Ex Goth Seeks Same For Weekend Regression

It’s cold. My ex is exed. It’s windy. You know, I’m pretty fucking depressed. Not the hopeless, end-all-angsty-teen-depressed, but not the casual, guy-in-the-bar-laying-out-his-troubles depressed either. I don’t want to be social. I don’t want to be cheery. I don’t want people to tell me it’s okay. I don’t want to get over it.

But I do have a huge, ill-fitting leather trench coat stuffed in the back of my closet. What I want is a gothic goddess to go with it.

Let me be clear: I do not like you, and you’re not supposed to like me. That is not why goths date. Awkward, drunken, violent, and regret-filled sex is the best we can hope for, and for the old goths, that was enough. You have no idea what sub-sub-goth-clique you were supposed to be in. You are not a suicide girl. You hate the suicide girls. You hate your parents. You are not impressed by me, and I am not impressed by you, but we will spend an hour getting ready for a long, pointless conversation, chain-smoking, shivering and under-dressed outside some hipster lounge with expensive drinks. You don’t love the hipsters, you hate them even more than I do. You are arrogantly snippy with the scene boys and girls who worship you. You ignore people who make fun of you but you secretly hate them.

I will not be nice. I dated you a thousand times. You dated me a thousand times. We were all the same, we were all bored, but thank christ we were not perky. We were not looking forward to the inevitable godless death, and did every twisted thing we could think of in a haze of sex and drugs and misery to make sure that if there was a god he wouldn’t take us, because better to burn than admit love was going to save us. That’s for those fucking hippies.

You shopped at hot topic once but won’t admit it. I stayed up and smoked until dawn, while you cut up magazines in the corner. High school was bad, but nothing compared to freshman year in college. You probably cut yourself. While everyone else was getting high, you sought out that human connection in the lowest despair you could come up with, hated yourself for it, hated yourself for finding a happy moment, hated other people for putting up with it, hated them for not putting up with it, and still hated your parents.

You knew there was no real culture. You knew we were all just depressed and irresistibly attracted to thin, pale things, swathed in black, tinted in dark red, and covered in wine after dark. Occasionally, you really, really hoped there was a vampire god who would damn you to the dark. You learned to stay away from strong hallucinogens.

You have since tried in vain to recover from the lack of food and palid complexion. You did get a job, and wear long sleeves to cover your scars. You don’t hate your parents quite as much. You still have an inexplicable number of black clothes, but that’s just business now.

Somewhere, in the back of the closet, there’s a stash of lace and leather.

You will find that stash. You will buy a pack of cloves. You don’t do this anymore, and you hate Halloween, and the cold, yet you will walk a mile in the wind and rain. You are not sub or dom or BDSM or ADD; you are an animal because sex is how you take out aggression. You will dress to the 6’s and find that black lipstick. We will meet by chance and size each other up critically. It will be slow going, and we will smoke ourselves sick in the cold, stumbling from one awful bar to the next until we find someplace with pinot noir and indoor smoking. We will not be happy. It will get late, and we will make small talk, and half-hearted cynical jokes, and revel in pure, exhilarating despair at the slow and awful end approaching fast from a handful of decades’ distance. If we kiss, it’s not going to be gentle. We will grab each other, viciously and against all odds, and fight our way to the nearest dark corner.

C’mon, you evil bitch.

Let’s do this.

He doesn't know he has cancer yet.