give the others some considerations. Andy; I know him the least, he's spoken to me the least, and he seems the least interested in my presence. Edward; he's nice enough, friendly, attractive in that rectangular way, and is the most normal towards me, I would say, Tim is the big feminist, maybe he thinks this will be his big nice guy reward, or maybe he doesn't want any part of it and thinks this is no way to treat a woman, like a sex toy to be passed around. None of their faces give away any hopes or expectations, just watching for my reaction. 

Tom leers smugly at me. My choice was always obvious. My choice was never mine. 

I pull out of John's lap and move across the floor into Tom's lips. Tom pulls me towards him and onto his lap. The kiss goes for longer; he holds me to him with his palm across the back of my head, pushing his tongue into my mouth. Way too much tongue, not enjoyable, but still my stomach flips when he hikes his hips up and I can feel the light pressure of the beginnings of a boner press against me. 

This is why men think the alpha negging stuff works. 

Oh my god, does the alpha negging stuff work?

Tim pats Tom on the shoulder from where he's sitting above him on the bed, "Alright, I think that's enough of a display."

I look up and see something in Tim's expression. Discomfort, concern, the only man here with enough braincells to rub together, or enough empathy to toss me, to realise that what they're doing with me is, at the very least, a little disturbing. Tom's first move is to look over my shoulder at John. I turn my head back to look too. John's smiling.

"You've got to stop kissing other people's girls," John banters. Tom practically shoves me off him, and I return back to John. I have become a puppet, a toy, passed between boys. They're talking like I can't hear them.

"Yeah, but this one's not yours, is she?"

His girl, his property, his thing.

As I'm leaning my back into John's chest, he puts a hand under my chin and turns my head to face him, attacking me with another tongue-drenched kiss. It occurs to me that there is absolutely no consent on my part here. Here, I did not even have choice. Fully and completely, simply just a bag of meat to kiss. 

I pull out of the kiss and turn to the room. To remind the men that I am a human, that there is a person inside this bag of meat, that they can speak to me directly, not just about me, I speak. 

"My turn. And this one's to the room. A question. Who of you eyed me first? Was John really the only one who wanted to approach me, or was there a group discussion first?"

The room falls silent and their faces fall stern. 

I continue, "How did you decide who'd get to screw me? Who wanted me originally?"

John answers. 

"Me, obviously, baby." He tucks my hair behind my ear. But it's so clearly a lie to try to satiate me. God, these men think I'm dumb. 

"You think I'm dumb," I smile at him. The room sits tense. 

"What?" I ask the uncomfortably shifting room, my mood dropping with every frame passing per second, "what's so… what…"

I'm starting to feel a painful anxious doubt gnawing at my gut. 

"What do you guys not want to tell me?"

My tone isn't playful anymore. 

Chapter 27

We're in the hallway. Me and John. 

"Can you just chill?" He asks, insecure gaze focused on the hotel room door.

Oh my god, I realise, he's embarrassed to have brought such a crazy bitch around his friends. 

"Who wanted to bang me originally, John?"

He finally brings his eyes to mine. 

"It was a losing bet…"

Five men booked three rooms, two per room. They were arguing over who should get to sleep in the room by himself, when in the pub they decided that the sacrifice would be having to chat up the sad slut sitting alone at the bar. They thought the birthday boy should have to do it, in that hazing man-friendship way. 

I threw away my whole damn dignity, played dress up as a sex doll, for men who were looking down on me. The purest form of degradation, the most demeaning way men think of women — she's ugly, but I'll fuck her anyway. To them, I am nothing. Worse. I am nothing, that they've fucked. 

God, I wish I was angry like a man is angry. I wish I was angry because I wasn't rich or because I felt my ego threatened or some other bullshit reason men use as an excuse to act like children with weapons as toys and call it badass. 

"What. In. The. Toxic. '90s. Romcom. Bullshit."

Is that the best I can do? Is that my badass antihero line? I sound like a child. I am a child. 

"Don't take it so fucking dramatically."

Explosion time. I do it. I finally let myself lose my control.

