artwork by ALLISON CARTER-BEAULÉ

I WILL PROBABLY DO IT IF YOU JUST ASK; OR ONLINE PSYCHIATRIC EVALUATION FORM

A social cause I care about…
Finding out what the hell happened to Matthew Perry’s sweater vests from the early seasons of Friends.

The dorkiest thing about me is…
Given that ‘dork’ means ‘a contemptible, socially inept person,’ I’d say everything.

The way to win me over is…
I accidentally read this as ‘wine me over’ so take from that what you will.

I’m the type of texter who…
Won’t really read a message the first time but will over-read it on the second. That’s how you should be reading this, too. Twice, thrice, etc…

You should leave a comment if…
You’re ready for a judgmental, broken-hearted loon who cannot trust a soul but is willing to change, you know, if you believe in that stuff.

Dating me is like…
Watching the weird 90s documentary about dog owners in Manhattan and wondering what the fuck is wrong with everyone that they can’t appropriately interact with humans and also why the hell this thing was even made in the first place?

The secret to getting to know me is…
Listening to American Idiot on repeat for 12 hours until you can sing-shout along, understanding how good it feels to articulate just how angry you are, even if you’re technically borrowing the anger of Billie Joe Armstrong.

We’ll get along if…
You get what I mean when I say that I sort of wish everything could feel the way that the Christmas tree lights look when I’m not wearing my glasses.

A random fact I love is…
The total lifetime economic burden of child sexual abuse in the United States in 2015 was estimated to be at least $9.3 billion (although this is likely an underestimate of the true impact of the problem since child sexual abuse is underreported).

A Shower Thought I recently had…
Why are there so many commercials for erectile dysfunction on CNN, and where does it rank on the BDSM scale that I choose to wash my hair to Wolf Blitzer telling me how the world is ending?

The one thing I’d love to know about you is…
If when you’re watching amateur porn and a pet walks through the scene if you have to close out because it all suddenly starts to feel real and you haven’t quite sorted out your relationship to voyeurism.

I’ll know it’s time to delete Hinge when…
All and not just some of my ‘Most Compatible’ profiles have back tattoos in the shape of trees featuring the faces of their best friends, as well as the balls to call me out on being a ‘red flag’.

I go crazy for…
Details: moles, mistakes, microscopic things that most people will never notice that I cannot get out of my mind. That’s sort of my problem: rumination. Working on it.

Don’t hate me if I…
Ask you every 10 minutes in bed if you’re okay. It’s just that I’m hoping you might ask me back.

My greatest strength…
Matching with boys on dating apps who openly admit to needing yet not going to therapy, instead choosing to use their romantic partners to discuss their unsorted trauma. I bring a dust pan and some half-cooked jokes. If you’re reading this, though, I’m already booked for next week. Try back again soon.

I take pride in…
Remembering the astrology signs for all the men I’ve ever tried to give my heart: Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Aries, Capricorn, Pisces, Scorpio, Gemini, Pisces, Taurus, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Taurus, Cancer, Aquarius, Libra, Virgo, Aries, Virgo, Libra. Earth after Fire, Air after Water. Blame my Gemini moon. And find me a Leo.

I bet you can’t…
Tell whether or not I actually want it, or if I just feel like I’m supposed to want it. I also bet you’d never ask me that question because you don’t really want the answer.

First round is on me if…
I know there will not be a second and I don’t want you to have the satisfaction of thinking you’re just doing this to make me feel special. Don’t flatter yourself. Nothing makes me feel special.

Best travel story…
Getting kidney stones the morning of Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, ending up in the George Washington University emergency room, and having to admit to the intake nurse (in front of a guy I liked) when she wouldn’t stop asking if I was sure I wasn’t pregnant because I was a twenty-year-old virgin. It cost me $1,351.43 and most of my pride. 2/5 stars. After all, they did serve apple juice.

I know the best spot in town for…
Publicly sobbing. It’s Washington Mews in the Village; specifically, the window ledge outside the Deutsches Haus; really specifically, sometime in January or February, in the late morning, when the sun is out but you still think your salty tears might freeze when they release.

Do you agree or disagree that…
To attempt to hang oneself from the neck of a 7-foot-tall metal rooster ornamenting a front lawn along Main Street in the oldest stone house village in the United States wouldn’t quite be what The Smiths deemed ‘a heavenly way to die’ but would still, aesthetically speaking, be something.

