My colleague Sina Khani and I have been working on a project together for months. With the Amsterdam based artist collective The Unsafe House, we will create The Unsafe Event in Leipzig in July. It’s an exhibition in which the boundaries of the artist’s freedom of expression will truly be pushed. Cause both The Unsafe House, Sina and I agree that art is suffocating under political correctness in our present times. And we all genuinely love art. Sina and I are also inviting artists from Leipzig and Berlin to take part. The following story is a chapter in my book called Everything I Think Is Wrong With The World. 

Sina Khani was supposed to go on a date with a woman called Lina Elisabeth Tühmer. She’s a tall, German art student of the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. But Lina Elisabeth Tühmer blocked Sina on all social medias a few hours before they were supposed to meet. Sina calls me and tells me. “I thought you were getting along?” I ask him. “I thought so too, but something must have happened, I just don’t know what, and now I have no way of asking her”, Sina says, sounding disappointed. 

A few days earlier, Sina had been visiting me in Leipzig. We were sitting in bed one afternoon, talking about The Unsafe Event, me on my computer, Sina on his phone, writing, making our plans, both content in our usual habitat. “Look, I’ve been chatting with this woman called Lina Elisabeth Tühmer for about a year, and she now seems interested in The Unsafe Event”, Sina told me and showed me their instagram chat. Lina Elisabeth Tühmer then sent Sina the profile of someone I know from the Leipzig art scene. She recommended us to invite this person to collaborate with us for The Unsafe Event. “They are a great artist”, Lina Elisabeth Tühmer wrote. “If you work with them, they won’t let you down”, she added. 

The artist Lina Elisabeth Tühmer was recommending us had already been on my mind for a while. Their name is Jola Wollny. They’re a non-binary performance artist who studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. They do performances in which they roll around in muddy puddles in forests around Leipzig wearing ripped clothes. Jola and I used to get along very well. So well that I invited them to do a performance with me in the BSMNT offspace in Leipzig. This was a year ago. Jola happily accepted and so we started collaborating. In our performance, I emerged from a pink coffin leaning up against one of the walls of the space. I was wearing a pink juicy couture tracksuit and smothered clown make-up all over my face. An ASMR microphone was attached to the inside of the coffin, so the excessive chewing sounds coming from my mouth as I ate one piece of candy after the other would fill the gloomy basement space with sleazy snacking sounds. After having been quietly observed like that by the audience for a while, I stepped out of the coffin to take a stroll around crowd. I walked slowly among the people, starring intensely at whomever dared to lock eye contact with me, all the while filming them with my phone. If I’d lock eyes with a seemingly straight man, I’d make sure to act extra creepy and flirtatious towards him. I eventually ended up in the corner of the space, where Jola was sitting, attempting to drink 10 liters of black water. I stood still and starred at them, the audience right behind me. I continuously chewed one piece of candy after the other, and as Jola started throwing up the black water, I filmed myself watching them while continuously stuffing myself with the candy. 

Almost immediately after our collaboration ended, Jola disappeared from my life. I tried to care for our relationship by reaching out and taking initiative to spend time together, but unsuccessfully so. I began to suspect Jola of using me for their own benefit, then ghosting me when they’d gotten what they wanted from me. I eventually reached out and directly confronted them with my impressions: That there had been an abrupt disconnection between us after our performance, certainly not initiated by me. What had happened? Nothing, Jola told me. They said they were just busy and overworked. I accepted this as the truth, but eventually started feeling frustrated again as Jola kept asking me for favours: “Can you help me carry a piece of furniture a couple of blocks?”, “Can I borrow some money?”, “Can you pick me up at the studio and drive me home?”. At first I really didn’t mind helping them out, but after a while I began to feel exploited and disrespected. I stopped making efforts to care for our relationship as well, and so it just vanished into lots of unresolved question marks. 

Now, one year later, I thought Jola’s performance art would be an interesting act to add to The Unsafe Event. So I made a little video for them, inviting them to take part. I didn’t send the invitation video at first. I told Sina I was reluctant to do it, cause I know Jola is a subscriber of the exact political dogma that Sina and I want to kill. I knew it could be risky to send the video to Jola. They can be quite judgmental. And I’m being very honest in my video, criticising wokeism as a danger to the artist’s freedom of investigation. I knew this might not exactly please Jola, but I was hoping our differences of opinions wouldn’t affect a possible future collaboration. 

Back in my bed, Sina told Lina Elisabeth Tühmer that we had already been thinking about Jola as a participating artist at The Unsafe Event, but that we were unsure about whether it would really make sense. Lina Elisabeth Tühmer then responded to this with a voice message: “If you don’t want to curate Jola because he’s queer, that’s absolutely ridiculous”. I listened, terrified, what an awful misunderstanding! I took Sina’s phone out of his hand and replied with a voice message: “Hello Lina Elisabeth Tühmer, I’m Ronja, and it is certainly not because of their queerness that we’re doubting a collaboration with Jola. The whole concept of The Unsafe Event is to curate artists based on their artistic vision and ideas, not based on their identities and/or political opinions. I think Jola can be a very good artist, that’s why I’d like to have them on board. But to them, identity politics are very important. And this is where the conflict potential between Sina’s and my artistic vision and Jola’s lie. Which is why I’m thinking it might not work out”. “Ah. That makes sense”, Lina Elisabeth Tühmer replied. So far, so good. Crisis averted. She started following me on instagram later that day. 

“What the fuck is this!”, Sina says to me over the phone, “Why did Lina Elisabeth Tühmer block me?”. “I don’t know”, I say, “But I did sent the invitation-video to Jola yesterday”. “Oh my god! That must be the reason!”, Sina bursts out, and I start feeling uneasy about it all. “Can you call Jola and ask him directly? And don’t forget to film it!”, Sina says. “Hm. I don’t know if they watched the video yet. But they did see my message. They haven’t reacted to anything yet, though”, I say. “I think Jola watched the video, hated it, then told his friend Lina Elisabeth Tühmer that you and I are both toxic, problematic, patriarchy-loving assholes, and then they both cancelled us!” Sina says, and I’m sad to think that he might actually be right. “Can you check and see if Lina Elisabeth Tühmer also blocked you?”, Sina asks me, and I’m horrified to discover that she actually did. I can’t find her anymore when I type in her name. “I fucking knew it! What brainwashed, 2 stupid, dumb, silly wokies! Why did you want to work with Jola in the first place anyway? All he does is sit in a corner and drink his own piss and throw it up, so not interesting, so fucking boring, completely outdated! And we don’t have a budget to pay for a cleaning lady anyway!”, Sina bursts out, “Or cleaning gentleman”, he then adds. “Yeah. I really hoped they would be smarter than this”, I say, and hang up.  

I think about my complicated relationship with Jola. It’s not the only one, but as opposed to other conflicted relationships I’ve had, I feel like there are blindspots everywhere when it comes to Jola and I. I’m honestly not sure why they didn’t want to be friends with me. I’ve often even felt like they just suddenly decided they didn’t like me anymore. And it’s not just Jola. It’s the whole scene around them as well. It’s a scene I perceive as rather hateful, really. 