"John, you're fucking pathetic, you know that? You seem empty to me. A void. A walking, binge-drinking void. Your dream is money? And power? To, what, prove the size of your dick? Because that's what the world told you would make you a big strong man? What the fuck is wrong with you? At your age, most people have spouses. Kids. And you're picking up kids. Asking me if I'm 18? What, cause that's less creepy than if I was 17? You're sick. You know I have a job? A degree? Do you know fucking anything about me, as a human? No. You don't care, do you? Did having some questionably young thing on your arm make your phallus feel big and hard?"

"Who the fuck are you, Anna? What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Lacan put forward that Freud's fear-of-castration theory made a lot more sense if you understood phallus as the power inherently placed on a man in the patriarchy, not literally their dick. Maybe that's why men are so obsessed with dick size. Sad, honestly, to put so much of your human value (however metaphorically) in a body part so small and so easily removed. 

Lily once said that's why cis men hate trans women so much. They see them as men who have willingly given up their phallus; manifestations of their worst nightmare. 

"Men and their endless need for an ego trip," she said, "like addicts. It must be exhausting. No wonder all of them are nuts."

"You should ask for a psychiatrist's report before you pick someone up at a bar, John. Scan for personality disorders," Andy says somewhat lightheartedly, standing in the now open doorway to the room.

I fired my therapist. 

Is an angry woman nothing but a personality disorder to be medicated into submission? Is an angry woman nothing but an android that has malfunctioned?

"All women have them," Tom adds, leaning on the other side of the door frame with his arms crossed. 

The men watching us seem so amused by me. 

The annoying thing, as an angry feminist, is that nothing you do will every impact the men whose dehumanising, objectifying view of you angers you so, because they look down on you. To them, you're a chihuahua. Your rage, your deep, existential rage, is cute at best, an embarrassing display of womanly hysteria at worst. Silly feminist, shut up and show me your tits.

You could stab a man and his eyes would still be glued to your tits. 

How the hell is man supposed to find meaning under such circumstances. 

"You know what, Andy?" I turn to him, then look at Edward, too, "And you."

Edward looks shocked and offended, though still somewhat lighthearted, saying "What did I do? Why am I about to catch a stray?"

He's kind of right. I ignore him. 

"You two sad repressed cases. Clearly, you've done something, and it's none of my business, but it's fucking sad that you clearly have a part of yourselves you're too stuck up the ass of toxic masculinity to acknowledge."

I almost use a slur. I almost call them faggots. But then Lily and Leah and Nina cross through my mind and, even when I'm not carefully controlling myself, I just can't get myself to use something derogatory against them, even if it's to hurt someone else. I'd never be able to love any of them again knowing I had discarded their pain and experiences, done my small part to keep the world that hates them hostile, in a moment of anger, just to piss some men off even more. 

Well, at least now I know one thing about me. At least I'm not homophobic. 

Instead, I turn to the other men. I turn to Tom. 

"I can tell you where Andy went during that party."

I point at Andy. 

"He's the kiss marks on Eddie's neck."

Both men get alarmed at this. Defensive. Nervous. Tim twitches a bit, his eyes moving to Tom, who doesn't seem to believe me. His face remains smug, unresponsive to my outburst. John believes me, though. He seems to, briefly, for a moment, forget the situation, and looks towards Andy and Edward like this is new information. Processing that his friends… are queer? Hooked up? How the hell do I know what John gives a shit about his friends.

"What, you dumbasses don't think I have eyes, too? Connected to a brain? I can see, too, you know. Even you, Tim."

Tim's taking me seriously. He's the only one not finding my outburst amusing. His face is tense. Concern, regret, discomfort, reflection. Listens to women. Oh, go suck one, Tim. 

"Mr. Feminist, Mr. He-For-She. You realise you're part of the problem you want to believe you're not. You want to think of yourself as better, because you pity the way your peers treat my kind. You think the fact that you actually understand that we're human, that because you have the most basic capacity for empathy, that you're not one of them. But you are. You are, so classically, a lamb who is too weak to masculinity to actually apply the bullshit you think you believe because you listen to podcasts or whatever. You don't objectify me, you don't degrade me, you don't harass me, but you sit and smile all well-behaved while your best friends rape girls."

Not like a man, not badass, just a hysterical woman. My screaming isn't intimidating, it's pathetic. But the men don't seem so amused anymore, at least. Tom has uncrossed his arms and is heading towards me. 

"You better shut up, soon," Tom threatens. 

