#6: CEASE AND DESIST
The fantasy version of you says hi
Study this. You will need it for what is to come
CEASE! AND DESIST!
You have been served.
To: Maison Kelly’s Current Romantic Obsession
From: Maison Kelly
I wake up thinking about you braiding my hair. I don’t dream it; I actively conjure this thought with my first conscious breath of the day. This is a good example of my “morning routine” since you Left Me, or, giving you the benefit of the doubt, since you Left. I wake up, create an image of us in an ideal romantic moment, and think about that until I fall back to sleep again. If I wake up at 7 am, thinking about you braiding my hair, or holding me in bed, or putting your hand around my ribcage, I can expect to have my feet actually hit the floor around 4 pm.
The image of your hand on my ribcage is enough to black me out for nine hours. I have to live with this knowledge now. Romantic desire is so monstrous! I am a transcendent person by all accounts, monk-like, some would say. I type words like “the sacred” and “the mundane” into my iPhone every day and post them unto Instagram. I like to deal in the Cosmic, the Abundant, the Absurd. I think about… nihilism! I cry little existential tears. Yet, the blurry, distorted, contrived image of your hand on my ribcage incapacitates me.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about something so base and feral, but these thoughts have overtaken my entire reality. I wish I could couch my desire for you in floaty language. “I need to rip out your stomach and live inside of you in an… Academic.. sense...”
At 4 pm, I rise and feel no regret for wasting most of my day, for I haven’t wasted it. I have spent it in a dream with you, my future, current, and past lover, who has never once loved me, whom I have never once loved, around whom my whole life now rotates. I don’t eat, can’t eat, haven’t eaten in a year, a decade, out of love for you, yes, but mostly out of disorder, let’s be honest, so I go outside.
My feet strike the pavement around 5 pm; it’s 80 degrees outside even at this hour, and the sunscreen on my face burns my eyes and makes my headphones stick to my cheek. Out of my headphones comes our playlist, a playlist you neither made, helped make, nor know about. I listen to it and think fondly of all the futures we have already lived today, my favorite memories of us set to songs that always remind me of you, or you of me, or probably do, or probably would. My thoughts rehearse all the ways you could tell me you love me for the first time, which theoretically could happen at any moment, depending on what theories you read, and if those theories were written by a woman experiencing delusions.
I love taking walks and thinking about you because it’s two birds, one stone vibes. The first bird is limerence, a blue jay squawking in my ear, louder than the sound of our playlist, louder than thoughts of who I was before I started this Daily Obsession Parade around my neighborhood.
The second bird is my main man, a sparrow, my longtime eating disorder. Weathered and small, feathers sticking out every which-a-way, a wreck, a blot, a mess of a bird. They both love to walk, for different reasons, but really the same. They’re starving. I don’t know what part of this metaphor is a stone. I would never throw stones at my two baby birds; I love their little songs!
Did you know that in real life, blue jays are so mean, the meanest birds of all? I often see them bullying sparrows, yelling at them, chasing them. I scream at these blue jays, “HEY! BE NICE TO YOUR BROTHER!”. It makes me feel like a member of my community. I only do this because I imagine you’re watching.
I’m at 25,000 steps and I only get faster. You should know that when you Left Me, okay, Left, maybe it had nothing to do with me, which is the problem, anyway, when you Left, it was okay with me, I handled it really well, really coolly, just as a girl should. The first time you Left, in my view, you had only arrived. You Left my physical sphere but you arrived in your true form: A Magic Thought In My Mind. Isn’t that the best thing someone can be?
I should be satisfied with that, but after dark, my headphones die, and I’m three miles away from my apartment, so I ask the universe if you love me, really love me, even though you barely know me, even though you thought love could never happen to you, especially here, especially now, but here it is, if you love me even despite it all. The universe says sijofaeijofJOEQW p[oweq9pu qerwuyfebhfdsh ehireqrioq5ropqp=woqp.
So I connect two soup cans together with a long string and into my end ask, Do I want to know?, and the other can says, No, no, No, no, no.
No, no, no, no, no.
So, word on the street, literally, is that you don’t want to live forever in my mind, or in our imagined futures, even though I have spent this morning, and every morning, for the PAST TWENTY DAYS, mind you, making them up! I have put a lot of thought and time into these imagined futures and I want revenge. Or at the least, I want my old life back. I can’t live with this desire anymore. To do this, I need the fantasy of you to cease. And to desist, whatever that means, no one knows.
Recently, I have found myself slicing off your head with a machete in the middle of a fantasy, amidst an embrace with the fantasy version of me, just to see what she does. She looks at me like What The Fuck. I hate the version of me that is loved. She has blood spatters on her dress. She is not free.
I want her to know that her happiness is false. I want myself to know that. I want to know that in losing the fantasy version of you, I am not really losing anything at all. I want you to know that you loved and would have loved and would love braiding my hair.
This Cease and Desist is a no-reply situation; Maison Kelly has requested to go no-contact with you, which shouldn’t be difficult, since you’ve barely had contact in the first place. If you can find a way to make it difficult, she would greatly appreciate it. And if it gets to be very, very difficult indeed, you know where to find her.
This was edition #6 of Hot Girl Gothic. If you missed edition #5, the beginner’s guide to Hot Girl Gothic, check back in your email (spam and promotions too) and mark it as important, or click here. See you next Thursday.