My former friend The Lost Case says the work that I’m doing right now with Sina and The Unsafe House is stupid. She says: “I think you are smart, so I don’t understand why you’re acting so dumb at the moment”. This makes me feel shocked by her disappointing level of reflection. I sincerely thought The Lost Case was smarter. The Lost Case is friends with Jola. I know they’re talking about me behind my back. I can see it, hear it, feel it, sense it, know it. They bring the self-righteousness out in each other, both claiming they’re victims of evil, oppressive structures. Jola because they’re queer and have ADHD, The Lost Case because she’s a refugee and a woman. I can imagine them sitting around, wrapped in the protective cotton coat of their own entitlement, acknowledging each other and agreeing about everything. Especially that they find me and my work “problematic” and that I’m just a white, privileged, stupid girl from Denmark who’s upholding patriarchy by working with allegedly toxic cis-men. But in my eyes, these very men are beautiful, complex, queer, middle eastern individuals, who are in fact woker than woke, lefter than left! Artists, who might behave rather outrageously once in a while, though all for the meaningful purpose of creation. And they are honest. I’m beginning to think that the problem with Jola is that they just haven’t been honest to me about what they wanted from me. I can’t help but think about an Instagram post Jola did about our performance a few weeks after the show. The post consisted solely of photos of Jola. There was not one single photo of me in there. The post made it look like the performance was entirely created by Jola, and that I had had no part in it whatsoever. “My love, I’ll do another post with you in it during the next days, I promise!”, Jola texted me. And they never did.

This is my idea of being incarcerated: To have someone else self-righteously judge me for my random background, labelling me as useless, cause I don’t abide to whatever limited ideas of morality they’ve set for themselves. How conservative can it get? No, really: If I’m constantly being reminded of my own whiteness and my own background, and these completely coincidental features of mine are being used as reasons not to respect me or my work, we can never progress. How is this not the exact faschism they think they’re fighting against? Hyper un-aware and super un-woke, wake the fuck up! Also, if Jola Wollny and The Lost Case keep insisting on staying in whatever victim position their identities are granting them the privilege of staying in, they will never be able to liberate themselves from these very victim positions. It’s almost as if they want to stay victims, like their self-claimed position of victimhood is this safe space they’re so enthusiastic about. What is this idea of progression they have? They’re just plain blind if they think that what they’re doing is “woke”. It makes me think of an interview with Jonathan Meese I’ve watched recently. He’s talking about how people nowadays are too busy glorifying their own mediocracy to really be progressive and move forward. I’m starting to think this is the case of The Lost Case, Jola and their scene. 

I get a message from Sina. “I told Lina Elisabeth Tühmer that she’s a lefty nazi”, he says. Oh no, I think, and call him. “How did you even get in contact with her?”, I ask him, “I thought she’d blocked you everywhere?”. “There was one of my Insta accounts she’d forgotten to block. From the Creeps of the Middle East account. I wrote her from that one”, Sina says. “Well, did you ask her first why she blocked you?”, I ask. “No, it’s obvious why she blocked me, it’s because she’s a woke faschist. Her art is drawings of fucking horse whips! She’s been reproducing these highly uninteresting drawings for years! Why the fuck do you think she blocked me?”, Sina yells. For fuck sake. I’m dealing with another giant man child here. Sina’s unprofessionalism is stressing me out and it’s beginning to make me angry now. Ugh! “Sina, you have to get your temper under control. You should have asked Lina Elisabeth Tühmer about her motifs before attacking her like that! It’s way smarter, don’t you see?”, I say, blood pressure raising, this is bad. “You’re being a liability to me right now, and I need to be able to trust that you’re always doing what’s best for our project. Verbally attacking a woman is not helping us in any way! It gives people good reasons to dislike you, which then falls back on me, which then falls back on our work. Why didn’t you think of that?”, I say, my voice and blood pressure now both at a fast speed. “No!”, Sina yells out loud, “This is who I am! You can’t control me. You have to let Sina be Sina! This is what happens every time I collaborate with people, this is why no one else besides Tarik and The Unsafe House can work with me! Everyone else is always trying to tame me, but I’m a wild horse! The only interesting version of me is the untamed version! I’m like the sun, I burn down the Amazon rain forest, but I also give live to plants! And I’m saying this in the least narcissistic way imaginable!”. I take a deep breath. “But if you’re insulting and offending people and behaving like a fucking asshole, of course no one wants to work with you in the end! What do you expect?”, I say, “Tarik is even worse than me, you just wait and see!”, Sina yells, “Tarik gets physically violent, I’m just verbally violent, I’m really not that bad!”. I go quiet. It’s useless to keep talking to Sina at this point. This so-called “wild horse”, who thinks he’s the sun, yet claims he’s not a narcissist, while he’s sabotaging my relationships and adding unnecessary stress to my daily life. I hang up without further notice. 

Since I know Sina, he’s always encouraged me to be the most myself. That is, not make any stupid compromises, speak my mind freely, trust my own intuition. To liberate myself from any chains that might be holding me back. Like fear and shame. He’s probably the most authentic feminist I'll ever meet. But where to draw the line? Is full liberation really just setting yourself free, every single part of you, your inner demons, the evil monster that inhabits every single one of us. Of course there has to be some restrictions! And that’s what we call civilisation, isn’t it? Sina is not asking of me, or anyone else for that matter, to act like him. To be rude, verbally abusive and offensive. But he’s insisting on the right to be this way. And it makes it very hard for people around him to actually be around him. Cause his words hurt. And he is unpredictable. But what is the solution then? To vote a person like Sina completely off the island? To try and change him? Or to just live with his demons, try to embrace them in a way? And if we go with the last option, at what cost then? But really, wouldn’t cancelling Sina be an absolute waste of talent? Full liberation is destruction of what’s keeping us from being liberated, whatever it is. This is why we have to be able to separate art from civilisation. Cause art is the frame in which we can allow us selves to act, think and behave uncivilised. Art will remain harmless. Art is morally unjustifiable and unethical, when it has to be. And it’s not hurtful. It is art. Let art be art. Let the artists be artists. Then we can act civilised towards each outside of art. Out there, in the (un)real/fake/artificial world. 

In my bed, I check Jola’ story on Instagram and see a photo of them and Lina Elisabeth Tühmer hanging out at an exhibition in Berlin. I immediately take a screenshot and send it to Sina. “I know”, he replies, “I already dropped a broken heart emoji on his story”. “Oh my God, you’re officially too impulsive”, I text him. “Shut the fuck up! Don’t tell me how to behave”, Sina answers, and I start to feel a wave of anger rising inside of me again. I hate it when he speaks to me that way. “I didn’t tell you how to behave. I only commented on your behaviour”, I reply. “I don’t give a fuck. Don’t upset me. You have to let Sina be Sina. That’s the only way this works, that’s the golden rule. You can’t control me.”, Sina replies, and I have no words left besides: “lol”. But Sina isn’t done: “I’m not joking!”, he says. “Why are you being so overly sensitive right now?”, I ask him, feeling more and more frustrated and worried. This might escalate, and I want to avoid it without surrendering to him. “You see what happened with Creeps? The film crew and I had to end the collaboration because they told me the same shit you’re throwing at me right now!”, Sina says. “Stop threatening me, it’s beneath you. And also, are you the only one who’s allowed to be yourself fully, to be rude like that? Is there space for me as well here?”, I write to him. “No there isn’t. And goodnight”, Sina replies. “Goodnight you fucking asshole”, I text him, turn off my phone and fall asleep. 

