Three

Bring a bucket and a mop.

Eyes on the Table (1938) by Remedios Varo

When a person isn’t interested in what I have to say or write, I find that faintly insulting. Expected, sure, but still insulting. When someone isn’t attracted to me at all, I also find that hurtful and rude, plus pretty hard to believe: Do you have eyeballs in your head? Are those marble decoys? Have you really looked at me closely at all, because the second you do, I’m quite sure I’ll see a light go on in that dim attic of your skull, a sudden flurry of activity, shadows moving frantically behind the windows, like that scene where the guy who works at the observatory first spots the meteor the size of Texas hurtling towards Earth. Yes, that’s exactly right: My crushing and absolutely irrefutable beauty, strangely invisible to you until this exact moment, is about to smash your tiny world to smithereens. 

Occasionally I’m struck with the realization that I am merely adequate but no prize, only capable of true beauty for brief moments, ideally while being videotaped or photographed for wide distribution. Nevertheless some greedy part of my fading brain soon returns to my default assumption that I’m supernaturally attractive in spite of my obvious lack of physical perfection. Don’t blame me! It’s not my fault that I recognize the effect I have on the vast majority of mortal souls trudging across the surface of this doomed planet! You fix those eyeballs on this wretched ambulatory bag of microbes, this turgid blob of delusional notions, indignant emotions, and sheer unremitting hunger, and you feel things. You start picturing old ‘90s music videos with waterfalls in them, and you want to lug my stinking sack of flesh underneath the waterfall to see how it looks there, arching its “back” in “pleasure” or whatever such disorganized, moist bulk does when exposed to splashing water. 

And from that moment forward, you just can’t stop dragging my bloated chassis around, throwing it wetly against various cliché-sexy backdrops in order to understand how it might, you know, sink in on itself or sag discreetly or emit fumes or rot openly – you know, the usual stuff you keep in your overpacked file of mental jackables (pronounced jah-KAH-bleuz in French).

Attraction to my chaotic, soggy anatomy is a gateway drug to bad alternative French pronunciations, among other things. Everything pretentious and pointlessly frivolous and vain and self-serious and grandiose lurking inside you will suddenly start oozing out in the most distasteful and unsightly fashion, until we match perfectly. Before long you’ll hum to yourself on the bus, and write bad poetry about loofah-ing the dead skin off my calloused heels. 

When someone likes my words a lot but isn’t attracted to me, I find that insolent, not to mention flat out alarming. What exactly about my words isn’t attractive, you rube? I could be a four-headed gargoyle and you should still want to fuck me, based on these exquisite words. Can you even read? Is that a prosthetic brain in your big empty skull? Are you even mildly sentient? And also, are you going to finish that Italian sub or can I shove that last slimey bite into my gaping maw right here and now, oh yeah, baby, and now you’re remembering that one movie where Kim Basinger is blindfolded and sensuously eating grapes and dry crumbly crackers and family-size cans of tuna fish, mmm, getting thirsty now, aren’t you, you dirty little doggie? 

I haven’t even seen that movie, to be honest.

When someone realizes suddenly that I’m a liar and a fake, a complete charlatan, a soulless cipher and at that point they don’t find themselves even more drawn to me and the je ne sais quoi of my abject ignorance of the world and everything in it, I am just flat out offended. What, you require actual facts and real knowledge and expertise along with *gestures wildly at distended form* all of this? What makes you so special, that you’re completely above admiring and lusting after a partially collapsed sausage casing housing the unremitting stank and raw arrogance of a mental and emotional lightweight, one that locomotes primarily by off-gassing disdain and alienation?

“Where’s the mystery?” you’re mumbling now. I’m sorry, what’s not mysterious about a person who publishes every single thought and emotion pinging and ponging around in her giant anvil-shaped head every few hours? Do you need me in a mask and a cape, you complete fucking hayseed? Do you require a fog machine to bring the unremitting drone of my unfocused resentment to life?

What, you don’t like Covid? You hate tears of self-pity, dripping down my twisted cryface in the sunshine after three days in my room? You have some kind of a special allergy for congested, despondent great white worms who lie around in their lairs, listening to the new Kendrick Lamar on repeat while reviewing an endless reel of their biggest failures and regrets? What does a girl have to do around here for someone to buy her a drink? Stop calling herself a girl when she’s actually a misshapen sack of viral spike proteins anxious to bind onto some unsuspecting host cells?

Mmm, yeah, membrane fusion. Am I making you hot again? Damn, you just can’t resist this *gestures at vague liquidy decomposing mass,* can you, you stupid little sea donkey? I pity you, honestly, but keep groveling. Get the loofah. That’s right, chumpy. One more time, with feeling.

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Thank you for reading to Ask Molly! I had to change the name of this post from “Two” to “Three” because it's actually Day 3 of Covid for me today. I am just so *needlessly vigilant* about stupid shit! I guess that's just another piece of what makes me so irresistible to literally every mammal on this planet, in addition to some of your larger waterfowl, who wail and whine at my beauty as I drive my car FAST through their swampy habitats. Anyway, wow! Being sick sucks! And Covid makes your brain foggy, foggy enough to laugh at all of your own dumb jokes. Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em, I guess.