24 Jan 2012, Posted by admin in Features, 0 Comments Tagged borderline personality disorder, Essay, Fall 2011, nonfiction, relationships

BORDERLINE: A USER’S MANUAL

nonfiction by Marian Crotty

Admit to yourself that straight girls don’t usually spend four hours a day masturbating themselves numb to “The L Word,” stop sleeping with men altogether, and you might just find her. When you do, it will seem like fate. She will be beautiful and smart with just enough swagger to let you think she might like women. A Ph.D. student at the school where you adjunct. Perhaps, when a friend asked what type of woman you might like, you even said her name. Maybe, years before, when you saw her for the first time, strutting across a parking lot with her long dark hair and mirrored sunglasses, you thought, “I really need this girl to love me,” and were disappointed for weeks to learn she had a fiancé.

It will be years later, after the fiancé and successive boyfriends are out of the picture, that a throwaway line from her—a stupid line you don’t believe about women being the subject of art because their bodies are more aesthetically pleasing—will make you flirt. What you say at this point does not need to be smart, is better maybe, if it’s clumsy, gross, and nervous.