Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. Lena Dunham

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СКАЧАТЬ with a woman smoking Newports and send love notes to someone I’ve never met. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t even have email.

      Juliana says that Igor’s friend Shane says that Igor says he really likes me. This emboldens me to ask him to talk on the phone. He seems eager and takes my number but never calls. Juliana says she thinks he may be self-conscious about his accent.

      Trixiebelle86: If u don’t like the fone may-b we cud meet in person?

      He agrees to meet me the following Saturday on Saint Mark’s Place. He’ll take the train in, and we’ll find each other on the corner. I go, in a tank top, cargo pants, and a shrunken denim jacket, even though it’s freezing. I’m so nervous, I arrive twenty minutes early. He isn’t there yet. I wait another half hour, but he never comes. I try and look relaxed as pierced NYU kids and pink-haired Asian girls stream past me. I go home and log on, but he isn’t there either.

      The next day, he messages me:

      Pyro0001: Sorry. Grounded. May-B sum other time.

      

      Gradually, Igor stops messaging me. When he does make contact, it’s only to respond. He never initiates. Every time that ping sounds, signaling a message, I run to the computer, hoping it’s him. But it’s only John, a kid from a nearby school who excels at break dancing, or my friend Stephanie, complaining about her Peruvian father’s strict rules about skirt length. Igor doesn’t ask me any questions anymore. Our relationship had hummed with possibility: the possibility of meeting, of liking each other even more in person than we did online, of falling in love with each other’s eyes and smell and sneakers. Now it’s over before it began. I wonder whether I can consider him an ex.

      One day, in late summer, Juliana IMs me.

      Northernstar2001: Lena Igor is dead.

      Trixiebelle86: What???

      Northernstar2001: Shane IMd me. He had a methadone overdose, choked on his own tongue in his basement. Its fukked. He’s an only child and his parents don’t like speak English.

      Trixiebelle86: Did Shane say if Igor stopped liking me?

      

      I’m not sure who to tell because I’m not sure who will care, and I don’t want to explain the whole thing to anyone. It was impossible for my parents to understand the reality of Igor when he was alive, so why would they get it when he was dead?

      A year later I have to change my screen name because a boy at school, a massive hairy boy with a face like a Picasso painting, sends me an email saying he’s going to rape me and cover me in barbecue sauce. He’s the only guy who likes me in that way, but I wish he wouldn’t. He mentions having a machete and attaches a photograph of a kitten that has been stuffed inside a bottle and left to die. My father is justifiably angry and calls my uncle, who is a lawyer and says the police need to be involved. For the first and last time, I am escorted home from school by the cops. When they go to his house, they find he has printed and saved all of our instant messages, pages and pages of them. One of the officers implies I shouldn’t have been so nice to him if I didn’t like him “that way.” I tell them I just felt sorry for him. They say I should be more careful in the future. I am ashamed.

      My new screen name includes my real name and is only shared with select friends and family, but I transfer all my contacts, so I can always see who is logged on when. One day, in my here to chat bar, I see him: Pyro0001. The world goes fast, then slow again, the way it does sometimes when I get up to pee in the night and the whole house sounds like it’s saying Lena, Lena, Lena.

      “Hey,” I type.

      The name disappears.

      I walk around for the rest of that day like I’ve seen a ghost. I type his full name into multiple search engines, looking for an obituary or some evidence that he existed. I mean, Juliana knew him. She met him. She heard his accent. He was real. He is dead. Fake people don’t die. Fake people don’t even exist.

      Years later, I will give his last name to a character on my television show. A smoke signal, so that whoever wants to know can know: he was kind to me. He had things to say. There was a way in which I loved him. I did, I did, I did.

      

      ——

      September 27, 2010

A.,¹

Before I get back to writing I had to jot this down to you.² Like, the last six times we’ve spoken it has ended with a series of long silences where I say something, then another thing to modify it, then I sort of apologize, then I sort of unapologize.³ That would be funny as a scene in an indie rom-com,⁴ funny the first few times it happens, but it doesn’t need to happen because I should just be able to get off the phone and say “enjoy your day, A., I’ll talk with you soon.” I’m obviously fishing for stuff and then explaining it away between silences.

I should stop apologizing for being overly analytical about this, even though I am sorry (not to you but in a deeper way, sorry for my brain chemistry and who I am. I do what I can that isn’t heroin to modify it but I was born as anxious and obsessive as any incredibly gorgeous child ever could be.)⁵ The dynamics of romantic relationships are obviously fascinating to us both, artistically and theoretically.⁶ Ditto sex. But it’s harder to incorporate into your actual working life in a way that’s comfortable.⁷

I obviously like you a lot. Not in a scary oppressive way⁸ and not in an “I just came looking at a picture of you” way (though I did do that)⁹ but in the way that I am going out of my way to make you a part of my life, or just to figure out what it could be. I was so ready to spend four months in Los Angeles really embracing this alien city of bad trees, letting my parents visit me and hiking and maybe dating some douche bag just for the story.¹⁰ A week before I met you I quipped to someone “I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.”¹¹ Jokes aren’t just jokes.¹²

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