Niko’s leg has begun to nervously shiver up and down. He’s sitting in front of me on a chair in his kitchen, I’m halfway sitting on the chair in front of him, halfway sitting on him with my legs wrapped around his hips. I’ve just given him the full picture: Sina and I are playing sex games with each other, and this has become a rather crucial part of our work, of our mutual project. Sina has come into my life like a devil sent to me from heaven, and now everything has been disrupted and brought out of order and I can’t get enough. “I usually wouldn’t think it’d be any of your business who else I’m sleeping with, but if you want to be a part of our project, it’s important that you understand it to it’s full extent”, I’d told Niko after dinner: He’d cooked me a questionable bowl of gorgonzola-sauce with a way too thick kind of spaghetti in it, impossible to wrap around the fork. We’d been discussing Niko’s role in my new project with Sina, Niko might want to take part, and so I’d decided to tell him the full story. “I was kind of expecting you’d have sex with Sina”, Niko says, his leg still making small, steady jumps next to me. He’s making an effort to stay brave and upright, while I can see his whole entire inner system wrenching, wiggling and wringing. Brain twist. Crushed fantasies. Cracked open heart.

My relationship with Niko reminds me of what I had with Robin and Tom: These deeply sensitive, hopeful, delusional men, who think highly enough of themselves to choose to believe in the impossible idea that one day I will fall in love with them as well, turn into a devoted girlfriend, make babies with them and live in a house on the countryside, where I’ll happily bake pies from scratch, put them in the window frame to cool off, attracting kind deers and chirping birds. We’ll make sweet love once a week on clean sheets, giggle and cuddle and kiss the healthy cheeks of our teething toddlers in the morning. “Maybe I’m not being honest enough with him”, is what I would always tell myself in these situations, as the hopeful dreams of my current lover had shown their frightening faces, and my conscience towards him began to rot. 

“I don’t want to hear anymore about you and your boyfriends”, my mom told me a decade ago, as I was still living with her. We’d been standing in the kitchen one afternoon, my mom was all sad and worried in her face, and I was feeling relieved and free, having just liberated myself from the tight grip of yet another romance with a boy called Matthias. “I can’t stand hearing about all of those soft, kind boy-hearts you break”, my mom had said, and a burning tickle of anger presented itself in my inner void of shame.

In Nikos kitchen, I’m now sitting straight up in the chair. “You’re meeting me in a phase of my life where I’m making some important realisations”, I tell him. “What are those?”, he asks me, anxiety-intoxicated voice. I feel nervous as well, warm in my face, an internal conflict between my urge to protect his feelings and my urge for complete and utter honesty is making it hard for me to speak my mind. But Sina’s words are cheering me on: “You gotta be Ronja during the entire project. If you start making compromises, you will loose”. He’d told me this as I was asking him for advice about Niko. We were sitting in his kitchen eating bacon and drinking coffee. “I want to rub my clit on your brain”, I’d said to him. “Rub your tongue on my dick instead”, Sina had said, and I had wilfully followed order, my mind bursting with hunger.

“I feel like I’m going through a tunnel these days”, I start explaining to Niko. “I’m transitioning to some other side, and I don’t know what’s there exactly. I also don’t really care, cause I’m so in love with everything that’s happening in here in the tunnel”, I tell him, we’re still sitting in his kitchen, he’s wrapped his warm hands around my ankles now. He’s looking at me with eyes bursting with self-control: Don’t fall. Stay at the abyss of reality, they scream. “I’ve never felt more close to my work”, I continue. “Everything is possible inside this tunnel. I want to look at everything without distractions. One thing I’ve found in here is this photo. It’s black and white, rather old, but still sharp around the edges. It’s depicting flames in the shape of a female figure, in a sort of dancing posture. It’s my autonomous spirit. She’s got horns on her head, deep, dark eyes, full of thirst. She’s looking me straight into my eyes, saying: It’s me. Don’t forget me again.” I look at Niko. He’s looking kind of baffled, but I think he gets what I’m saying. We only know each other since a month, but I feel like he already understands me quite well, or at least he’s actually trying to. Niko’s this kind of stable, reasonable, clever, trustworthy man, to whom I’ll forever stay exotic, cause he gives me all the space in the world to freak out, well knowingly that if he doesn’t, he won’t be able to keep me for very long. He’s fighting to stay in this fantasy he’s created for himself, where he will one day be the only reliable force in my life, my rock. He wants me to need him, to feast on the generous amount of intimacy, love and care he’s able to offer me. And like always, I feel full after a few delicious bites, then begin to starve for something completely different. Of course he knows this, he’s as intuitive as anyone else. But sitting here across from him, I’m realising that he won’t accept the truth on his own. So he’s giving me no choice. I look at Nikos shivering eyes, then jump: “I’ve come to realise that I don’t want a partner at all. And if you want to keep seeing me, you have to accept that”, I say and Niko immediately scoff. “I don’t believe that you can really exclude the possibility of you being in a thriving relationship one day”. My autonomous spirit rolls her eyes. We’ve heard this before. 

