So in Love

Nicole Sellew

It’s not easy having a boyfriend, I always tell people. In my head. If I said some shit like that out loud I’d seem pretty obnoxious, or at least more obnoxious than I already seem. I said it to my mom once when she let me drink rosé with her and she just kind of looked at me funny, like she forgot who I was for a second. Stuff like that is why I stay at my boyfriend’s place. His house is pretty, way nicer than mine, and the ceiling of his bedroom is all glass with beams of exposed wood shot through like veins. I trace the veins on my boyfriend’s arm and I look at the ceiling and think is this what it’s like to be in heaven, but if this is heaven then why can’t I fall asleep. 

I genuinely don’t even know what my boyfriend’s parents do to afford a house like that. When people ask me I make up something different every time. His dad’s a doctor and his mom’s an interior designer. They’re both in real estate. His mom put out this one-hit wonder in the nineties and now neither of them has to work, they just paint in their spare time, but actually there’s this gallery in Paris that wants to show some of their work because it’s very groundbreaking. It’s not that I enjoy lying, it’s just that I feel compelled to do it. 

I’m only in high school but I seem older, at least that’s what people tell me. When people say some shit like that to me I always just smile and say why the fuck are you telling a little girl she seems older than she is, like you’re prematurely trying to justify wanting to fuck her like she’s an adult woman, etc., etc. But I say it in my head. And it’s not like I’m some little girl. I fuck my boyfriend, like, three times a day. We sneak into the basement of the library during school and he presses me against the Russian literature in its original Russian. We don’t even teach Russian at school, I always think. My boyfriend’s the captain of the football team, no he’s not, but that would be pretty cool if he was, at least I think it would. We inhale microplastics together and then we exhale them into each other’s mouths which I think is pretty romantic. 

My boyfriend’s got a boat (I know) and he takes me on it. Then he takes me to get Asian fusion. It’s not specifically Japanese or Chinese or K-BBQ. It’s everything. It’s fusion. He loves it and I try not to eat too much in front of him and seem like a fatty pig. Honestly, I tell him, I’m not even that hungry. And I’m not. Everything is so oily and everyone in the restaurant has the kind of puffy face that depressing people have. I never want to look like them. So I have to stay focused, eat beet powder, walk on the treadmill on a 13% incline for thirty minutes at least three times a week. And honestly I do a lot more than that. When I’m in the gym I just put my headphones in and no one can talk to me. Sometimes I don’t even put music or anything through the headphones, I just let them dull the noise of what’s happening around me. At school we’re not allowed to wear headphones walking to class but I do anyway and when someone catches me I say sorry, sir and then I imagine cracking whoever’s skull it is apart with my bare hands because fuck you, I do what I want. 

When my boyfriend fucks me in the library basement I think about how it might be nice to be alone, completely alone, in one of those sensory deprivation chambers where you soak in the water like it’s the womb, like Joe Rogan does, I don’t listen to the podcast but my boyfriend does. I tell him yes I think Joey Diaz is funny. We go on our phones together and I see everything, tessellations of the entire universe; What I Eat in a Day, Here Is How to Make a Low Calorie Buffalo Chicken Quesadilla. Maybe I seem so Old for my Age because I see everything online, because when I was twelve I saw that video where the guy dies on 9/11. So when someone at school tells me I have to go put on a shirt because what I’m wearing is basically just a bra I say fuck you lady you know half the boys in this school are j-ing off to Japanese pre-teens getting gang-raped, cunt, and what are you gonna do about that. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free, why buy the milk when you can look at an NFT of some girl’s tits covered in raw milk for free online. At least I know my boyfriend has that NFT; it’s of his ex-girlfriend and the milk spells out his name, you can see her nipples in it and my tits are bigger. 

When my boyfriend takes me out on the boat it’s the fourth of July, I’m in love, I’m in heaven and I should be so happy, I should be so lucky. It’s just us on the boat, it’s just us in the world, original man and original woman, and when I whack him across the head with my empty bottle of Budweiser PBR Heineken he falls over the side and then it’s so quiet and I realize that it’s only me now, alone in the world, which is pretty cool. 

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Nicole Sellew is a writer and student currently based in Scotland.