Women spend out lives trying to keep ourselves safe, safe from men, statistically the biggest threat to our lives. 

Ever heard of suicide by cop?

"You're a rapist, Tom, are you aware of that?"

How about suicide by man.

"Crazy bitch."

"How sad is it that you can't get laid for who you are so you get the girlfriends of your friends drunk to take advan—"

Tom throws me into the wall and my eye meets a door handle.

I've never been punched before, let alone punched by a cold metal knob. I've been thrown before, though, and the feeling of pummelling helplessly towards the wall is very familiar. The impact is a dull one, mainly felt in my forehead. 

I slide down until I'm sitting with my back against the wall. The world is blurry in my right eye, the pain slowly growing into it. 

Tim chastises Tom and runs up to me to see if I'm okay, but in the morning Tim will forgive Tom on my behalf and they'll continue being friends. Tim is asking me if I need to go to the hospital, avoids, however, calling the authorities on his friend. Obviously. He's pulling my hands away from my eye. I hadn't realised I was holding them there.

"Here, let me take a look at that."

Oh, Mr. Big Doctor Guy. Saviour Of Women. Tim is the worst of them. I stare at him blankly while he inspects my face.

John just stands over me, behind Tim, with a cold look in his eyes. That cold distance every man gets at some point, when you stop being his fantasy and start being a real person. 

"I think it would be best if you took your stuff and left," he says flatly. Like I'm a child. Like I couldn't come to that conclusion by myself. Take my autonomy away once more. I can't even leave on my own accord, I'm being told to leave. I'm not rejecting him for his misdeed, he's rejecting me for my overreaction. I just glare back. 

Tim helps me up and offers to help me collect my things, but I shrug him off. I give him a kind, appreciative smile, and wince because my eye does quite hurt, I'm starting to realise. 

"Thank you, Tim. I appreciate your support."

Jerk off to that one, asshole. I hate this guy. 

John lets me into his hotel room and stands silently by the door. He watches me change. He doesn't want to fuck me anymore, but he doesn't look away to give me privacy or dignity.  He just watches me strip naked, reduced to animal status, with cold disgust. I put on the dress I first met him in. He never did have hotel service clean it. I've been in his clothes this whole week. How metaphorical. I pass him in the doorway. He doesn't say bye.

And he never even knew my age.

PART THREE — RUBBLE

Chapter 28

Out of all the walks of shame I've done, this is the worst one. Vienna has night buses, and I have them all memorised, but I choose to take the 90 minute walk home in the brutal winter night cold. At least it will burn the… ah, whatever. 

The snow is melting and Vienna gets so damn windy in February. My fingers have frozen, I can't feel my nose, and I'm so close to sticking my cigarette into my arm — a little reminder of home. I'm not sure I'll make it home. I'm not even sure I want to. 

I mean, what the hell did they expect? A fucking woman, that's what. An empty vessel. I think men genuinely believe we have lower and less cognitive functions. I think a lot of them genuinely believe that women's heads are empty and hearts are overflowing (which is why the Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl-Men fall so quickly for any woman with a head screwed on). Well, fucking surprise, bitch. Just like you, some of us have empty hearts and overflowing heads, too. Pick up a damn stranger, treat her like a piece of meat, like another fucking tourist attraction, like a toy. What the hell did they expect? 

What did I expect? What the hell do I do now? Why did I do any of this? 

It's hard to self-destruct as a woman, since you've spent every moment of your life protecting your own safety. It's hard to let go of that instinct. It's hard to just let go. Rock bottom is a lot worse for a woman than it is for a man. Since we already start at a level so low, men won't touch it. 

Men "self-destruct" by destroying the things around them. Every tragic tale of a male anti-hero ruining his life is him ruining the lives of those around him. Oh, how tragic, his ego leaked over and set off a bomb. 

A woman could, if she wanted to, really self-destruct. Some men could, men with features the world doesn't forgive (see: the shameless crime of not being white). We're less tempted because we know that the world isn't ready to forgive us. The world doesn't "know that we're doing our best", doesn't "understand the our destructive nature is a helpless thing we, ourselves, are victim to", like every white male rapist and shooter with slaps on the wrist sentences and sympathetic tears from an apologetic public. We failed them. White men get to have their little tantrums, get put in the corner, then get given a second chance. 

