There Will Be Times When You Want to Tear Yourself in Half

a short story

I’ve been working on this short story for a while now, though it’s been over two years since I last revisited it. I pushed myself to share it here because I wanted to force myself to make some revisions; even still, I know it’s not ready. This month’s paid subscriber posts have been condensed into one because this is such a long project — I hope you’ll understand, since this piece is much longer than the traditional two essays would have been. This still feels like an early draft, something I wouldn’t normally share — but you guys have been gracious enough to let me use this space to work some things out, and so I’m doing the same with my fiction.

This comes in lieu of a typical end-of-month Brain Dump, but in a way it’s still a catalogue of things I’ve been obsessively thinking about recently: the commodification of young women’s sexuality, the way that industries with a “dream job” element chew up young people and spit them out (I’m thinking particularly of the recent bombshell Nickelodeon documentary about abuse on sets, and the raid of Diddy’s homes in light of his sex trafficking and assault allegations), and how the sex work that some content creators engage in to fund their picture perfect lifestyles fits into all this.

This story is a little dark and gross, so if you’re not in the mood for that…proceed accordingly! If this email is cut off because of length, you can click the link in the top right corner to read the whole thing. On Sunday I’m back with reflections on six months of Brain Rot (!) and some other announcements, alongside my usual clownery.

Thank you guys for being here — you’re the realest fr.

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There Will Be Times When You Want to Tear Yourself in Half

The question was this: to send to the group chat or not? The message was one of the first things Andrea saw that day, since she always did a cursory scroll through Instagram after waking up in the morning. It was from giothaman, one of her usual reply guys, the small army of anonymous men who lurked behind empty profiles, filling her inbox with an array of emojis ranging from wholesome to obscene. This morning he surprised her, deviating from his usual thread of hearts to make a request. Apparently a selfie of her in a bright purple matching set at the pilates studio she skipped meals to afford had aroused something in him. You’re so beautiful, he wrote. Would you ever be interested in meeting up and making some money? He’d followed up this first message with a second, a link to the Wikipedia page for urolagnia. Andrea didn’t know what that word meant, but the curiosity that led her to click soon provided an answer: Urolagnia is a paraphilia in which sexual excitement is associated with the sight or thought of urine or urination. Also known as a golden shower, the article helpfully informed her. 

She’d screenshot the message on sight, of course, as she usually did whenever she got a particularly outlandish DM from one of her followers -- something to look back on when she finally made it, a reminder of what she’d endured in her pursuit of internet fame. But she hadn’t yet decided whether she should put in her group chat with her friends from college, which she sometimes did to pull a laugh out of the dying chat. Now that they’d graduated and had grown up jobs, the messages were sparser and sparser, confined to logistics and birthday messages. Today, the conversation happened to be alight with chatter; they were trying to decide where they should go for dinner that night to celebrate Efua’s return from a month-long assignment in London for her splashy finance job. She was the associate on a huge merger between her boutique firm and the fintech startup they were acquiring, and she’d accompanied the partner overseeing the transaction to do some due diligence on the deal. While away, Efua whined constantly about the questionable remarks her bosses made about her and her work ethic but Andrea could never surface much sympathy. Efua dealt with microaggressions at work and brought home a fat six-figure paycheck to fund a sexy single girl lifestyle in New York City. Andrea, on the other hand, got constantly degraded at her shitty editorial assistant job that paid poverty wages — and also on the internet for free, so who really had the right to complain?

When the message didn’t leave her, even after her morning at work, lunchtime spin class, and commute home, Andrea sent the image, following it with a The More You Know screencap. As she walked to her apartment, her phone buzzed with the responses she’d come to expect from her friends.  WTF is wrong with these wack ass dudes, said Dana. I’M YELLING, chimed Efua. Karia sent only the hospital mask emoji, as was her way. By dinner that night, Andrea had forgotten the comment, and so had, it seemed, the group chat. The screenshots got buried as Dana crowdsourced recommendations for a piercing parlor in St. Marks Place. But when Andrea pushed away from the table after their first bottle of wine to head to the ladies room, Karina grabbed her forearm, stopping her with an urgent “wait!”

“What?” Andrea asked irritably. She’d tucked the tag of her form-fitting sweater dress into the neckline so she could return it after posting pics, and the cardboard flap had been scratching at her neck uncomfortably all night. 

“Don’t go here,” Efua said. She pulled Andrea toward her. “You might as well get that money, sis!” The others erupted into laughter as Andrea rolled her eyes. 

“I can’t believe you stopped me for that corny joke,” she grumbled. Efua was on a high all night, effervescent with the glow of crushing it professionally and being back in her hometown. She deserved it, it was true: Andrea had watched her grind all throughout undergrad, applying for every scholarship and fellowship and internship and work-study job just to make it from her Bronx neighborhood to the spacious studio she paid almost three grand a month for in Fidi. (Andrea had looked up her building on Streeteasy after her housewarming.) But it didn’t stop her extra-loud laugh from being grating as hell. Their laughter ringing in her ears, Andrea moved from the table and made her way to the bathroom, teetering in her uncomfortable gifted-by-a-brand heels. 

Afterward, as she approached the table, Andrea saw that the other women were crowded around Efua and giggling at something. It took a little while before she recognized the marbled case of her phone in Efua's hands.

“What’s up?” Andrea said lightly, forcing a smile once she was close enough. She played with the large cocktail ring on her right hand, clamping down on the itch of annoyance prickling at her. She ran her tongue over her teeth. Her mouth had a faint crawling sensation in it, reminiscent of the way her mild allergy to kiwis manifested. 

“Yo.” Karina grabbed the phone and shoved it in Andrea’s face. “He’s got money,” she said, drawing out the second syllable. 

The screen swam in front of Andrea’s eyes, and she blinked rapidly as she tried to focus her vision. She was running a #drymarch challenge for her followers, and the three glasses of wine she’d drank at the goading of her friends were quickly catching up to her. When the screen steadied, Andrea saw that her friends had started talking to giothaman, pretending they were her. Depends, they’d typed in response to his inquiry. From there, giothaman offered to pay Andrea a a thousand dollars, sending off a long back and forth until he finally agreed to twenty-five hundred dollars in exchange for Andrea urinating on him, so long as he got to watch her drink a Green Machine Naked Juice beforehand (he would provide the juice.)