It is Saturday night in Berlin. I’m in a bar with my friends Normal Slavic Girl (formerly known as Unicorn Creature), Closety Gem and Privateman. Sina is also here. I’ve been at his place all day working on The Project. I’m making a movie in which I investigate the true purpose of art. In doing so, I’m making my own life subject. Sina is my collaborator and mentor on The Project. He’s a 42 year old ex-artist turned comedian from Iran. He’s got a mullet, a dubious reputation and many haters. Sina understands my artistic vision like no one else though, and he’s been showing true dedication to The Project and myself. After a day of working, we decided to go out and meet my friends for drinks. They’re all not very fond of Sina, but they’re trying to understand The Project and my reasons for letting him mentor me. In the bar, I’ve been preoccupied for the past ten minutes, trying to help out a random, seemingly very drunk Indian dude, who’s kept turning up next to me on the couch, asking for my help. I’d taken him outside for a minute to catch some fresh air. That’s when I realised that he’d been playing me. He really wasn’t that drunk. I went back inside to rejoin the group.

“I could have told you that guy was playing you”, Sina says with a drunken, vicious look in his eyes. He’s sitting across from me on the couch, next to him Normal Slavic Girl is sitting looking back and forth between Sina and I. Closety Gem and Privateman are both high on keta, cuddling in the corner. “Don’t judge me for my good heart”, I say and put my hands to my chest. “It’s not a good heart you have. You just have an idiot brain, that’s all”, Sina says to me and laughs. I look around the group to see if anyone else heard it. It doesn’t seem so, or at least no one is reacting. Everyone’s just starring at me now. I grab my bag and get up to go to the bathroom. The bar is full of wasted tourists, the music is loud and I have to push my way through the crowd of sweaty bodies. “Ronja”, someone yells behind me. I turn around and see Sina on the couch, making a gesture that I should bring him back a beer from the bar. I give him the middle finger and disappear into the bathrooms. 

In the toilet cabin, I take out my Tupperware box from my bag and place it right next to the toilet. I then pull down my skirt and underwear, and sit down on the toilet. I look between my legs to locate the blue string coming out of my vagina. I fetch it and slowly pull it out. My tampon has been in me for about three hours now, the maximum time before I start leaking. I raise it by it’s string so it’s hanging right in front of my eyes. It’s big and juicy. I watch the different textures of red colours swing back and forth before my eyes, mesmerisingly heavy content. I then tilt my head back and let the tampon hang down right in front of my nostrils. I inhale. I love this smell. The little cotton bullet is bearing witness of my own, vibrant insides. Middle earth. I have a feeling of ultimate closeness with my own body in this moment. What’s more satisfying than that? I carefully place the tampon on the sink next to the toilet. I need both my hands for my next step. I reach for the Tupperware box on the floor. The box is made of black, hard plastic, about 12 centimetres long and 3 centimetres deep. Probably intended as a snack box you can fill with cucumber -and carrot sticks. And it’s got an extra safe lock-mechanism to ensure it doesn’t open under turbulence. I unlock the box and open it. There’s already five used tampons in there. I’ve placed them next to each other in a neat order, making sure that the strings don’t interfere with one another. There’s space for exactly six used tampons in my box. I reach for the newest addition to my collection on the sink, and carefully put it next to the others. I’ve made it, the box is yet again complete. I close the Tupperware and put it back into my bag, carefully. I then pull out an unused tampon from my bag, wrap it open, and insert it. 

“I want to leave”, I say out loud, as I arrive back at the table where my friends are still sitting. Everyone immediately gets up and start putting on their coats and grabbing their bags. “What are you doing? Where are we going?”, Sina says, emerging from the crowd with a whiskey sour in his hand. “We’re leaving. Now.”, I say, “But I just got this drink”, Sina says, “Who cares, you can drink it on your way home”, I respond, and Sina then also starts putting on his coat. 

“Are you okay?”, Closety Gem asks me outside in the cold. “No I’m fucking furious, Sina’s drunk and rude and stupid again and I don’t want to be around him anymore”, I say, “But aren’t you staying at his place?”, Privateman asks me, “My stuff is at his place, yes, but I’ll sleep elsewhere. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out”, “Are you sure? It’s three o’ clock in the night?”, Normal Slavic Girl says, “Yes, I’m sure, see you soon”. We then all hug goodbye and I turn to drunk Sina who’s spilled half of his drink on his coat trying to sneak the glass out of the bar. “You owe me half a whiskey sour”, he says and takes a sip. “Shut up Sina, I don’t owe you anything”, I say and order an Uber.

“Why the fuck did you have to insult me in front of my friends?”, I ask Sina, as we’re both sitting in the back of the car. “Let’s not talk about it now. I don’t want to discuss such matters in a fucking Uber”, Sina says, and starts humming a song I don’t know, probably a Persian one. I then go quiet and take out my phone to text everyone I know in the city if I can crash at their places. Sina lives very far out in Berlin. In Schöneweide. Horrible location. No matter who’ll get back to me, if anyone even will, it’ll take me forever to get there. Ugh. I’m fucked. 