Men don't know how to self-destruct, truly self-destruct, because they don't know how to self harm. Their ego gets in the way. 

I find myself walking next to a large rift in the ground that I've passed countless times before. It's an open gash in the ground that goes through Vienna. The subway passes by on one side of it. Sometimes there's a channel of water in the gash. Usually, though, just a sad little puddle at the bottom, surrounded by concrete. I walk to the middle of the next bridge I come across. 

I've crossed this bridge countless times in the glaring daylight, in the gazing eyes of people, idly observing the unused gash in the ground, partially wishing it would flood so I could finally see it serve its purpose. 

I climb over the railing. In the 3 am frost of a February Thursday, there is no one around to see me. Vienna gets so damn empty sometimes. It almost doesn't feel real. Reality, I mean. Like I could jump and nothing would happen. I'd wake up tomorrow and make my way to work and then the bar and then spend Saturday in a headache and nausea. Tree in the woods and whatever. Moments misplaced. 

I imagine it. I allow myself to really indulge the fantasy. I let go; I wave the white flag in the endless battle against my darkest urges, the battle I've been waging since I started therapy. I fired my therapist two weeks ago, and this quickly I've spiralled into standing on the ledge. Maybe I really wasn't built for this sick vapid world. Maybe that's a good thing. 

I let myself feel it, the rollercoaster stomach flip sensation of becoming suddenly helpless against gravity. The wind of air resistance slapping the tears out of my face. The brief regret right before you hit the bottom, the view from halfway down, when it's too late to ask for your life back. The enlightenment of an imminent fated death not yet arrived. Liminal existence. 

I imagine my neck snapping, head cracking, finally letting out all the sick shit stuck in there. My head, finally free of my mind. 

I see myself at the bottom, blood pooling around my mangled body on the concrete. 

I imagine it there, frozen stiff by the elements and rigor mortis, until someone gazes at the view and their life changes forever. A child, a young couple, a single mother on her way to work, some shitty twenty-something date rapist; another witness to report another dead woman to the news. 

A man with no future to live for losing meaning in life. And here I am a man. 

I've always found the heterosexual male an inherently contradictory being. They do everything in their power to see women as unhuman as possible, until they have wives and mothers. Then, suddenly, we're just supposed to infer their affections. Though men hardly see wives and mothers as humans. More like, cherished objects.

The ending of Se7en didn't affect me. Sure, it's sad that Brad Pitt's wide died, he obviously loved her very much. We know this because he cries a lot then shoots a guy. But that love is meaningless to me. 

Fridged woman is a concept from feminist film theory to describe the female characters whose trauma and death are just motivators for the male hero protagonist. 

The Wife Character, shown at home, an adult woman with adult woman interests such as the safety of her family, a prized possession the main character cares for deeply. 

She was an object — his Wife. It wasn't a person who died, with humanity in her own right, it was a wife. Why should I care? Men care. Men are tragic for his loss. His loss, not hers. 

I guess because men know what it's like to love, truly, humanly, love a woman. But I don't know what it's like to be loved, truly, humanly, loved by a man. The kind of love that makes him see you as a real, full human being, not whatever his interpretation of a woman is. The kind of love that makes your death worth mourning. 

As mothers, as wives, as daughters. Humanisation through a man's love. Prove your value to me. 

Ask not what the patriarchy can do for you, but what you can do for the patriarchy. 

What dies with me? I'm nobody's mother, nobody's wife, nobody's daughter. I'm a chick, picked up, who can't think of a purpose for herself besides the one prescribed to her by the male gaze. And even that one is quickly encroaching on the expiry date. 

Anna once told me, "Everyone has a task for their life, and it's unique to everyone, that's what that guy Frankl said, right?"

We were both high on a rooftop, watching Vienna glitter before us, under a midsummer midnight. 

"I think," she continued, "I think my task is to love this world. I think I was put here to love. The world, the skies, the people. Not save the world. Not change the world. Just, love it."

I almost said that's beautiful, but then she continued.

"But even that feels like a Herculean task. There's so much to love, and I'm so small. Sometimes I feel so exhausted by my task, I feel like I have no choice but to kill myself to escape it."

Frankl, she went on, was of the opinion that there are two races of men. (And here Anna and I are to presume we are also under the man umbrella.) The decent and the indecent. There are no lines to be drawn across any borders that would predispose the decent and the indecent. 

