DEAD FLIES
 
His eyes are two dead flies on the windowsill of my college dorm room. They refuse to go away. Tiny little gnats, black and crunched into balls, sad. That’s what he was, and that’s what I was, and that’s what the dead flies are, or were as they were dying I guess, there have been many dead flies because I keep brushing them into the trash and they keep dying all in the same spot. That’s how I replay the time we spent together, over and over in the same spot, and I think I was right to break up with those dead fly eyes. But they keep coming back.
 
I felt gross being with him, and that’s not something I would say to his face, but it went on long enough that I figured I should stop doing whatever it was that made me feel vomity, made me feel unsafe and anxious and sick. Flies vomit on their food when they want to eat it, and maybe that’s what I was trying to do, trying to melt him down and test him out and make him easier to swallow, but I still couldn’t get him to digest, I wasn’t happy with what I was tasting and I kept choking it up.
 
He didn’t think the other girls he’d slept with, not that I was one but the girls before me, had been worth his time to get to know. He told me this right to my face with those flat dying fly eyes, and I could see their wings whither as he talked, like I was watching him fall to the sill as he told me this. I said girls are cool, girls are people too. He said listen, I’m a feminist, I know girls are cool.
 
But in my head I thought, do you really? Because it started coming together that he didn’t really like girls, that he didn’t really want to get to know them, that he just wanted us to look nice and be nice and be there to hug and kiss and fuck (but only if we wanted, of course, he’s a feminist, he wants to make us feel good, which he told me most men won’t do, and which he told me I’m lucky he’s even willing to try) but
not to be real people. And I tried to tell him this but he didn’t understand, and he didn’t try to understand.
 
I stare at the real flies, the ones I keep connecting with him for some reason, the two siblings or lovers or strangers on my windowsill. I feel like them, dried up.
 
He told me my nose was lopsided (I meant it to be endearing, he said, I love that about you!) and that I needed to go to the gym (don’t worry, he said, I’m fat too!). He said he didn’t mean to be an asshole. I believed this for a while, but then I started feeling bad about my nose and the way my stomach looked in my full body mirror even though my friends tell me it’s flat and my nose is fine. And I knew he was melting me up inside like fly vomit, and I knew I had to get out of there, and so I did. And he said he was hurt and I told him he could still be my friend and he said he was set on the girlfriend title and so I’ve stopped talking to him.
 
See? Girls are just there for being girlfriends and for fucking. And that’s what I am. A girl.