Let’s debate this topic…
If a woman utters the phrase ‘assault’ within an hour after you finish, how many more minutes do you let pass before letting her know that you’re never going to see her again?

I’ll brag about you to my friends if…
I want whatever is happening to end. Once it enters the public domain, I’ve found, love (even lust) rarely survives.

One thing I’ll never do again…
Forget to tell a man when he’s made me cum. It takes so little of me to give and, I imagine, is nice to receive. I just want everyone to feel happy.

Biggest risk I’ve taken…
Being unabashedly candid and thinking it wouldn’t have repercussions.

This year, I really want to…
Learn someone’s favourite colour before I end up with their semen on my bedsheets.

Unusual Skills…
Maintaining the minimum requirements for high-functioning anxiety for twenty-four straight years. Masking trauma as ‘art’. Making cake doughnuts.

I’m weirdly attracted to…
Emotional unavailability, asshole tendencies, and glasses.

Change my mind about…
It doesn’t matter how many times we rehearse conversations on what it means to be in a place of common speech, to agree for something to happen, because if everyone involved isn’t honest from the start then the terms can never truly be concurrent.

Give me travel tips for…
One of those towns where the drug rehab clinics are located with the palm trees and the pastel colours that they advertised on television when I was in high school and depressed but in denial. They always looked more peaceful than any vacation I’ve ever planned.

I’m looking for…
Someone who asks questions because they actually care about the answers; also, someone who is going to remember the answers for more than the one or three evenings or however long it takes to get me into bed.

Worst idea I’ve ever had…
Taking a freelance gig as a BDSM erotica editor where I get paid $20 to retraumatize myself and make verbal abuse more grammatically correct.

I won’t shut up about…
This black and white comic I saw on Instagram about a female cat that stays outside all day on the balcony and watches the neighbourhood while on the other side there is a male cat who wants to play with her but she doesn’t want him to enter, yet every day he insists and every day she says ‘no’ until one day, the neighbour can’t stand the meowing so he asks his cat to stop, getting angry, and then the female cat feels guilty, so now she doesn’t go to the balcony anymore, but the male cat continues waiting around outside, of course.

Teach me something about…
How to drink a beer and not upchuck. Alternatively, puffing a cigarette and not choking the same way you would when a dick enters your mouth too fast without proper communication. Or just the way you like your cock sucked so we can get this over with.

Fact about me that surprises people…
I can cum in less than five minutes, sometimes without even being touched. Still, it’d be nice if you asked to touch me just a little, play along and all that shit.

I recently discovered that…
I sent a photo of my disfigured tits to a 22-year-old electrician and gun advocate living in Cook County named Nick who called women ‘females’ and ‘chicks’. He said the tits were ‘yummy’ then sent a photo of his penis, telling me he didn’t understand why rape victims wouldn’t come forward, why women didn’t just carry mace and a gun if they were so scared of sketchy men. ‘I’m not going down without a fight,’ he wrote. It was all very red. We both asked for it.

My biggest date fail…
Getting a ticket for public indecency in Central Park for dry-humping an unemployed actor-turned-chess-instructor because I refused to bring him back to my apartment because I thought there was some satisfaction to be had in telling him ‘I don’t have casual sex,’ because I guess I didn’t consider that complying to what I did was for him that evening enough.

I geek out on…
Watching strange men masturbate for me on Linkello, creaming to varying degrees all over their fleece blankets and Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs, thinking I’m doing the same, when really, I’m listening to unsexed academic editors arguing on a conference call that I have to attend to keep my health insurance, pretending like I have power over some aspect of my life.

I’m convinced that…
Breaking my own hymen the night after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn onto the United States Supreme Court with an un-lubed purple warm-up dildo purchased from the Museum of Sex was the only way I would find someone who would care when the moment happened. I put down dark green towels beforehand, tearfully kissing the inside of my own arms after.