The world wants something of us, something different from each of us, and it is up to us not to let the world down. 

"So," Anna said, "I don't."

I watch the puddle at the bottom glitter in the light pollution. Another dead woman on the news. What a waste of a life. No, actually, what a waste of a death. 

Me, who's always tried so hard to be good. The last thing a decent man can do, when any other purpose seems out of reach, is to suffer with honour. Find meaning in his suffering. Presuming, again, that here I am included under the man umbrella, then at the very least I can live with my — 

Suddenly, everything shifts perspective and I feel silly. Here I am, about to kill myself so I don't have to live with the consequences of the life I ruined because I felt too comfortable and was searching for a greater purpose in an ego trip. An ending to match every destructive man tragic tale I so desperately wanted to channel. But standing here, the pathetic cowardice of that becomes so clear to me. 

The decent thing, and I do try so hard to be good, would be to live with it. 

I think of how Lily one told me that there's a graphic novel sequel to Fight Club, the book that doesn't end the way the movie does. You know, when Marla and the narrator hold hands and the banks blow up while Pixies' Where is my Mind? plays and for a moment the world really did end in the late '90s. But that's not real. It didn't. The narrator has to go on in his lacklustre empty vapid life as husband and father to a wife and son who prefer his psychopathic alter ego. There's actually an "and then everything continued, as boring and unchanged as before" after the big dramatic finale. 

I think of Se7en, how every male death is exploited by the camera for every inch of gruesome morbidity that it's worth, and how the dead women are barely even on screen, un-ogled by the camera. Deaths that have impact because they're loss of human life, not because of the bodies left behind. David Fincher didn't have to do it that way. But he did. 

I climb back over the railing. Vienna is so damn windy in February, and a strong gust nearly throws me off the bridge while I'm balanced over the railing with one leg on either side. The wind almost makes my decision for me, but I lean down and grab tight, clinging on for life. Clinging on to life. And I realise, I don't want to die. 

My two feet at the end of two shaking legs stand firm on the bridge I've crossed many times before, and will cross many times again. That cyclical life that, it seems, will continue rolling repetitively forward for now. 

And I know, to John and his men, I'll just be some tale to tell. My entire life, my entire human, my entire personhood will be reduced to "some crazy chick we spent a week with". 

My phone dings. 

"Volume should be turned down: 

Based on your headphone usage over the last seven days, you've exceeded the recommended limit for audio exposure."

Ha. Yeah. That's not healthy for my ears. 

I turn the volume down. 

Chapter 29

I sleep all through Friday and start drinking the moment I wake up. 

I wake up Friday afternoon. I'm wearing the dress I wore last Saturday, that Saturday I met John. I'm not sure why. 

Fuck men.

Fuck everyone. 

I don't brush my teeth. That's not healthy for my teeth. I don't wash my face; I've got days old make up on. That's not healthy for my skin. My mid-afternoon breakfast is a Jack Daniel's from the back of my liquor cabinet — left over from when I invited one of my uni colleagues over in hopes of fucking him; we got too drunk and didn't — and a diet Coke. That's not healthy for anything. 

Fuck it. 

Somewhere in the back of that cabinet I'm sure I've got a half-smoked joint or my dead grandmother's sleeping meds or something. Bent over in my kitchen, juvenile two-ingredient mixed drink next to me on the floor in a Christmas mug I forgot to put away when the years changed, I search the mess of the cabinet. Lint. Hair. A rubber band. A broken piece of key chain. And I find both. The pot and the meds, I mean.

I wash down the expired benzo with my teenager's cocktail. That's not healthy for my liver. I light a vanilla biscuit scented candle with my lighter, and light the dusty half-smoked joint on the candle's flame. Back to my bedroom, I pick up my laptop by the screen with one hand, the other occupied with drink and joint. That's not healthy for the device. I settle onto the floor, in a corner of the apartment I never stand in. I look over my apartment. I never see my apartment from this angle. 

"Come on, laptop," I mutter, scrolling the internet hopelessly, "give me something."

