You Will
Calla Selicious
You will outlive a year.
You will fall in love with a man who stores a stash of individually wrapped snack cakes under his bed, under his bed for ease of eating immediately after sex, and you will let him come inside of you just because you’re on your period and he asked. You will let him do this even though you know he is sleeping with other women and has no intention of stopping, and you will do it because he smells too good not to do it, like cheap coconut oil and even cheaper white bar soap. You will know it will end in abject disaster, and you will keep doing it anyway until it does. You will make a promise to yourself never to look at his Instagram. You will make a promise to yourself never to treat anyone the way he treats you. You will.
You will have a falling out with a friend of ten years over what seems like nothing. You will take offense when he indicates it’s because you’re a judgmental bitch whose remarks made in service of truth and wit can also make people feel needlessly bad about themselves. You will decide it’s because he is exceedingly sensitive and lacking in a sense of self.
You will watch as friends get jobs in fields they’ve long dreamed of being in, nourished not by their entry-level salaries but more enviably the tangible fulfillment of ambition, and you will watch as exes acquire boyfriends, girlfriends, and fiancees, and you will be floundering, really fucking floundering, not in a cinematic way where you’re crying prettily on the L train and drinking a bit too much in a way that reads as fun to other partygoers but like, crying on the toilet because your asshole hurts from wiping after diarrheal events, calling out of work because you can’t sleep for the fourth night in a row and are convinced you are one of the 25 people in the world who has fatal insomnia, leaving your own party to go to urgent care, running away from an acquaintance who taps you on the shoulder because your body has become too afraid of itself to not be afraid of everything else, every errant pain in the left arm a brewing heart attack, every headache an impending stroke, you will never sleep again, you will never write again, you will never have anything to talk about again except for these two things, and you will curse the part of yourself who loves men who want to cum all up in your blood to the detriment of men who are very nice to you and also don’t do that snack cake thing because your fucking perfect ex-boyfriend would have been a good person to have in your sleepless bed right now and also you loved him in a way that was more noble, and you will never sleep again, you will really never sleep again, it’s been five nights and you will never sleep again. The sixth night comes and you sleep again.
You will resolve to go to yoga once per week, and you will go on a particularly fraught Tuesday and fart silently but potently enough to make everyone else present regret their decision to practice self-care with frugality by opting for a donation-based studio in Bushwick. Mindful of the imperative to practice yoga consistently to reap the full extent of its inner-peace-cultivating benefits, you will try to summon the energy to board the G train after work the next week to make a slightly less flatulent but no less inspired attempt at it. You will fail at this. You will go again another week, the urge to stretch and breathe in a quiet collective suddenly interrupting your plans of watching an old TV show with takeout in your lap. You will not sleep well that night, despite your brief cosplay as a member of the enlightened. As a matter of fact, you will feel as if you have been hit by a truck the next day, but you know that you will sleep again.
You will think you are over the snack-cake-muncher once and for all, and in your hubris you will look at the Instagram of the girl he’s seeing, an Instagram you have acquired through means that are less than dignified. You will lie on the floor and think of yoga as you do it. You will try to breathe in a meditative way. You will instead breathe in a crying way. You will ask your mother if love continues to feel like this after your frontal lobe is developed. “No,” she says, and you think she sounds a little wistful, but you will look at her and see an expression of pitying relief. You will feel better about it the next day, and worse the day after when you walk past a shelf stocked with Entenmann’s in the bodega, but better about it the next week, even when you smell coconut shampoo on the subway. You will still worry that you will never meet anyone else.
You will go to yoga sometimes. You will sleep sometimes. You will think of your friend who is not your friend anymore, and you will realize you’re not friends anymore both because you can be a judgmental bitch who makes people feel needlessly bad about themselves and because he can be exceedingly sensitive and weak in his sense of self. You will go on a date that feels good, but you will not know how it ends yet.
You will be asked, when you’re feeling better, if you regret any of it. You will say no, wistful yet relieved, and then you will wonder very privately and very briefly if you mean it.
You will.
Calla Selicious is a Brooklyn-based writer of plays, articles, fiction, and creative non-fiction who just quit her job as a legal practice assistant to be more serious about her art and also more stressed about money. Her work has been featured at the Latea Theatre and in Fifty Grande and Office Magazine. You can and should subscribe to her Substack, Baby On A Plane, at stackelicious.substack.com. In a move that no woman writer has ever before considered, she chose this photo because she thought it made her look both attractive and brimming with pensive interiority.