Worst Boyfriend Ever@TwinkBukowski
The real reason I flew to NYC after making all that crypto money was to see this one girl, "Celine," from Harvard. She lives in New York now.
She was functionally my editor, over email. I would send her my stories before I'd post them and she would tell me she loved them, and that was all the approval I'd need.
She didn't love *me* though, just the stories ... about me fucking other women. It was baffling. It went on for so long, almost a year.
Once I was in New York I emailed her, asking her on a date.
She's "very busy" but she obliged. She set it almost a week in advance, at this French restaurant, "Amelie." I said OK great, trying not to seem too excited.
I felt kind of intimidated by the restaurant, and I'm a niche internet microcelebrity now, with a gaggle of hoes in NYC, so I took this other girl from Substack to Amelie, on a Practice Date.
And then I took ANOTHER girl from Substack to Amelie, a couple days later, on a Second Practice Date.
I identified the best place to sit, away from all the noise. I built rapport with the waiters, the host. And then Wednesday rolled around, and I finally saw her again.
*
I arrived at Amelie for the third time this week at 7:36 PM. Celine was already there. In the first moment she saw me she smiled and looked away, pretending not to see. I scooted past some bodies to get next to her and I think I gave her a hug. She was shorter than I remembered. She was pale, calm, wearing her nerdy asian circle glasses. Lazy white sweater over jeans. She didn’t dress up sexily like she did the first time we met. She immediately identified me as being on-drugs. Despite that I looked relatively good, for me. I had just gone to the gym, and showered, and shaved, and dressed myself head to toe in new black-grey-brown winter clothes that all fit pretty well.
The first few moments of our meeting were slightly uncomfortable until I revealed that I had come here yesterday and I sat right There, there being the best seat in the house, and I told the host to reserve that table for me tomorrow. She only half-believed me, but the staff real-believed me, so when those two women got up to go we were escorted right there into those seats, as far away from everyone else as possible, so that I could hear her, and so we could maybe have a good time.
I hate that I’m typing this, but I had more fun talking to her than any person I’ve talked to in the past 9 months, since I met her last May.
It’s not because she’s the greatest conversationalist in the world, or because she’s so funny beautiful or smart, but because she’s so strange. She would withhold completely random information, just to piss me off. What did you eat before this? You don’t need to know. What? How could I use that information against you?
There were moments where her head was cocked at me and my head was cocked at her and the tension was so thick I felt like flipping the table.
I couldn’t stop smiling. Laughing. At the things I said to her and sometimes at the things she said to me. She told me that Grad School was too easy for her. I asked her if she got straight A’s and she said obviously, why would you even ask. I’ll never know to what degree she was telling the truth, about anything, but it doesn’t really matter. The most meaningful truth is in action, which is why I find it more important that I couldn’t stop smiling than any words in particular that were exchanged.
Celine is not particularly beautiful until she turns her face to the side. She was intent on not touching me. She asked me to move further away from her so that our knees wouldn’t brush beneath the table. I grabbed the seat of her chair and pulled it towards me so that it might happen anyway. I said I would move, but only if she asked real nicely. She did and it made me smile and so I did.
This entry is incoherent. I’m bouncing around from moment to moment because there is no narrative, I’m just recording this right now so that I don’t forget, trapping it in a jar so I can one day look back on it and remember and maybe smile again.
My favorite part was that we talked about her more than we talked about me. I’ve been on an incredible number of interview-dates in the past few weeks since I got to new york and everyone has been raping me for information, it’s always just me answering questions about myself. The same questions, too. From people who haven’t read enough of the blog, or who read snippets and headlines and only want to get to the bottom of the person, so they can determine him friend or foe, or use him for content, or whyever else people always question me like that. I try to deflect but then the conversation always gets back to me me me me me, and it drives me nuts. Celine was a good girl in that she didn’t really do that. Maybe because she’s no longer so curious about me, or maybe because she’s read so much of me that she gets it, or maybe she was just having fun lying to me, gaslighting me like certain types do. Everything women say is kind of a lie anyways.
We drank several glasses of wine until we were drunk. Her demeanor barely changed. I hope I’m the same. The eye contact got more intense. I smiled and she smiled and she kept half-answering all my questions, about grad school and about what she’s doing on valentine’s day and what she was doing earlier and what she wants to do after college and yoga and how she’s never had a one-itis because nobody’s on her level, I told her “every girl who reads the blog hates you” and she was taken aback - she doesn’t understand; everyone on the other side of the screen who loves me and wants me to be happy wants me to get over this pointless thing. I’ve been circling the drain re: you for 9 months now and it obviously holds me back, I’ve met so many girls who I think are great but I give up on them so fast because they’re not you. I flew here, to New York, across the world, for you. I wish I told her that but I didn’t. Because I was trying to be different from last time, I was trying to seem detached, like I no longer cared, like she was just one item on my list of dozens of girls just like her, because that’s how you seduce a girl. You don’t over-extend, no grand gesture, you don’t commit, you are just better than her in a way she can feel, and I know that I am but I can’t seem to act that way in her presence, because the whole narrative of the past three weeks of my life has got to be leading to something, and if it’s not resolving my feelings for you I don’t know what it is, but I can’t show that because then that’s needing her, and needing her is unattractive, and the only kind of resolution I can think of that might kill this for me once and for all is… sex.