Someone in some online community got cancelled for grooming minors, and someone else made a three hour video about it. Someone in some online community is always getting cancelled for grooming minors. I spend three hours listening to a cartoon describe sex crimes to me while I scroll through pictures of '90s Leonardo DiCaprio on Pinterest on my phone. That's not healthy for my mental health. I'm almost too old to be his girlfriend, I amuse myself with. He never gets cancelled for that creepy pattern. Is he too big? Too hot? Too iconic? Or are the women too old to be cared about? 

I throw a glance at the screen. Dark discord chat screenshots of awkward unappealing sexting, next to it in big bold capital text is written "MAY 2022. VICTIM WAS 17". The moment we're not minors anymore, the world loses interest in us. Too old to be victims. I pan my gaze back to my phone. Leo was hot in Romeo + Juliet and Titanic, though. I like it when people deeply in love suffer. It's only fair. 

I decide to watch Romeo + Juliet and spend the whole time spitting curses at them. Fuck people in love. They deserve to suffer. Life is so fucking magnificent when you're in love, isn't it? It's only fucking fair that those, who have been enlightened through attachment to another, suffer for it. The rest of us are stuck here being used by fucking tourists. 

Chapter 30

The movie ends, the screen goes black, and I realise I'm sitting in pitch black darkness. The sun set and I didn't notice, never turned any lights on. I crave the outside. I don't turn any lights on. I put on my shoes. 

I take off on a walk around the neighbourhood, devouring cigarette after cigarette, idly hoping I'll show up raped and dead on the news. Once you've flirted with death, you don't break up with her so easily. Suicide by man. Another dead woman on the news. 

I think of Nina, of every protest she takes the rest of us to, with fire and brimstone in her eyes. Every time a woman is murdered — almost always in, what the news dubs, a "love quarrel" — we wear purple and hold candles. 

In June of 2020, Vienna held a Black Lives Matter protest attended by 50.000 people. That's 2.64% of the population of Vienna. There was another one in 2021. And then another one in 2022. There were 50 people at that one. There weren't any more after that. Caring about human life just wasn't in fashion anymore. 

Nina, after that last one, when we were all sitting in a park, lay down on her back with her arms outstretched and stared directly at the sun sizzling our skins. Leah was softly rubbing sunscreen into Nina's legs, and Nina seemed to, for a moment, forget that the rest of us where there. Wistfully, she spoke to herself. We listened.

"Another name. Every time, we add another name to the chant. Women on the news. 6 million Jews. Numbers and statistics, and in all of it, the human tragedy lost. The death, to be borne by the survivors as a reminder of their place."

None of us knew what to respond to that, so we just sat there until Nina fell asleep, then placed and Umbrella over her so she wouldn't get sunstroke. 

The girls and I like- 

… 

liked to trade statistics. 

Like Pokemon cards, to compare. Intersectional politics as a race to the bottom of the food chain. We'd, drunkenly, google various statistics, and argue about who had it worse. And if multiple things apply, well, they don't do studies specific enough. Pick a struggle. Which what that you're discriminated against do you identify with most?

Sometimes I think I get the least sympathy because my only struggle is the most universal one. Woe is me, a cishet middle class western white woman. But then I think, that's what conservative-feminist wives of nazi-ideology-pushers think, and I move on.

I think of Tim, who I hated so much. Am I any better than him? All my friends are queer, I go to pride, I read the books. And yet I speak of the world as cis binary absolutes. I think of every male vicim and female perpetrator who has gotten lost in my blanketing anger. I think of Nina. My one black friend. I read the theory and go to the protests and still, when I speak of imbalance, I speak like men and women are all white. 

And did you notice how Nina and that nurse were the only ones whose skin colour I described? Did you notice how you simply presumed that everyone else was white? Notice the unspoken agreement between you and me, that every person is, by default, white, with only aberrations necessitating clarification. If I didn't tell you Nina was black, you would never have known, the thought wouldn't occur to you. I didn't tell you Anna was white. But you knew she was. I don't know what, but I know there's something insidious in that.

I think of my parents, of their gen-x political correctness. They used the right words — that was their understanding of justice — and just hid that they thought differently. Am I any better? Am I unlearning or am I just policing my thoughts the way my parents policed their words? Or am I just policing my words? 

Can I even undo the bad that was sown into me when I was raised?

