No 1: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DIVINE FEMALE

PHOTOS BY FAYE RAAD

REBECCA KOPELMAN

You spend all of your time inside, these days. Now, to step out is an almost intimate experience, and the weight of the clear sky above presses expectantly down on your every pore like an overeager lover. You exercise a lot, on the floor of your air-conditioned bedroom. 

When you workout, you do it naked in front of your full body mirror. In a perverse way, you enjoy seeing all the new and disgusting ways your body can sag and crinkle–with each squat and push-up, your breasts violently pitch down towards your ankles. You worry sometimes that they’ll fall right off your bony chest and hit the floor with a wet thump. Then you could live the rest of your life flat-chested. Like a little boy, or a supermodel.

Sometimes, you spread your bare legs to look at your pussy in the mirror, just to see what a potential lover might. Aside from all the stomach rolls, you guess, because men don’t tend to pay attention to those things. Once you think about it, you realize that they probably don’t even pay that much attention to your vagina–after all, a pussy is a pussy, whether it’s hairy or pink or tight or whatever. Anybody would be lucky to even get this close, you remind yourself, smiling at your spread-eagled reflection. Not that the amount of people who have is all that negligible. Either seven or eight, you think. Whatever. Sex is stupid, anyway. That’s why you’re always thinking about it.

The last man to get that close, an heir to some decrepit American dynasty, told you he thought you embodied the divine feminine. He also said you should eat more, since you looked a little emaciated, and if you lost any more weight you might lose your tits. You took it as a compliment that he thought your tits were worth maintaining, and that he thought you looked emaciated. Says something about something, maybe. 

When you got home that night, after creeping past his sleeping body and out of his bare studio apartment, you admired your jutting ribs and your pendulous breasts. I am the divine feminine, you said, wrapping wiry arms around your own waist. 

Before going to sleep, you did one-hundred sit-ups, dreaming of him dreaming of you. You hoped that you might flit across his sleeping mind, lighting up neurons and receptors as you went, stepping lightly ahead of him. Maybe he could fall in love with you. This version of you is the right amount of thin, with a bigger ass.

You love it when people fall in love with you.

You also do a lot of writing, these days. Fueled by ketamine and acid, you write almost exclusively about men: how they might perceive you, how they fall in and out of love, how they think. You feel yourself disappearing, turning into a silhouette whose blurry edges are defined only by the negative space between penises. It’s not very divine of you, but arguably pretty feminine.

You sleep with a girl once, just to counteract the patriarchy of it all. Or something like that. She’s patient, with freckled hands and straight red hair. You don’t text her again, and it seems like the feeling is mutual. You cry because even though you’re not in love with her, it would be nice if she were in love with you.