Having arrived at Sina’s place, I go straight to his living room to pack my suitcase. I throw all of my stuff in there, then grab the roll of tape I’ve brought with me from home. I hear Sina turn on his radio in the kitchen and open his fridge. I check my phone. No notifications. “If none of my friends answer, I’ll just go back to Leipzig when the first train leaves in the morning”, I think to myself as I take out the tampon Tupperware box from my bag. “Cookie come to me, let’s make peace”, Sina yells at me from his kitchen. “Fuck off Sina, no peacemaking tonight. Just leave me alone to sort out my stuff”, I yell back, and fetch out my disposable camera from my bag. With the camera, the Tupperware box and the tape in my hands, I look around Sina’s living room. His paintings are everywhere: On the walls, on the floor, on the couch, in the window frames. There’s even one nailed to the ceiling. They look like enlarged pages from a notebook : obsessive strokes, random colour scheme, his full name written on the front of each one of them, along with a few words here and there, small, catchy phrases, like “Sina Khani did nothing wrong”, “Help”, and “I hate my friends”. Sina has told me they’re all unfinished works, but still signed, in case he dies. He gave up painting a few years back to start his comedy career. That career ended well before it took off though, cause he apparently told a fatal joke on stage once, which got him cancelled from the comedy-scene in Berlin. To this day, he still hasn’t told me what the joke was exactly. “Which one of his paintings will it be tonight?”, I ask myself and walk to Sina’s bedroom, which is also full of his unfinished, signed paintings. I see a small one standing on the nightstand next to his bed. It’s new to me. It’s depicting a face painted in black, thick strokes, on top of a sort of abstract, chaotic landscape. In the middle of the face, it says “post woke”. Bingo. I go to Sina’s nightstand and put down the Tupperware, the tape roll and the camera. I then lift up the painting and turn it around. I can hear Sina in the kitchen, babbling along to that Messy-song by Lola Young, without knowing the lyrics properly. I start whistling along myself, as I carefully place Sina’s painting face down on his bed. I then open up the Tupperware box and look at my fine collection of my own, used tampons. “Which one for the post-woke painting?” I think to myself and look closer. “And then I’m too clever, and then I’m too fucking dumb. You hate it when I cry unless it’s that time of the month. And then I’m too perfect, till I open my big mouth, I want to be me, is that not allowed?”, I hear Sina turning up the volume of the radio, still attempting to sing along. I look at the colours of the six tampons. The dry ones are the darkest ones. The one from the bar is still moist and now has a sweet scent to it. The one from yesterday is special, I was bleeding rather heavily as I was on my way to Berlin from Leipzig. The tampon is completely dark, almost black, big, dead and beautiful. I fetch it out by it’s string, and place it neatly on the back of the canvas. I then take the tape roll and rip off a piece, fix the string to the back of the painting. I take a photo of the arrangement with my disposable camera, before putting the painting back where it came from. I then close the Tupperware again, and look around Sina’s bedroom. I’ve lost track of which paintings hold the bloody, little secret. Only my camera knows now. I leave the room and go back to the living room, put the tampon box, the tape roll and the disposable camera back into my bag, close my suitcase, and go to the kitchen. Sina has fallen asleep on his chair in the meantime, his head bend forwards, saliva dripping out of his mouth. The radio is still playing, and the sound of Miley Cyrus’ raspy voice fills the room:“I can buy myself flowers, write my own name in the sand. Talk to myself for hours. Say things you don’t understand. I can take myself dancing. And I can hold my own hand. Yeah, I can love me better than you can”. I turn up the volume to it’s max, which makes Sina immediately wake up and look at me, confused. He then dries off his mouth and shakes his head awake. “Hey cookie, let’s make peace!”, he yells out. I turn down the volume again, and look straight down at Sina on his chair. “Can you sit down please?”, Sina asks me, “It freaks me out that you’re standing like that”, “No”, I answer, “I don’t want to sit down right now. I’m on my way out the door, you know”. “Alright”, Sina says, looking at his beer on the table. “You know, I had a talk with Privateman in the bar”, he then tells me. “Oh yeah, what did he say?”, I ask, this should be interesting. “He asked me why I have to provoke so much all the time”, Sina says, “then I said my kink is to make stupid people angry”. “Yeah, that’s the only way for you to get hard, isn’t it?”, I say, and Sina nods his head, then grabs his beer to take a sip. He continues: “Yes, I told him I love to upset dumb people. It really is my kink, it turns me on. Some people like to be choked and pissed on and eat shit. I like to piss off people who are intellectually inferior to me.” Sina looks at me, the vicious look in his eyes is back now. “Privateman then asked me if I’m not afraid of getting cancelled” Sina says, “and you know what I said?”, I shake my head slowly in response, “What did you say, Sina?”, I ask, “I said that only God can cancel me!”, Sina bursts out and laughs at his own joke. I can’t help but laugh a bit myself as well. Sina’s an atheist. Sina and I look at each other for a little minute while Miley is still providing us with her words of empowerment. “Turn off the radio”, I then command of Sina in a sharp tone, still standing in front of him. He immediately reaches his arm out to press the power button, while keeping eye contact with me the entire time. Silence. I then say: “You know what? You are the perfect example of how one must learn to separate the art from the artist”. Sina looks at me with red eyes, then fetches out his phone from his jeans pocket and starts filming me. “I think you’re schizophrenic or something. Something rotten is going on with you”, I continue, “something deeply disturbing and rotten is happening inside of your psychological arena. And it’s serious. And I love it for art. Let’s make good use of it and see what happens, let’s admire your artistic brilliance! But you, as a person, suck. You, as a human being, suck. And this is actually really interesting to me. Cause in this moment I’m realising that it is true; It is possible to separate the art from the artist. This is what I’m doing with you. I am a very good example of that. Cause it is my belief that your art is good. And that your artistic vision is great. But you as a person, are a fucking asshole, okay. And that might have an influence on your art and your artistic vision. And thank God for that. Thank God for mental illness, and thank God for assholes, and thank God for whatever the fuck went wrong during your childhood. But I don’t want to be at the receiving end of it, and I don’t want to be a victim of it. I only want to make use of it for my own artistic purpose. So we can continue this collaboration, and it’s going to be great, I just know it. But I am not going to pretend that you are capable of having any other kind of relationship with me outside of The Project, cause you certainly are not, you fucking sick fuckhead” I look Sina straight into his drunken eyes behind his phone. He’s smiling a bit, “Good girl”, he then says, “I’m proud of you. Now get on your knees and give me one of your vanilla blowjobs”. Now I’m the one to burst out in laughter. “See you, you lunatic”, I say and leave the kitchen to go grab my things in the living room. As I leave Sina’s place, I slam the door behind me as hard as I can. Outside on the street, I inhale the cold, dark night. As I start walking towards the tram station, my phone buzzes in my pocket. Yes! I take it out. It’s Buggy Lover calling me. Thank fuck. I pick up. “So you need a place to crash?”, he asks me. “Yes, urgently”, I say, “but I’m very far away”. “Doesn’t matter. Take your time, I’m awake”, Buggy Lover says, “Are you alright though?”, he adds. I smile. “Oh definitely. I’m wet as a rain boot in a thunderstorm”. 

Dear Niko,

I’m sitting at my desk at home in the sun since a few hours. Last night I started working on a trailer for The Project, and looking through the large amount of footage from the past month, I went through many different emotions. I feel overwhelmed mostly, probably. I realised I need a place in my life, a secret island, where The Project doesn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong, it excites me that The Project is consuming my entire life, I invite this to happen with great appetite. But with that said, I really need a cave to hide away in once in a while, to breathe, reset, indulge in an entirely different reality for a moment. 

I’ve been thinking about this quote from Lena Dunham: 

“Romance was the only way I knew to completely forget about my obligations, to obliterate the self and become someone else.” 

And that’s it. That’s what I need in this phase of my life: Romance as a form of escapism. 

On Sunday morning as I was about to fall asleep after the Heartbreak Party, I thought about whether you’d felt sad during the evening.. When you texted me that you decided not to come to the reading, I felt a punch of sadness in my stomach, and I felt trapped and sort of paralysed in my response-options. I don’t want to lead you on, into a utopia where you will get from me what you’re looking for. And I also don’t want you to be stuck in a self-effacing compromise, stuck in a Ronja-cage that will become your zone of heartbreaking comfort as time passes, cause you think that what’s outside of it might be worse. Maybe the best way to describe to you what I mean exactly, is by letting you read an excerpt from the text I read out loud at the Heartbreak reading: 

“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 TL’s 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 TL 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.

Of course my text should be seen as an example of how I turn my own life into an artwork, more so than a direct witness to what actually happens. But still, there is a lot of truth to be found in there. It’s a different kind of witness, maybe a kind of confession even. Confessions of an art whore.

So.. I’ve been thinking about whether it’s wise to see each other this week. Whether it’s wise to see each other at all. In this moment, I’m locating two big fears inside of myself:

I’m scared of trapping the both of us in something that might be very hurtful in the long run, especially for you. 

I’m scared of loosing people, good people, and eventually be trapped in the consequences of my own making, only left with bitter remorse and silent loneliness. 

It would be really nice to create a soft, warm, lovely lovership together, where we see each other once or twice a month, or every other month, when we want to escape our own realities and melt together in romantic sensuality. It would be nice if you could be my little island that I could go to, whenever everything starts to feel too consuming, and I need to let myself be consumed by something entirely different, to forget about my obligations, obliterate myself and become someone else for a moment. It would be really nice. 

But something tells me that that’s my utopia. Cause you’ve been very clear about what kind of life and what kind of relationship you want. So in the light of your honesty and my honesty, is seems that this fantasy of mine should stay a fantasy. Cause neither one of us should be making that big of a compromise. 

I don’t think it would be healthy in the long run.

I’m curious to know what you think though. Take the time you need to respond. And if you don’t feel like responding at all, that’s okay too. 

I brought the disposable cameras to have them developed. I’m especially looking forward to see the photos I took of you on our last night together. I think it will be special. R. 