Here's an uncomfortable truth: every white person is racist. Every man is sexist. Every straight person is homophobic. Every cis person is transphobic. Etc. etc. You just don't grow up in a world telling you that you're the standard human being — not that you're above everyone else, but that everyone else is below you — and lose that worldview. The rules and instructions on where we slot in to the big hierarchical matrix sow the very way we learn to think.

Here's the second part of that truth: every person of colour is racist. Every woman is sexist. Every queer person is queerphobic. Etc. etc. You just don't grow up in a world telling you that you're an off-branch of human being — not that everyone else is above you, but that you are below everyone else — and lose that worldview. The rules and instructions on where we slot in to the big hierarchical matrix sow the very way we learn to think. 

 You've probably heard some teenager parrot "no ethical consumption under capitalism". It's true, and it stretches out over every facet of life. There is no ethical existence in an unjust system. Nothing you think, nothing you do, is untainted by the position the world perceives you in. 

That's what love — real, actual, non-scripted love — claims to cure. Love — not infatuation, not possession, not lust, real love — breaks through all that, sees past all the pointless corporeality of humanness, and sees the soul. Anything else — money and power, like John deifies; any art, if I had any such talent or inclination; every shitty TikTok I make for my company — all of it is attached to this damn identity. 

I think of Leonardo DiCaprio in all those '90s movies proclaiming his undying love to this or that woman the chick flick audience was meant to project themselves on to. I think of Leonardo DiCaprio and his endless string of girlfriends my age. And I wonder if that kind of love — the kind of love that liberates you from your body, from who you represent to everyone else, and sees you — is nothing but a myth; an Excalibur fools like me are blind to chase. 

All this talk of love and I've ended up at the bar. Huh. Muscle memory. Routine sown into my network of nerves. 

It's 2 am closing time, and the bartender is shooing out a group of young drunk men. As I approach the door, the men stop to leer at me. 

The bartender herds them with his arms and cordially commands, "eyes in front of you, gentlemen. Walk."

The group leaves, giggling, and the bartender turns his attention to me.

"Mania?" He asks, putting a hand on my upper back to usher me in, "are you alright?"

Walking in, I immediately get the attention of everyone left. The regulars. All these familiar faces I only see in this familiar context, a chorus of concern for me. The newly-wed husbands who met here and come every Friday to celebrate. The definitely-underage kid who never orders alcohol anyway and sits in the corner silently sketching. The widower, who orders one drink — his dead wife's favourite, some old person cocktail I've never tried —  and spends the whole night nursing it. 

He gives me his coat, the old widower. It's only then that I realise I've been braving the snow cold in nothing but my slut dress. I realise I can't feel my face, or my hands, or my legs. I thought it was the alcohol and drugs, but looking at my fingers, they're pale blue and veiny.

Eye starting to bruise properly, John's dry cum still on my stomach, and immediately all my friends forgive the fight. They rush me, flock around me. Women don't get to be as destructive as men are. I guess that's a good thing. Because when I blow up my life in a childish panic, my girls are still there for me. 

"I'm… sorry," I croak. My lips feel cracked and frosted together, like tongues on telephone poles. 

"Oh, of course you are," Nina coos and wraps her arms around me. She's warm. 

This was supposed to be my moment. This was supposed to be my Breaking Bad finale, Walter White dying in a pool of his own guilty blood. But women don't get to be as destructive as men are. So instead I'm getting water and free fries and caring looks of worry from my friends and the regulars and the bartenders.

Billie Joel is singing over the speakers. 

Vienna waits for you. 

When the widower needs his coat to leave, the bar gives me a blanket for my way home. Sitcom life. At the end of the 20 minutes, all is returned to the status quo. At the end of the 20 minutes, all is well. And the cycle continues. 

Epilogue

A woman can't even nosedive towards rock bottom in peace. When men have a crisis, they get to ruin their lives and the lives of everyone around them in a big tragic tale, but when women have a crisis, we call our therapists to ask if we can resume sessions because I'm not good without her, actually. 

I wake up in Nina's bed, cuddling a hot water bottle that's gone lukewarm. My eyes are blurry and crusty. I rub my eyes, but flinch. One of my eyes is sore. Oh, right. 

I sit up, and I can see myself in the full length mirror she has next to the closet. I can't believe she let me sleep in her bed like this. I'm still covered in cum and street gunk and smeared make up. Her bed is her holy space of cleanliness. She usually doesn't even let you onto her bed with outside clothes on. 

