There are approximately seven gay
men at this Godforsaken school
in the trenches of New Hampshire, and,
lacking touch,
my body has assumed the shape of an incel.
What does it mean to be shaped like an incel?
My back is hunched, crippled with the weight
of a belly full of middling cookies and a backpack
crammed with RA-provided condoms. My pinky is bent
(from holding my phone) and my brain is shrinking
from terminal onlineness.
Maybe incels look a lot like monks. I shaved my head and wore
a bedsheet to class, dared to stop talking.
I can’t eat in front of boys anymore.
Instead, I go to CVS and collect junk food,
store them in my cheeks like nuts.
When I scurry back to my cave,
I am depressed, I wake in the night
and chow down on corn chips. The
crumbs stick to my neck beard.
When I do talk, I’m such a verbal whore.
I’m feral, I’m fiending, I crave attention
from grown ass dudes twice my age.
We’ve come a long way down.
There are times when I do see the light.
I walk the pond.
The trees bend down to whisper to me, they play
tricks on my ears, they’ve started to corrupt my
sense of self: I think my ego has allergies,
it’s red and swollen and puffy, blood is flowing
to it, but everything is blocked and my eyes
can’t help but water all over the place.
Once upon a time, I went on a date with a boy who told me gingers made him really excited.
I went on a date with another boy who told me I’d have no personality if I treated my anxiety.
My last date was with a boy who told me I could afford to lose some weight.
Once upon a time, I went on a date with a boy
who told me he loved me. You know, monks
are different from incels because it’s all voluntary. They’re volcels. Their mind is not clouded. Only
now, with my shaved head, can I see that I
was wrong, and I was able to love from afar, to
stand up straight, to
still love him from the trenches.