Didi (2024)

dir. Sean Wang

The moment after you’ve fucked up again is almost relaxing. Sitting on the curb, at peace with your own fated loneliness. Sinking into yourself. Back in the comfort of isolation. Like an old mattress—like a brown suede couch you know better than your own skin—soda stain, 2003; stab wound, 1999; crusty vomit, last summer—like a haircut you’ve wanted to change for 10 years—like the tacky quilt your mom sewed before you were even a thought. The TV blares. Here’s the latest: bombs over Baghdad. The patriotic beauty of Tomahawk missiles, anchors composing Homeric war poems live on air. Godly retribution, divine streaks of red in the Babylonian sky; a tearful Giraldo Rivera at the scene, praising the beauty of conquest; an invasion on Pay-Per-View. A wrathful Bill O’Reilly on the screen, his fists pounding the table, demanding murder as a toddler would demand a slice of chocolate cake—let me see some fucking bodies—

But enough nostalgia, lil bro. You’ve been in this dark parking lot for hours. You should probably call your sister to pick you up.

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The streetlight bends over to get a better look at you.

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Would it kill you to take a little pity? Looks like Fahad’s still hanging out with those girls. I remember a dorm room—I can’t decide if it was a Boy Scouts thing or a church camp or what—it doesn’t matter—but I remember a dorm room, and an older boy, a Ladies’ Man. I handed him my phone. “Here’s how you do it,” he said, and took a selfie of himself laying down shirtless. Showed me a gallery of photos like it; he’d reduced romance to repetition; he’d formed callouses where I couldn’t stand to be touched. I juggled two competing explanations in my head: first, I was ugly, and he was hot; second, I was doomed, and he was not. How easily I could have fallen head-first into the rabbit hole of involuntary celibacy, of men’s rights (specifically, the “rights” to guaranteed property and sex); I flirted with that abyss in chatrooms and forums and image boards. I turned up logs just to watch the centipedes scatter. I have a soft spot for repulsive things.

(“Are you nervous?” she asked, her hand on my thigh during school lunch, no one else seeing. This pretty older girl I couldn’t act normal around. “Um,” I said. I focused hard on my blood flow to kill my erection. “I’m… shaky,” I said, choosing honesty this time. She laughed. “Shaky? Okay.”)

Lies are landmines, Chris. Careful where you lay them. Conversations feel like interrogations, don’t they? You thought you were making progress, endearing yourself to them—and then the light shines on your face, and your little fib blows up—the toothpick holding up your friendship snaps. This is what you get for telling them you could film. You deserve it, of course; you earned this shame all by yourself; but what’s the alternative? Honesty blows up too. Honesty is a chemical burn. Sincerity is a weapon of mass destruction, Dìdi. Mr. Cheney was looking in the wrong place. He should’ve gone to war with the suburbs.

There must have been a reason this shit kept happening. There must have been a disease. Where there is a disease, there is a cause, and where there is a cause, there is blame. Don’t worry, RFK Jr. will get to the bottom of it. Once, in a previous life, I texted everyone in my contacts I could conceivably consider a friend “happy new years!!!” after the big apple dropped, and no one replied, not even the next day. Who could I have blamed for that? Who could I have blamed for that summer afternoon when I called her because I just wanted to talk to someone, anyone? (“Uh, well, I have to get back to it,” she said; the antecedent to “it” being her life in general; I really admired her and her older brother Francis, the smartest and coolest people I knew, respectively; “okay, see you at school,” I said; click.) Not myself. Certainly not myself. I’d tried everything short of taking an actual risk. I’d made an effort to put myself in good situations so I could bomb them all. In those days, I would rate my conversations as successes or failures. I could have graphed them for you.

Here’s the deadly pattern: begin with the desire to belong; then perform masculinity to impress them; but perform masculinity a little too hard; express an opinion you don’t actually hold in order to seem cool and irreverent, but it’s a step too far; too obviously performed; now, commence the interrogation; scramble to invent an alibi; get found out; go home. Silent drive. Silence tight as a cable at the end of its spool. Silence like an accident waiting to happen. You swear there’s a lesson here, but where? You can’t not lie. You can’t express your actual thoughts and feelings. They’d call you gay again. You’d be labeled a fucking queer. The only thing better than masculinity is ironic femininity. For instance, a shirt of a women’s bathroom sign. For instance, a performed gesture, an exaggerated limp wrist—a joke at another’s expense, laughter redeemable as social credits—turning in your chips at the counter—but the counter's closed for the night—the house is empty—

The arcade invites you in—

Oh, I still have so much to unlearn.

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Have you ever felt so totally, imperially alone that the idea of connection feels actually disgusting? That it makes you gag?

Have you ever wished you were more like your sister? Have you ever felt like a teenage robot?

Have you ever covered your nails in pencil lead late at night?

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They walk in twos. You hold them in the snowglobe in your palm and watch the micro-dramas play out. They walk in twos.

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Dìdi, love’s not waiting for you by the lockers. Love’s holding its hand out to you, infinitely patient, while you insist on finding it elsewhere. You want love, but you also want to prove that you don’t need it. That you can become anyone. But the changes will only come when you stop pretending. The becoming will only begin when you stop begging for it. Chris, you won’t find your real name on your bedroom carpet or behind your sister’s door, I can tell you that much; but maybe it’s necessary, this pointless searching; maybe it’s part of the Process, with a capital P; maybe God does have a plan and maybe the plan hurts. But then, why does it feel like wasted time? Like years set on fire, but the fire is not warm?

Real fire should be warm, Dìdi. Real fire should have heat.