“I need a yes”, Sina says with eyes like dough. He’s lying in bed with his hands underneath the blanket, I’m sitting in front of him wearing my pyjamas: My pink, velvet Juicy Couture pants and a striped, old t-shirt. I feel like I’m about to get into something I might regret later. “Wait, I have to think it through first”, I tell him and go to his kitchen. I look out the window and talk to myself out loud. “Interesting”, I say, “could be interesting, but wouldn’t it feel better, I mean, good for me as well, if I was really attracted to him and the situation, or is that the whole point why I’d give him my consent? Cause I could watch him, objectively, soberly, as an experiment, have one more story for the books? Or might I be worried I’ll get turned on and want to fuck him, be seduced by him desiring me and then chaos will break loose?”, I start laughing a bit for myself, then return to the bedroom. “Sina, I’ve decided that I don’t want you to masturbate in front of me”, I say, standing at the end of his bed. I can see his hard dick through the blanket. “No problem, but then at least give me your dirty underwear”, he says, and I leave the room again to think about this new idea of his. I stand in front of my suitcase in the living room, looking at the plastic bag where I keep my used panties, safely, zipper bag, ready to go through a vacuum sealer, dirty, pussy-juice-infected underwear stay away! I think about how B. once told me he didn’t like the smell of my pussy and love Sina a little bit for directly asking for it. “What if he won’t like the smell either? Is that what I’m afraid of?”, I say it out loudly to myself, then open the zipper bag and fetch out yesterday’s undies. I go back to the bedroom, Sina’s still waiting. “Knock yourself out” I say and throw them at him before I leave the bedroom, closing the door behind me. 

“Your panties weren’t at all dirty enough”, Sina emerges from his bedroom 10 minutes later, all red in the face, body posture like when a dog is looking you straight into the face while taking a dump. “They just smelled clean”, he continues and puts his arms around me. “It’s because I’m on my period. I’m basically wearing diapers these days. Maybe I should have fetched my used one out of the trashcan and given that to you instead?”, I say, “That would have been much better”, Sina says, shaking his head, disappointed. I suddenly feel sad not to be a tampon-girl, cause then I could have him change mine like in that Miranda July book I’m reading. Would I have Sina change my tampon though? Maybe he’s really too nasty, and I’d need someone more Davey-like for that action, at least to begin with. Davey is the character in the book who the main protagonist, the narrator, falls in love with. He’s sweet and young and bright and, sadly, married, so Miranda and him never have sex or kiss. In one scene though, Davey changes the tampon of Miranda, sitting on a toilet, her sitting on top of him, with her back turned against him. Ever since I read this, I’ve been contemplating who I’d have change a tampon for me. It would probably have to be someone like Davey, not Sina, he’s way too wild, no, I’d definitely need someone normal, with a normal job and a savings account and a credit card and a driver’s license. And a future. Someone white.

Sina and I are lying next to each other in his bed, I’m dipping my thumb into a glass of water cause I just burned my finger while pouring boiling water into my heating bottle. I always sleep with a heating bottle during winter. It’s four o’ clock in the morning, we’d returned home about an hour ago, after having had a chaotic evening out in Berlin. “Oh, you really burned yourself, baby”, Sina says, his arms around me. “Give me your thumb”. He puts my thumb in his mouth, then pulls it out softly and blows on it. It soothes, “Do it again”, I say, and I look at how his lips embrace my finger tightly, look at how his mouth shapes as he blows his soothing breath onto my skin. “Again”, I whisper, and while my thumb is in his mouth, I start kissing his face, moving my lips towards his. We start undressing, still managing my thumb-burn: Finger into the cup of water, then into Sina’s mouth, he blows on it, and another piece clothes is pulled off. I’m all naked now, and Sina starts fingering my ass, wow, what an interesting place to start, most men go directly for my clit, or at least they try to, but this is new. “Fuck me in spoon”, I demand of Sina, as I turn my back against him and push my ass up against his hard dick. “I’m not gonna fuck you without a condom”, he says, “you’re not my fucking girlfriend”, he then gets up to go find a condom, and I feel rejected and safe at the same time. Like, is this a case of the Madonna/whore-complex, and it’s what’s saving me from ending up with another horrible STD and/or bladder infection, and/or pregnancy-scare. Scared to be impregnated by Sina Khani, ugh, what a nightmare! “And also, you don’t decide in which position we’re fucking”, Sina says and leaves the room. He comes back a minute later with a condom on his dick, then lies down next to me and pushes me away from him, roughly, then pulls me back towards him and thrusts his dick into my pussy, starts fucking me like I told him to. I like it like this and don’t want it to stop, kind of melt. He then turns me on my belly and keeps penetrating me, holding my hips, pulling me towards him so I end up on all fours. I love this position, it’s always what I’m looking for whenever I want to jerk off to porn. Sina leans over me and kisses my shoulders and my neck, then slows down his pace, and whispers in my ear: “Break”, he pulls himself out of me tenderly and lies down on his back. I’m all soft and happy next to him in bed, “I’m your submissive, little puppy girl now”, I say to him, sticking my tongue out of my mouth, imitating a silly little dog. “Yes, I fucked the bossiness out of you”, Sina says, and it makes me think of F. and how much of a turn off it was for me that he’d called me bossy, probably because my bossiness was a turn off to him, but Sina decided to swim in it, play with it, use it, then turn it into wilful devotion towards him. And it worked. He sure did fuck the bossiness out of me. The same kind of skilled mechanic he’d made use of hours earlier in a bar, right before we both lost control and got caught up in a nasty fight with each other. 