My mantra is…
‘Lol fr tho not enough men give the gspot any attention let alone know where it is,’ which aren’t my words but rather those of a twentysomething Air Force officer stationed in Sheffield named Kevin with a lot of chest hair and a penchant for gangbangs in European cities. I don’t actually know if he’s wrong because that would require letting more than a finger inside of you, and that requires comfort, and that usually stems from confidence. So…

An overshare…
I had a panic attack in a Lowe’s because a boy who’d spent two months wooing me via text ghosted after meeting in person (I assume because I wouldn’t sleep with him) and I realized my happiness was built entirely on my communications with a stranger. It was in the paint aisle.

Most spontaneous thing I’ve done…
Sent a shitty iPhone picture of my open, acne-covered mouth to a 25-year-old named Connor in Newcastle who wore grey, French Connection boxers and had a tongue that reached down his chin. ‘Your other photos were sexier,’ he replied in the middle of me explaining how I’d jerk him off while biting his throat. I agreed. I still made myself cum.

Believe it or not, I…
Had my first orgasm at 11 while watching uncensored lesbian porn on YouTube I found bookmarked on my step-father’s desktop computer while trying to figure out how to buy my Webkinz panda a pair of purple galoshes. A week later, I got my first period. I sobbed in consequence.

I’ll pick the topic if you start the conversation…
What happens to us when we die? (Hint: there’s only one correct answer and it’s the same thing that happens when there’s a break in our trust).

My simple pleasures…
The smell of sweat mixing with laundry detergent. The whisper of, ‘Can I…?’ and actually waiting for the answer. The taste of wine on someone else’s lips. The heat of two thighs touching. Eye contact.

Together, we could…
Stone cold sober break open our hearts for a few hours while watching a ceiling fan spin, occasionally touching the other’s veins with our fingers or our lips, then quietly accord to never, ever speaking again.

Which is more important to you…
Getting off, getting your partner off, or getting to the point of being able to communicate with someone as your foreheads are pressed against each other and your breath is in the other’s neck so you both can get off just about simultaneously. Take your time responding.

If loving this is wrong, I don’t want to be right…
It’s never really wrong to love something. The problem is if you are trusting whatever it is to love you back.

Two truths and a lie…
I have a job with a 401K. I have people that love me for their own foolish reasons. Really, I’m okay.

My Love Language is…
Spending three hours alternating between tracing your collarbone and playing with your hair while you unload onto me your emotional baggage, taking short breaks to swallow before muttering, “I’ve never really told someone this before,” as I nod; yes, yes, I know.

The best way to ask me out is by…
Pretending you’re 15 again and don’t really know how to do this shit, but that you’d like to spend an evening where sex can go sit in the corner and there can instead be room for warmer, innocent, beautiful things. I’ve never actually gotten to see those things, but I’d like to, you know, if you want.

What I order for the table…
Something I can manage to sneak a few bites of without turning my whole stomach upside down, or whatever you want since let’s be real, this stuff will always be about you.

The one thing you should know about me is…
I cry at children’s movies because having someone touch you before you understand what exactly it means to have someone touch you sort of fucks up laughing at the antics of retro, animated toys.

The award I should be nominated for…
Anything other than the D.A.R.E. essay contest I won in 5th grade that when I read it made all the moms cry, that when I wrote it I was pretending to be naïve to why someone might want to submerge their body in a sea of chemicals not necessarily to feel better but to not feel anything at all.

Typical Sunday…
Sitting under a $149 weighted blanket, downing my third or fourth bottle of rosé, worried that I’m not fucking doing…*gestures futilely* this…correctly.

I’ll fall for you if…
You tell me something slightly embarrassing but horrendously human that shows every imperfection you cannot stand but I will, somehow, find a way to believe makes you beautiful, because I am broken, baby, too. 

Let’s make sure we’re on the same page about…
I will probably do it—whatever it is that you want—if you just ask, okay? I’m fucking serious. God, the fact that you asked alone will make me want to make you happy.

My most controversial opinion is…
Yes, suicide is sort of selfish, but there are only x amount of ears that can stand to listen to things and y amount of tears to hide pain away in the shower for z amount of fake happy days, so it’s only logical that some broken people will fall apart. I’d call it population control but heaven forbid I offend those who get by through believing in a supposed ‘god’.

Weirdest gift I have given or received…
I keep buying sex toys and heating pads and body pillows with the hope that if I can simulate the act fully in control then maybe I can eventually feel safe enough to be penetrated by another person.