Sex. I want to have sex. Not sex in general, sex with you. I want to know how well you can lie to me with my dick in your mouth. Missionary so you can see my ugly face. I want to know which one of us can last longer. I want to hear your real voice.
I only made her laugh, hard, once. She asked what I ate today. I told her a clementine and a piece of cheese. In a plastic wrapper. She asked what kind of cheese. I said orange.
We stayed later than every other couple. I watched groups of people leave behind her and my mind raced for an answer: how do i get her back to my place? what do i say? i tried to think about this earlier in the day but i couldn’t come up with anything then either. i tried to think in the restroom, which was hot as a sauna, i didn’t bring my phone in there because the phone is brain poison and for some reason i wanted my time with her to feel private, uninterrupted by messages or social media or the internet, but even alone in that tiny restroom i could not come up with a good reason for her to come back with me besides “i need to fuck you so that i can move on” - but that’s not a very good line, to say the least, also something i think i know about this girl, because she is at the end of the day, a girl, is that she can’t feel like she’s going to have sex, she just needs to ‘fall into it.’ even the most paper-thin excuse, something stupid as i have a gift to give you, or even perhaps something as simple as “do you want to See my place?” i think there’s a decent chance it would’ve been enough. she must have drank four glasses of wine, she kept ordering more, i know she wanted something to happen and so did i but i could not come up with a way to ask. i… can’t lie to her. i can’t do it. it would feel like an enormous step backwards, back to 2024, the last time i lied to the girl who i loved. back when all i did was lie.
At approximately 10:20 PM she got up to leave. She looked at her phone and said someone’s here to pick me up, I’m leaving, and I looked at her like she was crazy. There was a little hint of her asking for my permission in her tone, and I just let her go. I let her go because through all this I’m sticking with the don’t-let-her-know-how-much-you-want her strategy, because that is what I settled on, and I’m going down with the ship. I won’t make the same mistake I did last Spring, I’ll just fuck it up in the opposite way.
She said "I’m going, someone’s here, I -"
I waved her off. “Go!” in a tone I can not describe.
I didn’t turn around to watch her go. I just stared into space. I wanted to run out, not after her, but away from the check. Not because $168 is a lot of money to me right now (though the way crypto is tanking lately.. ) but because I felt scammed by the world. Not by her, by reality itself. It’s not just that I couldn’t have her, it’s that I couldn’t have a satisfying ending to the story. How can I justify all this time of yours I’m wasting putting these words in front of your face with no happy ending? How can I move forward in this condition? How can I stay in New York…
The waiter came back and gave me a sympathetic smile, like a bomb had just gone off at the table. I gave him a fresh smile back because I was still drunk, and you’ve got to smile, because life goes on.
He said “…coming back tomorrow?” and I laughed.
I woke up the next day and everything was the same except now I was depressed. More of the same: “Sex Magazine” wants to interview me and put me in their next issue. My Agent tells me another mean journalist is going to cover my book but they’re afraid of the backlash, more people making plans for me, more girls, the retreat I applied to on the other side of the country said I got off the waitlist, none of it feels real or meaningful to me now, I am totally lost.
*
I relayed all the above to Helen, a different Asian Ivy League Grad Student Who Loves My Blog, and she sent me this wonderful text:
“Thomas, it’s not a matter of technique, you literally just aren’t good enough to be anything but a toy. Even in her casual sex partners she’s stressing cultural capital you don’t have. You don’t do anything for her self-image, you couldn’t even tell that that Hater was referring to Louis-Ferdinand Celine, you mean nothing as a conquest.
The men who might be her social equals - her classmates, quants, PhD students - are not that easily impressed by her, even if you insist otherwise. She’s signaling Dostoyevsky past adolescence. She is inadequate, that’s why she withholds and cares about male attention. The sophisticated men who appeal to her self-image are actually yearning for girls who are doing PhDs in quantum information, or articulated crucifixes, or the novel after Zola. She likes you because she feels better than you, that’s it. And because it’s funny to see you pine and humiliate yourself over and over.
Anyway, I can’t help but feel like I’m too interesting to be used as practice. Good luck with the book, get over it, or kill yourself. Whichever works best.”
And then, that girl who sent me that text, I invited her back up to the city, for another date, and I gave her all the Ketamine she wanted, and, half out of love and half out of spite, I raped her.
And then I did my show on Valentine's Day.
And then I flew away.
The end.
