The limits to the dolls’ allowance to want are thick and broody: you may be fucked, but you will not be meeting any parents.
Having been well raised, he will graciously order you an Uber home but he will not follow the outline of You as you wind yourself there, not transfigure himself as protective crow, not swoop and dive in the night sky with you, a watchful eye transfixed on the moving bodies as the driver rolls out his rote lines over and over, another twist of the knife. When the acts are done, your safety in all its precarity goes back to being none of his business, another fragile thing to hold within always.
Sometimes the ongoing quiet humiliations in the life of a doll become loud and this, you will learn, is fine. It will have to be fine.
You will allow yourself to long for base things and the length will become a tiresome expedition: an arm tucked tightly around a waist; a man telling his friends about you without adding, hushed tones now, a queer exploratory narrative in defence; a declarative gesture; a stream of public I Love Yous exchanged without fear or favour; a hand taking in all of your face in a park, fingertips translating bone and fat pockets to deleterious memory; the joy of a blankbrained un-need to even think about the million ways you are failing in the act of being You, how your everyday existence is a scam.
And you will learn that these are not the thoughtless worlds we are allowed to inhabit. Ours is a world of potato peels, not of feasts.
Many of your wants are superfluous and in the end, and in the grandiose spirit of selflessness with which we must sway through the world, eventually you will learn to kill the want itself. You will learn that to want beyond what is allowed is to be deceived, to desire normalcy is a cudgel and that at some point you must stop beating yourself up with it.
Make friends. Make sure they’re One of Us. In the nighttime, when the heat comes in slow waves, when the boys are busy rutting and impregnating, we are all we have.