Midnight Messages and the Art of Saying Too Much

There’s something about the quiet of the night that makes my brain want to unravel itself in long, messy messages. I’ll tell myself it’s just a quick reply, and before I know it, I’ve written a novel—one that probably should have been edited down before hitting send. But I don’t. Because in that moment, everything feels important.

This time, it started with a simple request for gift ideas. A practical conversation, nothing too deep. But I took the task to heart, drawing inspiration from things I’d picked up in London, wondering if I’d missed the mark, or if I was just too late. Somewhere along the way, the message stopped being about the gift and turned into a stream of consciousness: my upcoming psych nurse appointment, my frustration with the system that still has its hooks in me, my tangled past with love and sex and the people who shaped (or misshaped) me.

I don’t walk into those psych appointments prepared. They ask the same questions every time:

• Have you been suicidal?

• How’s your mental health?

• Support network?

• Been getting out?

• Sleeping well?

• Doing chores?

And I never know what they want to hear. Am I supposed to have neatly packaged answers, progress reports on my “well-being”? Or is it okay to just say, I don’t know. I exist. I think about things. Sometimes I overshare with people who don’t have time to read it all.

I think I understand what this thing is between me and the person I was messaging. Which is to say, it’s nothing. I’ve fallen in love twice, in a way that had nothing to do with sex, and the only actual relationship I had was financially abusive. Tinder scares me, but maybe worse than that is the idea of ending up like my aunt, who once punched my teeth when I was 17 and who my mother still prefers over me.

Tauruses flock to me. Slow, materialistic people. My curse.

Sometimes I think I’ve said something out loud when I haven’t. Sometimes I say too much.

They say all the cells in your body regenerate in seven years. It takes about 2-2.5 years to fall out of love when it’s one-sided. So where do you put yourself in the meantime? When I first met him, I thought, Wow, a British guy who’s a good kisser, amazing. But I didn’t need to know more, and he never showed me more.

I’ve never really felt sexual attraction when I look at people. I understand the concept, but it’s like I learned the actions without the drive. Just doing what was expected. A blank, mindless freak. I wanted to write fucktoy, but freak is what I actually said when someone asked what I was like. I once read that “freak” used to mean a beautiful woman. Not that it matters.

When I lost my virginity, the guy didn’t believe I was a virgin. I was too good at it. He’d been with hundreds of women and said I was the best. And so he never contacted me again.

Before that, my first kiss was with a girl. And then with a drunk guy who mocked me.

There was a time when I met men in hotels every weekend. A secret phase of growing into my womanhood, or something like that. Unleashing my hypersexuality that had always felt at odds with my asexuality and inexperience. A contradiction.

Now? I don’t know. I just exist. Psychiatry clipped my wings early, and I never found a place to land. No one wanted to deal with me—except maybe to control me, like my grandparents and my dad. My mother just wanted to get rid of me.

But never mind all that. I know my life’s meaning.