We were sitting around in the bar, quietly observing what was going on around us. The place seemed like a hybrid between a club and a bar really: Very high ceiling, a chaotic mix of people on drugs, a DJ in the shape of an older guy with long, thin hair and a leather west. “Nice place for an LSD-trip”, I said to Sina, but he didn’t react, he was busy with his own thoughts. I then made the impulsive decision to leave our table and go engage in a heavy flirt with some random, Italian guy, leaving Sina alone, looking out for my suitcase. I’d gone from Leipzig to Berlin that very day, suitcase packed for a few days at Sina’s. I don’t know how long I left him to his own company, but apparently it was too long. At one point, Sina came to the Italian and I, asking me to look out for my suitcase while he went to the bathroom. “Sure”, I said, then turning to the Italian again who was getting me all juicy with his aggressive flirtation. “What are you doing with that guy?”, the Italian asked me in his thick accent, “He’s not giving you any attention. If I was the one lucky enough to have you by my side tonight, I wouldn’t be able to take my hands off you”. He then pulled me towards him and I felt his hard dick in his pants against the lower part of my belly. In that moment, Sina came back from the bathroom, seemingly furious. He crudely slapped the Italian’s hand away from my back, then pushed him away from me. “Oh, come on, who could resist a beautiful girl like her?”, the Italian asked Sina, making the stereotypical, Italian-arm gestures, then attempted to hug Sina. “Get away from me”, Sina said, “You want her? Then let’s talk business”, he then made a gesture towards the table. “Go sit on that chair baby”, Sina instructed me, pointing at the chair he wanted me to sit on. I followed orders and sat down, Sina then sat down next to me, and looked at the Italian who was still standing around, obviously unsure what to do with himself. Sina helped him out, “Come sit here next to me”, he commanded of the Italian, who then went to sit on the other side of Sina. I leaned back on my chair, curious to see what would happen next. Sina took a sip of his foamy whiskey sour and leaned back in his chair as well, looking straight at me. The Italian looked at Sina with a silly look on his face. “Do you love this girl or do you want to spend the night with her?”, Sina asked the Italian, “Look at her, blond hair, big breasts, blue eyes, an arian master piece, Hitler would have been proud”, Sina pulled my hair, it hurt a bit, he made a grouchy face and pulled so hard I had to tilt my head back, I pretended not to like it, and looked straight at the Italian’s confused eyes at the same time. “She’ll blow you for 300 Euros, a whole night with her is 500”, Sina continued, “No, 1000 Euros for a whole night”, I interfered, still looking at the Italian, whose whole entire body posture was changing, you could see the insecurity take over, his dick must have gone soft by now. “Shut the fuck up bitch, I’m your fucking pimp”, Sina told me, and I went quiet. “It’s 300 for a blowjob here in this bar, 500 to take her to your hotel room. You can Paypal half of it now, half of it later”, the Italian attempted to make some kind of joke, “It’s not a hotel, it’s an AirBnB!”, I could hardly hear  his words through the lights, the music and the chaos, drowning man. “And if you fuck her and don’t pay the second half right away afterwards, I’ll send my friend Harry to your AirBnB”, Sina continues. I was impressed. What a way to turn around the power dynamics, turning his jealousy into acting. Had Sina come up with all of this while he was in the bathroom, or was it all happening completely impulsively? Also, why did I like to be put in this position, where I’m suddenly Sina’s property, the unmasked femme fatale, this side of me has been sleeping for a long time. I used to identify immensely with it, but in this moment, she’d taken over, Sina had understood and knew how to handle her. My feminist friends would be ashamed of me and I was warm and wet. The Italian left the table, his friends saving him from the situation by wanting to leave the bar to go to some club. “But I could have you for free, right?”, the Italian whispered in my ear as we said our goodbyes. I giggled, “Ok, but don’t tell Sina about it”, I said an gave him a kiss on his scratchy cheek. I then turned to Sina, still quite sure what had just happened was all an act, fun and games. But I was wrong. “A complete turn off”, Sina yelled out, “this is over, you’re not sleeping at my place tonight, call your fucking friend Katja”. I was shocked. And confused. Is he still acting? “But I thought our thing was that we’re free enough to do whatever we want”, I told him, “And also, you literally just told me earlier that you never get jealous”. “I’m not jealous, I’m disappointed”, Sina replied, “I was suffering, sitting here alone, watching out for your suitcase, with a full bladder, you have no idea how much I had to pee, my god! AND I was bored, nobody was texting me, not even Edo, I didn’t get a single notification!”, “Jesus Christ, that sounds AWFUL, sitting here all alone with a full bladder”, I yelled out, sarcastically. Now I was the one who was getting angry. “Well you come here to Berlin and try to make me jealous?”, Sina said. “I did not try to make you jealous, I was just bored by you going on and on about yourself and how great artists you and Tarik are! And so I decided to go for the fun for a second”, I said, “30 minutes!”, Sina bursted out, “I was sitting here for 30 minutes, waiting for you to finish off with some Italian AirBnB-bro!”, I couldn’t help but laughing at this, heartedly, I had to appreciate Sina for still dropping funny lines like this, even in a place of anger and frustration. “And you were obviously trying to make me jealous”, Sina continued, “which is not working, cause I don’t have any emotions for you. I just met you, and already you’re starting to play games, super fucking toxic. It’s mediocre female toxicity, and it’s nasty and not sexy. I’m not gonna fuck you tonight.”, Sina was now looking at me with drunk eyes. “Oh please Sina, fuck me! My whole world will fall apart if you don’t fuck me tonight! I’ll be crying miserably all night cause I won’t get your dick!”, I yelled out, Sina was now putting his face in his hands. He looked up again saying, “That’s the cheapest kind of sarcasm I’ve ever heard. I’m a comedian, sarcasm is my middle name. Sina Sarcasm Khani, okay? And turn that fucking thing off, this is over”, he then took my phone out of my hands, I’d been filming his freakout the whole entire time.

Sina is running around his apartment looking for a second condom. I’m hoping he won’t find one, it would spare me a discussion and/or negotiation. It’s now five o’ clock in the morning and I’m naked and tired and my thumb still hurts. Sina comes into the bedroom again, also naked, looks in his cupboard if there might be a condom in there. “Tomorrow, you’ll go get condoms and then you fuck me in the ass”, I say to him, well knowingly that this turns him on and frustrates him at the same time, he’s definitely an ass man, it’s written all over him. I get up and start putting back on my pyjamas. “Ok”, Sina lies down again. Fully dressed, I put my head on his chest and wrap my leg around his body, my favourite cuddle position. I smell his neck. I love smelling the necks of my lovers. All of my lovers smell different, Sina smells like some kind of middle-eastern herb, might be cumin. Or turmeric. “M is my intelligent lover, N is my tender lover, and you be my rough lover”,  I tell Sina, and he agrees, “Ok, I’ll be your rough lover. I’ll punish you when you’ve been bad, award you when you’ve been good”, “Have I been good now?”, I ask him, “No, you’ve been bad you cunt, who the fuck do you think I am? I didn’t come yet, how dare you?”, he says, and my mouth fills with saliva, I smile, “Ok I’ll be a good, normal girl and lick you until you come”. I move down to taste his dick. 

Sina’s dick is average size, about 16 centimetres I’d guess, it’s slightly crooked, not much, let’s say 5-10 degrees. He’s circumcised cause this dick is Persian, the skin tone a dark shade of flesh. There’s a large vein on the front of his shaft, creating a small bump that I enjoy sensing when I move my lips up and down, back and forth, the vein subtly tickling my upper lip. His penis head is kind of beautiful, smooth and without any moments of negativity, like small spots or pimples or anything like that. He’s secreting more pre-cum than I’m used to, which pleases me, I like to see the small, shiny drops break out of his tiny hole like pearls out of a mussel, as I wrap my hand around his dick and move it up and down. I spit on his penis head and look him into his eyes before I swallow his hole entire dick, it tastes like skin, I let his full bush around his crotch tickle my chin and my nose. I then suck him until he comes. I don’t swallow, but spit his cum into the thumb-water in the cup next to the bed. This is an interesting automatism, cause normally I always swallow. But in this moment, I don’t want to, and I can’t think of any other reason besides just not wanting to. “Hahah, the poor cup”, Sina giggles a bit post-orgasm, and I’m relieved he doesn’t question my not-swallowing. “Good girl though”, he then tells me and kisses me, “You’re completely forgiven for making me jealous earlier”. I’m doing my make-up in Sina’s bed, getting ready to go to the theatre. I’m gonna go to the Volksbühne to see a performative reading by Lydia Haider. Sina doesn’t want to join, says he’ll only go to the theatre to see a Florentina Holzinger piece, and that Lydia Haider is just an out-dated copy of Florentina Holzinger. Sina has a personal story with Florentina Holzinger, which obviously makes him less objective, and I’m pretty sure he’d be interested in Lydia Haider as well if she’d been the Austrian artist staying with him for a week, drinking, talking and kissing. Sina is an opportunist and therefor needs to know he’ll somehow benefit from other people and their work, otherwise he’s not interested. This is also why he’s now interested in my work, cause he knows I’ll write about him. He knows that spending time with me means he’ll play a part in my work, which gives him a sense of importance, a sense of meaning. He’s been involved in a film project for the past two years, Creeps from the Middle East it’s called. It’s an ongoing series about Sina’s own life. He’s told me how that project served him like a big, soft pillow: No matter how tragic his life would be, everything could and would always be used in the film. And I relate immensely with this attitude. “Even my own death would serve me, cause then I’ll die on camera, which would be the end of the series, the final episode”, he’s told me, proudly. The production team had a fallout with Sina, then quit him altogether, quit the Creeps. Sina didn’t get to die on camera this time after all, and he stopped living in a movie, started feeling depressed and lost in his own reality. But he immediately understood how I myself am constantly looking for new content for my work, which is why I went to Berlin to meet him in the first place. We’d connected on Instagram because of a mutual interest in each other’s work, and one week later I went to Berlin to meet him, then ended up spending a whole weekend with him. We didn’t fuck the first weekend, but we did the second, this weekend. Sina is more than happy to be my content, my subject matter, my muse, cause it’ll give his life new purpose and meaning. He has the spirit of a true artist, like me: Forever searching, constantly creating even if he’s not, always looking for the next project, the next expansion of vision, the next opportunity, the next wave splash. I don’t know them personally, but I know that both Florentina Holzinger and Lydia Haider are like this as well, all true artists are, we have to be, everything has potential to be interesting, everything can be sacrificed for the purpose of creation, even our own dignity. Everything is as interesting as one decide for it to be. Add your own meaning, stir the pot, enjoy the chaos, and record the whole entire apocalypse while it’s going down.