I get along best with people who…
Understand that it is possible that I carried a knife around in my designer handbag for a month because it felt like an interesting bit at a time when that was almost enough to make me feel important, and because it sort of gave me a false sense of safety, and because it offered an end button, if ever so desired, and I’m a sucker for multi-tasking.

I want someone who…
Is going to do that thing Jenna talks about in the musical Waitress: ‘hold you for twenty minutes straight. They don't pull away, they don't look at your face, and they don't try to kiss you. All they do is wrap you up in their arms and hold on tight without an ounce of selfishness.’ Yeah, that.

The key to my heart is…
Hanging from a leather chord around my wrist and digging into the veins I sometimes envision but am far too scared to open. It, like everything else inside of me, would prefer to be set free. 

What if I told you that…
I bring myself to half-hearted orgasm at least once a day just to remind my body that despite the apathetic overtures encouraged by my brain it is still possible of feeling something mildly pleasant, if only when self-directed.

I’m a regular at…
Allowing my mail to pile up until the postal worker leaves a Post-It note on the outside of the box to try to embarrass me. Also, as a side effect, accumulating paper pay checks; not because I don’t need the money (I really fucking do), but because I cannot bring myself to care about needing the money because needing the money implies a future I sometimes cannot comprehend.

We’re the same type of weird if…
You watched the @subwayhands video on Instagram of the person tickling the palm of another and also immediately burst into tears.

You should *not* go out with me if…
It bothers you that I was so depressed I continued talking to that 22-year-old in Cook County, even though he described a group of women as, ‘These chicks are the typical 1234212345 house plants in my house, only pet is a cat, e girl kind of chicks,’ that he said their aesthetic was ‘cute,’ that he asked me if I ever wore ‘space buns’ when I mentioned wanting to kill myself, then said ‘I feel that’ and talked about his guitar.

Try to guess this about me…
How many weeks it took before my psychologist suggested that what I actually needed was a psychiatrist and a SSRI prescription. Alternatively, after she made this suggestion how many minutes it took before I walked out of the office and bought another bottle of rosé.

I’ll introduce you to my family if…
It’s through the letter I leave on my dust-covered stovetop that they’ll find when they come looking for me, when they realize I just can’t try to figure this out anymore but I especially appreciated your help when I was still fiddling with the dented puzzle pieces on the coffee table because you made me feel alive in the way few things can. But I’ll never do that. Promise.

Never have I ever…
Been able to participate in sexual intimacy without feeling like I’m breaking off some special piece of my soul that I can’t get back.

My most irrational fear…
Is pretending to be a dude in one of these sex chatrooms and connecting with a twentysomething woman desperate to lose her virginity, having conversations about how gentle and attentive I’ll be, letting it carry on for too many weeks and ultimately having to let her down that I’m not what I pretended to be; that nobody is what I pretended to be. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.

A life goal of mine…
To feel secure enough in any relationship that I don’t go to the bathroom halfway through dinner, return, wipe any remaining bile from my mouth, and ask, ‘Are you sure you like me?’

I’m looking for…
Someone not to question if sometimes I cry in bed, who won’t mind if I get their chest a little damp from tears or dig my fingernails too tightly into their side, trying to ground myself by pulling them close before I allow my body to fall asleep.

I’ll know I’ve found the one when…
They finish reading this and, somehow, still want to meet up. I’ll try not to wonder what’s wrong with them, too.

All I ask is that you…
Look me directly in the eyes when you decide it’s time to break my already dented, distrustful heart. Don’t fucking text me. Just let it out of your mouth, raw, in all its honest, brutal glory.

Something that’s non-negotiable for me is…
Accepting that the goal is not to forget entirely because that is never going to happen. It is instead to put all of it aside for long enough to feel like someone who doesn’t have to worry about it in the first place. You have to understand that, okay? I need you to understand.

The hallmark of a good relationship is…
Knowing that when I say I just can’t do it anymore that I’m actually having trouble seeing past the current block, as though a bunch of sheep have crowded in along an Irish country road, and I worry you won’t stick around to see them waddle away, but in this case, you take a seat next to me and lean your head on mine. And that’s it. That’s it.

You’ll know I like you if…
You probably won’t, and neither will I, not until it’s far too late.