It’s always the same. They never believe me when I tell them that I’m not the girlfriend they’ve been looking for. Cause I don’t want to be their girlfriend. And that’s really a part of the problem, it starts there. It’s not that I don’t know what I want, really. It’s that what I want is unacceptable to them. Cause what I want is not what they want. And they’ve got the societal norms on their side. And after a while of sleepless nights of negotiations and tears, one of us makes a heart-wrenching, deep-cut-compromise: Either he tries to fit into the almost invisible frame of the “Lovership” I’ve set for him, exerting all of his energy into fulfilling my ideal relationship-model, and thereby putting himself in an eternal position of dreaming and waiting, giving me so much power that I eventually start to feel bored and trapped by his hopeless devotion. Or I give in to the conventional girlfriend-boyfriend model, exerting all of my energy into adapting to this lifestyle of tedious twosomeness, while I loose track of my sense of self, the relationship an all-consuming, merciless vampire bite, and everything around me starts fading and dying. Including my art. Then the big disruption comes, the distortion, usually initiated by me, rehab, cheating, freedom, finally, again. 

“I’m repeating a pattern here”, I tell Niko, we’re now lying in his bed, post-sex. I’m lying on top of him, our faces close together. He smells good and his lips are full of taste. “Oh you are? That helps”, Niko says. His hands fixed in a tight, passionate grip on my lower back. I love how his hands feel on my body. Niko is a really good lover, a rather advanced fucker, like me. His desire for me is honest and he has seemingly no problem setting it free, surrendering to loving every last bit of my skin, while sweat and juice burst through his. I love how his perfect dick feels in my hand, in my mouth, in my pussy, he can empty my brain with those lips, those hands, that dick, turn my head into nothing, just a void of physical pleasure and sloppy devotion. Maybe he’s such a good fucker cause he knows these are the only moments where I’m entirely and only his. Take me, enjoy me, do whatever you want with me, let’s listen to some records, smoke some joints, talk and fuck all night, feed me ice cream at four o’ clock in the morning, then set me free after a few hours of sleep so I can go write about how I made you cry. 

Niko is spooning me and stroking my hair, I’m stoned and happy, my mind circling around work, Sina, the project, myself. “Omg Lea is sooo boring. I want to kill myself”, I hear Sinas voice and burst out in laughter in Nikos arms. “What?”, he reacts, and I know it’s probably not possible to share the fun with him, cause it’s about Sina and it will make him jealous. What a fucking pity. I feel a sudden sense of oppression, like I can’t fully breathe, cause I again have to pay attention to Nikos fucking feelings. “Well you probably don’t want to hear about Sina right now, right?”, I turn around and look at Niko. He turns onto his back. “No there are a lot of things I’d much rather talk about right now”, he says, and I feel a sense of sadness cause I again understand that this won’t work. Our expiration date seems like it’s arrived right here in bed with us now. “If I can’t talk to you about my work and my relationships, it’ll be hard for me to feel good in this”, I tell Niko, my face close to his. “I need to know that there’s a possible partnership in the future with you. Otherwise I just don’t know where my place is in this, with you”, Niko tells me from his pillow in his thick, German accent. I take a deep breath. “I think you should be brutally frank with Niko and not pay any attention to his feelings”, I hear Sina’s voice again. “I don’t want to promise you that Niko”, I say, and bury my face in his neck, inhale, devour his warm skin with my lungs. We both go quiet, listen to the funky, happy music emerging from Niko’s big, red speakers. We lie like that for a while. “Let’s just do this once in a while and be happy with that”, I say, and I instantly feel something dying. Niko’s holding me tight, his sadness is overflowing his bed, his room, it’s seeping into me like cold water on a wet towel. I release my face from his neck and look at him. He turns his head and looks at me with eyes full of endless suffering. I feel an overflow of empathy, a strong urge to make his sadness go away again, erase it and replace it with something less painful, like apathy or heroin. I think about those nights with Immo, me lying in his arms, crying cause everything I wanted was so devastatingly impossible to get. Shit. I have become Niko’s Immo. Niko’s fucked. 

I start wrapping my body around his again, kiss his tongue, stuff his fingers in my mouth, he sniffles, then turns me around on my back and places his lean body full of feelings on top of mine, he kisses me. “Are you going to punish me now?”, I whisper, and he immediately stops to look at me, confused. “Eh.. Do you want me to punish you?”, he says, brain twist again, “No, I don’t, I want you to protect me”, I say, and he smiles a sad smile, then say “I’d also much rather do that”. He then fucks me missionary and I’m feeling totally confused as well, wanting him to spit in my mouth and slap me in my face, but I know better than to ask for it. He looks me into my eyes and I realise I can’t do this, fucking his broken heart to pieces, so I ask him to pull himself out of me. He lies down on his back and pants. I look at him in the fuzzy darkness, no more music, just the sound of Niko’s breathing heartache. His eyes are closed, and I watch him quietly as tears break out from under his eyelids again, small pearls of doom. “What about the Heartbreak reading next week?”, Niko whispers in the dark, and I smile. “It will happen”, I say. “You can still come”. He turns his head and looks at me. “I don’t know what my place there would be”, he whispers. “You’ll be in the audience with a drink in your hand, crying”, I say, stroking his face. “Yes, I’ll definitely be crying”, he says, crying, and I see my moms disappointed, worried eyes watching over us like a bat in the corner.

I desperately start kissing Nikos face to make it all go away. “I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry”, I keep whispering repeatedly, I want to hold his heart like a baby in my arms, carefully rocking it from side to side, hushing and singing soft lullabies to make it stop from bleeding. “You don’t have to say sorry, you have nothing to be sorry about. You were just being honest”, Niko says, and I know he’s right, but I still can’t stop saying it, “I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry Niko”. I melt into his warm, salty kisses again for a moment. Then I ask: “What is your sadness about?”. Niko looks at me with defeated eyes. “Just.. my life”, he says and I suddenly can’t understand how he can be so sad when all of this is so beautiful.