Sina’s lying next to me in bed, watching me brush up my face in front of the round mirror I’ve placed up against some pillows. “The girl wants to go out tonight, but I don’t”, Sina’s telling his friend A. on the phone. “The girl’s name is Ronja”, I say loudly, A.’s on speaker. Sina hangs up and turns to me. “I’m worried I might get a double chin”, I tell him, and show him just how double-chinny my chin can get. “It’s a part of life”, Sina says, “look, I have one too”, “I know you do, baby”, I say, and turn to my own reflection in the mirror again. “A. even has a tripple chin”, Sina adds, “Yikes”, I say, “The horror!”. “When will we have anal sex?”, Sina asks me, as I put on lipgloss. “Hmmm.. when I’ve been a bad girl and need a good punishing?”, I ask him, looking at my own lips, smiling. I slowly smother the lipgloss on my mouth, back and forth while I continue talking, “First, you have to get me all wet and silly and warm and juicy, then you first fuck me in my pussy, then in my ass, and if it hurts too much, you stop and fuck me in my pussy again, really roughly, punishing me for being such a stupid, little, sensitive girl”, I feel a tickle, am turned on by myself, how nasty and seductive I can be, I look at my glossy lips in the mirror. “But you’ve been a good girl”, Sina tells me and strokes my hair. “I know, I’ve been very good”, I tell him, as I get up and walk out of his bedroom, slowly, well knowing he’s checking out my perfect ass as I leave the room. He follows me, am satisfied by my own irresistibility. I stand at his door with my back turned against him, he’s now taking photos of me. I twerk for him and his camera, look over my shoulder and smile at him, enjoying this objectification, being looked at this way makes me wet and happy. He puts his phone away and takes one step towards me, then puts his arms around my waist, we kiss, “Let me lick you just a bit”, I tell him, “Say please”, he says, “Let me lick you please”, I say, then turn around and slide down his body until I’m on my knees. I open his pants and look up at him while I taste his dick and start drooling, luscious, hungry, nasty, he loves it, of course, I kinda do too.

I take off my clothes and go to the bedroom, Sina’s putting on a condom. I want him to fuck me doggy style, and he does. I love it, I’m thinking about how I look from his perspective and wish we had a mirror, then melt into the energy bursting from my pussy. “Do you want me to come?”, Sina asks me as he’s turning me around to fuck me missionary, “Yes, please come for me, baby”, I say, and he breaks down in pleasure on top of me.

“Be a good girl and give me one of your vanilla blowjobs today”, Sina tells me the next morning, “I want you to suck me like you love me, like it’s our wedding day today” he continues, “Oh yes, it’s our wedding day today, yesterday was our wedding!”, I say, excited, “Yes and our grandmothers had a fist fight!”, Sina says and I laugh, “Yes and it freaked both of us out!”, I say, “No”, Sina says, “We were cool about it”, “Ok but then my mom freaked out about it, cause she doesn’t like my grandma to interact with other grandmas general”, I say, take my computer and leave the bedroom. “You have one hour to write about sex with me”, Sina tells me, and I go find a nice spot in a window frame to write all of this down. “And no alias, use my real name!”, Sina shouts at me from the bedroom.

“Done!”, I yell out exactly one hour later, “And it’s exactly one o’ clock!”, I smile at Sina, proudly, “Yes, I checked, exactly one o’clock”, Sina confirms, “So I’ve been a good girl?”, I ask Sina, “Yes, you’ve been a very good girl. Less punishment and more reward for you today. Now read out loud to me what you’ve written”. 

