OCD 10
I call you Bambi. I think you’re the cutest girl in the world.
I see a man wearing a sweater that says I’m Muslim Ask Me About Islam.
You have a thing for the posh and suits and ties and loafers and high society.
We went to the National Portrait Gallery and played smash or pass. Your tan lines reveal a much paler girl but never as pale as me. Somehow through your bronze skin there are electric-blue veins that meet mine when I put my fingers through yours.
And I pin you down like a trapped animal.
I see the mythic beauty of women from a couple millennia ago trapped in frames, hideously gorgeous, with curly hair spilling across their small chests and snatched waists. They did not diet. You do not diet. They were just born and caught in a glimmer of time. Beautiful.
Smash, smash, smash. Every portrait looks like you. What is a softboi if not just a boy raised on romcoms and The Smiths and tumblr?
What is the most cliched phrase in the world if not I Love You? What is more cliched than your coffee eyes and your cheetah-print panties?
You make a softboi go hard…
You have the biggest crush on Matty Healy and I am also a pretentious dickhead. And I love John Hughes movies…
Yes, I do want to say you look like art.
Yes, I do want to say I’ll give you a baby or two.
Yes, I do wish I was a cowboy and a Roman and a Victorian plague doctor and Oppenheimer and JFK and Sky King.
Yes, I do want to kill everyone in the world until it is just us.
If only I could autotune the sound my heart makes…
I know it’s not a popular opinion but I actually prefer the second half of Bambi, when he is so noble and heroic. He’s still haunted but I’d fuck him…
And one day I will paint you and no one will ever see it.
I tap the Muslim on the shoulder and I say God bless brother…
…life is so beautiful.
He looks confused.
OCD 3
When I was 13, I rolled onto my back and came on my own face. That was something I used to be able to do. You told me you used to grind against the nook of your foot. I can see the callus. One day, I lay on your bed and said “Osama Bin Laden” and you said, “What about him?” I just went quiet. “I forgot what I was going to say.”
I was nauseous for ten years and called it depression. I was clean from drugs for two years and I called it OCD.
The womb of my head was filled with guilt-flavoured Dr Pepper and birth was an orgasmic burp.
Your Mother lost all of her hair in the divorce and wears special wigs from Edinburgh. Your Father and I joke about making an origami crane out of tissue paper and wiping our asses with it. Memory makes no sense, memory is traumatic, illogical, unreasonable. The origami crane sits next to a video of a man being split in half by a train. Love is day 1000 of NoFap. The demon gets stronger and forces grey hairs out of my head. At the hospital, I see a drawer full of hearing aids and I feel hot thinking about you. To fold into yourself and submit to an animal urge is so embarrassing, like falling for a camgirl, like needing a cigarette. To cum is to shoot lightning. It’s to release a demon but it stays in the room with you all night.
A flash of memory dries on my stomach.
A few days later, you ask me, “What were you going to say about Osama Bin Laden?” I say, “Oh yeah, he said that masturbation was justifiable in extreme cases.”
You think for a while and say, “I can’t believe they just killed that guy like a dog” as I drift into a world of memories that have nothing to do with each other.
OCD 1
The truth is you will always want someone so much more interesting than yourself.
You will always only listen to music from TikTok and watch The Office and feel small when someone enjoys more of life than you do.
You’ll always cry on your birthday.
You’ll always replace me even though I was never that good to begin with.
You’ll always try to teach tricks to a retarded dog.
You’ll always masturbate to pictures of Andrew Garfield and vomit afterwards. Or during.
You’ll always have your happy picture trapped inside of the Nintendo Wii’s photo gallery and it feels light years away.
You’ll always want someone to be insatiable for you, to cup your cunt in public, to need to kiss your neck or they might die but you will never give them any reason to.
You will always turn to the wall and go to sleep, never sharing your pillow, because you can’t have anyone else’s germs on it.
Well, life is all germs.
Grow up.
Happy birthday.