I make eye contact with myself in the mirror, and try to have a silent conversation with myself. I fail, because I can't see myself. I'm too distracted by what I see in the mirror. 

My eye is bruised and dark and swollen. A black eye on a young woman is a scary sight. If I'd been a man, it would've been cool. Whatever. I still think I look pretty cool, even if on me it just looks like a dramatic ad campaign to end domestic violence. 

Nina walks in. 

"Oh good, you're awake. Good morning, my dear. How are you feeling?"

"Like a machine made up of a million small parts, all independently malfunctioning at the same time."

She laughs. 

"Yeah, that makes sense to be expected. I'm just glad you're back with us. What even happened?"

She doesn't sit on the bed. 

"I don't know," I run my hands across my face, "the horrors caught up with me, I guess. I was abused, growing up."

"I know, dear."

"Yeah, but I can't keep acting like I wasn't. Or it comes out sideways, I guess."

She gives me a sympathetic look and walks up close to me. She softly strokes my hair and cups my cheek.

"The demons don't like to be ignored," she says," They will make themselves known. The body keeps the score, you know."

I hug her and bury my face in her stomach. Oh, Nina, my friend of infinite wisdom. What would I do without her? Without any of my friends? I start crying. 

"I'm sorry," my voice is muffled by her shirt. She strokes my hair. 

"I'm sorry you had to go through all that." 

"No. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was a bitch and I'm sorry I worried all of you and I'm sorry I acted that way. Thank you for still being my friend."

"Oh, honey. Of course. I love you. It's you and me against your demons."

I cry into her shirt for a while. Then, softly, I say, "I love you."

She lifts me from her by the shoulders. 

"Come. We'll call your work and tell them you were out with 40° fever so you couldn't write in — to incapacitated. You can tell them it's covid and get a couple more days off."

I sit with my knees bent. I need to burn this dress. 

"No, I think I want my normalcy back. Fucking immediately."

I got the (self-)destruction out of my system, and now I never want to think of it again. 

"Wanna shower?" Nina asks. 

"Yes, please."

"Alright, I've put a fresh towel in the bathroom for you. I'll leave some clothes on the toilet you can change into, if you want."

"We must burn this dress," I respond flatly. 

She just laughs and ruffles my hair, getting up. I climb out of bed.

When I get out of the shower, Nina has changed all of the bedsheets. That's more like her. I'm wearing her biggest sweatpants and her dad's old shirt. I look at myself in the mirror again. I think it suits me.

Nina sees me and pulls the blanket back. I crawl back into the bed. She tucks me, sits down on the side of the bed, and strokes my hair. 

"Oh, you poor thing. Turning 23 really did a number on you, huh?"

I stare at the wall. 

"He came and saw me. Sat in my kitchen. Fucking apologised."

"Who?"

But I don't feel pressured to answer. Her tone tells me she knows exactly who. My silence tells her she guessed correct. 

"Oh, honey," she coos, "that's horrible."

I decide in this moment that it's alright to be a woman, maybe. Femininity maybe isn't all bad. Let the men beat each other up, let them become apologists for their rapist brothers. Men can love in their sick destructive ways. 

I turn to look up at Nina, and she gazes down at me with pure affection. 

That pure uncomplicated affection only women can share, only women can love with. Let men ruin the lives of those around them, let men ruin the world. Men explode, women implode. Which means when I blew up, everyone around me was relatively unscathed. Which means when I blew up, my life was still here. Maybe it isn't so bad that we don't have the same destructive power. Let the men let emotions get the best of them. Let the men get overwhelmed by their feelings. I've got my girls. 

Nina's eyes get serious with intention. She brings her face close. Her lips taste like cocoa. 

I don't think men realise that women are important to each other. I think they think we're in desperate competition for their attention. I think they think we see ourselves and each other the way they see us; only in relation to them.

You may not see value in us beyond yourself, but we see the whole world in each other. 

My love, real love, truer than any of that sick shit a man — or, sorry, romanic partner of any gender to anyone — could offer, is right here. 

Nina, and her golden soul; 

Leah, and her silken kindness;

Lily, and her terrifying courage;

Anna, and her boundless love;

me, and my friends.