Sina and I are going out for a drink, we both need a change of scenery after having spend the whole day in bed, writing. “One drink”, I say in the U-Bahn, “A drink”, Sina says, “A drink means several drinks”, he explains, “Yes, but I said ONE drink”, I say, “One drink means one drink”. Then we call Tarik. We’re trying to convince him to play a role in my master project. After ten minutes of brainstorming with Tarik, Sina and I are both riding a wave of renewed energy. Excited and stimulated, we walk into a random bar. It’s a lesbian bar called Silver Future. “Shit, the bartender in here hates me, lets go sit in the back, so she doesn’t see me”, Sina whispers at me, “Omg, why do all bartenders in Berlin hate you”, I say. It’s not the first time we’ve been to a bar and had to hide away from the bartender. We know each other since two weeks. “Tarik’s definitely in, you should do a shared post with him and I”, Sina says, and I go get us a new round of drinks to celebrate. A large woman dressed in black is sitting alone at the bar, chain smoking while drinking a cup of tea. I’m thinking she must have some interesting stories to tell, the devastating life experience is all over her smoke-shrouded face. I ask her why she’s drinking tea and she doesn’t really react, just stares at the coffee machine behind the counter. She looks very sad, depressed, but kinda normal at the same time, just like weighed down by the apathy and cynicism that might hit us all one day if we keep feeling like we’re loosing in life. I go back to Sina with our drinks, “I think that woman must have some good stories to tell”, I say to him, “Yes, but she’s not ready to talk yet”, Sina says, and I know he’s right, but I’m impressed by how he’s able to tell from where he’s sitting. “Or she’d start open up and let everything out and we’ll never get rid of her again. It would ruin our night! You can talk to her when you’re bored, but you won’t be bored, cause you’re with me, Sina fucking Khani”, he continues. I keep waiting for him to finish that sentence off with a laugh or a twink, but it never comes. Apparently, it wasn’t a joke. “Let’s go sit somewhere else, I hate these lesbian chairs”, Sina says. At the new table Sina keeps wanting to change seats with me cause he’s distracted by whatever’s happening around us. He says he prefers to look at me in front of the plain wall paper in the background, which I find flattering. “Why do this man keep walking around?”, Sina says, which makes me laugh, “He’s been to the toilet like 3 times since we sat down ten minutes ago”. Sina’s getting another beer and I’m starting to feel tired. My one drink has turned into three. Sina returns and starts talking about Florentina Holzinger again, he’s drunk now, drunk and nostalgic. An Indian-looking man with a basket of samosas, a bouquet of roses and a polaroid  camera comes into the room. “Wow, normally these guys only offer one of those services. But this man does the full programme”, Sina says, and I jump off my chair, “Come on, let’s recreate the photo you have of you and Florentina on your fridge!”, we get up and I give my best Florentina Holzinger-look as the photographer clicks his camera. The photo turns out perfect, and Sina and I get busy posting it in our Insta-stories. “Ronja Brainstorm - the next Florentina Holzinger?”, Sina writes in his post and we both laugh about it. Sina goes to get another beer, “The last one”, I tell him, “I’m tired”. He comes back and start baffling on and on about Florentina again: “In terms of network, she’s in the highest category there is for me”, and, “I really respect her”, and “If it wasn’t for that Austrian, fucking mountain-Nazi of a boyfriend she has, we’d be doing great things together. And he doesn’t even fuck her!”. Sina’s now sitting less straight, hunching his back, his hand around his beer, a sad look on his face. I’m now both tired, bored and irritated. “I want to go home now”, I say to Sina, who then instantly looks up, starring me straight into the eyes, “No”. After having discussed if we’re leaving or not for what feels like ages, I find myself outside in the cold streets with Sina, furious. He’s given me the task of finding out how to get to his place and I’m running around trying to find the right bus stop, while Sina’s being of no help at all. “I’ll order us an Uber, but you have to pay. Also I want to go to the Späti and get us some beers”, he rambles, “Ok, fuck it, I’ll pay the Uber if you promise to shut the fuck up all the way home!”, I say it and I mean it, “Do you have some cash for my beers?”, he then asks, “Do you really need three whole beers?”, I ask him in the Späti before I throw 5 Euros at him, whatever, here you fucking go. In the Uber Sina wants to listen to music, but the driver is trying to tell him that it’s not possible, because of something about the bluetooth connection. Sina apparently doesn’t get it, Sina needs the music now. Any music, apparently. “Sina, it doesn’t work, not possible for you to connect your phone!”, I say to him, “You remind me of my ex-girlfriend, she was always like that, what a bitch”, Sina sneers at me, and I go quiet cause it seems like the only right thing to do at this point. “Is that man really 42?”, I think to myself and stare out the window. “Alles gut?”, the Uber driver asks me through the rear window, “Jaja, alles gut”, I reply. We catch eye contact in the mirror for a second. Brown, warm eyes underneath a heavy blanket of brow. I let my eyes wander to his fingers on the wheel. They look quite large, hairy, I’m thinking three of those would fit well into my vagina, fill me up, tickle my g-spot, while his other big arm holds me tight into his body, and he whispers in my ear “Alles ist gut, alles ist gut”, over and over and over again, until I collapse in pleasure. Ahmed, my Arab protector from the Persian lunatic next to me. Sina doesn’t even have a driver’s license, but Ahmed knows how to steer a wheel, look out for the ladies and finger them until they don’t know any other words besides his name. “When are you leaving tomorrow?”, Sina is asking me, and I look over and see him sitting with his phone up against his ear, playing music, Mockery of The Quran by Mohsen Namjoo. Am I about to get caught up in some kind of religious fight? Could it get any worse than this? I roll my eyes, “As early as possible”, I say, and look out the window again. “Yes, leave as early as possible please, I’m done with you”, Sina says, his voice echoing with drunk viciousness. 

Arriving home, I go straight to the living room to get ready for bed. I hear Sina putting on music in the kitchen, opening another beer and turning on his radio. “Come to the kitchen honey, let’s make peace. I just gave the Uber driver one star and now I feel so much better”, Sina says coming into the living room. “No, I don’t want to, I want to go to bed”, I say, and he leaves again. On the couch, I take out my computer and open this document. I start writing a letter to Niko: 

Dear Niko. What a fucking chaos here. I’m constantly dancing on a whole new spectrum, between trauma-activated anger, drooling desire and endorphin-releasing inspiration. I guess it could be called the Sinja-spectrum. It’s 01.42 in the night, Sina is in the kitchen cooking himself dinner, I’m on the couch in the living room with the heating bottle pressed up against my vagina. Sina was acting like a fucking asshole again tonight, I only know him since two weeks, but I think it’s safe to say that he has an alcohol problem. Anyway, I don’t really care, I think our professional relationship will live on regardless, maybe it’ll even benefit from this nasty volatility of his. Tomorrow I want to go back to Leipzig and keep on working. I like that Sina sees my drive, that he understands that I need to work, and that everything is kinda like work to him as well. I think you understand this too N, but in a different, less penetrating way, literally. Anyway, I’m tired and irritated and want to sleep now. Should I watch something? I’m not sure.

I’m interrupted as Sina opens the door again. I knew this would happen. “Baby, let’s make peace”, he says, and I look at him from behind my computer. “You’re the one who’s been acting like a fucking asshole towards me, so that’s on you now”, I tell him, and he goes to sit down across from me on the couch. “You have to always be on my side, and you weren’t in the Uber before”, Sina explains, and I scoff, “I don’t have to always be on your side at all, and nothing happened in the Uber before, what are you talking about?”, I tell him, have zero sympathy left for his bullshit at this point. “I wanted to listen to music and you were not helping me out with that, but plotting against me with the Uber driver”, Sina continues the madness, and I can’t help but laugh a bit. “That’s ridiculous”, I say, and I literally don’t know what to add to that. “Is this your way of making peace with me?”, I then ask him, he has a wild look in his eyes now. “My ex-girlfriends were never on my side and I need someone who’s unconditionally on my side! Even if I’m wrong in that moment, which I mostly am, especially when I’m drunk. I’m not stupid, I’m just wrong!”, he says, and starts walking around the living room, laughing at his own jokes. I remain on my back with the computer on my belly. Sina keeps walking around the living room, repeating his last sentence, laughing about it for himself: “I’m not stupid, I’m just wrong, I’m not stupid, I’m just wrong…”. I take a deep breath.  “All of that is completely irrelevant information to me, cause I’m not in this to be your potential girlfriend. My interest in this relationship is first and foremost based on artistic purposes. So you don’t have to think of me as a potential future partner. Cause I for sure won’t be”, I tell Sina, and he comes to sit across from me on the couch again. “I’m the most interesting thing that ever happened to you, you need me much more than I need you, without me you’re just a boring, normal, white art whore from a bourgeoisie, Neo-liberal, danish family. Sieg Heil!”, Sina says, and I can’t help but laugh again, the absurdity of it all. The look in his eyes is now of complete and utter poison, poison pointed at me. “Leave me to sleep now, Sina. And don’t come in here again”, I tell him, and he leaves. Thank God. 

“Baby, good morning, I’m so sorry about last night”, I open my sleepy eyes and see Sina standing at the door again in the new daylight. “Come to bed”, Sina tells me, “No, you can come here”, I say to Sina, and he comes to lie down on his back next to me, I put my head on his chest and wrap my leg around his. “I sleep so well here, it’s strange”, I say to Sina in a soft, crispy morning voice. “And it really is strange to me, cause there’s so much happening here, and you’ve been so mean to me, sex and drama, your insanity, but then I just sleep like a baby at night. Usually I don’t sleep well at other people’s places, even if it’s my best friends”, I explain. “It’s because you have everything you need here”, Sina says, “You have the art, the drama, the inspiration, the stimulation, everything you need in order to be productive”. I am quiet for a minute, let it sink in. I feel Sina’s heart beating underneath his warm chest. “Is that so?”, I ask, and inhale the smell of his neck. “Yes Ronja, it is so. I’m good for you”, Sina says, then tightens his embrace around my sleepy body. “I’m a good boy”. 

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.