hi, and welcome to our cultural exchange programme

simp

I have this stupid crush. As far as crushes go, this is the sort of infatuation that is so shallow that if he so much as breathes incorrectly, he's out the window. It's like walking-on-a-tightrope, oh-my-god-what-will-he-say-now type of situation. He's incredibly fine (like fiiiiinnnnee) and we're into a lot of the same stuff. He has this unfulfilled (probably never going to be fulfilled) desire to be a musician, same as me, and we can talk about music for hours. We voted for the same party in the last election, so the political, the-world-is-ending-who-am-I-going-to-bunker-down-with ethical dilemma is covered. I mean, I know he won't be endorsing The Purge anytime soon—but also, you know, never trust a man.

Have you ever felt it though? The elation of hearing them speak and marvelling at how funny and intelligent they are, and also simultaneously—in the back of your mind—knowing the probability of them saying something misaligned, or uninformed, or downright morally objectionable increases with each sentence? It's dreadful. And I actually like the way he speaks. I like the quality of his voice, throaty and unique, and how he looks off to the side a lot as if he has a thesaurus of evocative synonyms written in tiny lettering in a corner of his mind. He has a tendency to get nervous when his thoughts, unfiltered at times, careen into a slightly rambly tangent. He once told me he found me sexy-intimidating and immediately started overcorrecting. My palms grew sweaty seeing him drying his so often on his trousers.

He's said some unfortunate things already. Things that terrorise my routine. I will be brushing my teeth in the morning—crack of dawn, not a single thought in my head—when I'll remember him praising Fariha Róisín's feminist book for its humanist depiction. Humanist? Reminds me too much of rhetoric I thought died back in 2012 with Kony. You remember Kony, right? And we've all met those men: I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist. Like, shut the fuck up, you know. But the thing is, I'll also remember everything else that followed and everything else isn't bad.

Actually, everything else makes me giddy. Makes me wish I could crack open his mind. I wish I knew if his boyish act; the way his lanky body fills the room (oscillating between confidence, intelligence and anxiety) is an endogenous ingredient or a by-product of male-centredness. I shock myself with how sad it is that I want to ask him how he is the way he is. Why are you so charming? How are you so unguarded and carefree? I mean, it's an accusation, really. Is this something inherent to all men or some 'it' factor special to you, and if is so, why are you putting it on display, you slut?

I'm scared of how much I want to know about how he grew up; what his summers were like, what he did with his friends. God, how desperately I want to be a friend from back then. To experience his childhood bedroom. The posters he had on the walls; the CDs he collected, the video games he played, the toys he outgrew but still kept in an IKEA box in the back of his closet. And yet, I'm afraid that these things might unspool his mind and make me privy to the unsurprising-yet-still-much-dreaded realisation that he's a man. Just a man. That he's held his dick in his hand and thought sexy-intimidating and rendered it frame by frame like a stop-motion picture. That his synaptic network is too wired to the overarching societal misogyny. Maybe it's too narrow of me to use misogyny as a litmus test for every kind of bigotry, but it's never failed me.

I want to know what the women in his life think of him, and how many of them there are. And the reasons why every person who's ever held a grudge against him did so. I want to know what his porn search history looks like. What he looks like, eyes rolled back in pleasure. What his fantasies are. I want to know if these things could harm me. If the belly laughs he's coaxed out of me are just the overture to the betrayal in act one. Are you a fraud? I don't ask because what if it was directed back at me? What parts of me make me an individual—make him one? His heart? His mind? If he offered me either, would it be enough to satisfy this need to know if he's trustworthy?

I don't want to unpack my heart only to pack it up again when—if—he turns out to be like the others. I can't stand the idea that he might be peacocking. That his niceness is a means to an end. What would trust even look like? Wearing his skin? Knowing every comment he's ever made about a woman to his friends? Knowing his friends? Trusting myself to desire, to fall backwards weightless and let his hands tear me asunder? To become a simp? A cliché? Every other girl he's had and gloated over in the locker room? Release. But release what? Give in. But give in to what? Giving in feels like giving up. Surrendering to his infectious laughter, the way he purses his lips and his smile breaks apart his face.

I want to be an equal, or better yet, a microorganism that can bury into his skin and vicariously live in the ease with which he navigates the world because let's be real these thoughts do not plague him. The worst thing he can probably conjure up is me making fun of his dick. But me, I've envisioned resting on his shoulders, sinking into his clavicles, becoming submerged in the experience of him. How he fucks and soothes and brushes back my hair. Envisioned myself becoming pliable to his carefully constructed words until I barely register how they've shrunken the world around me. Only when it's too late and I've lost too much. I can't allow that so I need to know, is he cool enough?