🕶️ You possess an intensity you can’t dim or control.

🎧 Listen to me read it — just the way I meant it.

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

Field Notes from Mercedes

Ew, now I have to choose to either take care of this bastard or be a bad person. 

Why are some men like this? Too soft for anyone’s good? Who emasculated him at such a young age that he never got to taste his own testosterone?

I honestly just can’t feel attraction to men like that. I need a man to put me in my place, make me feel desired. Not offload his inferiority complex into my arms of steel.

You don’t get to capitalize on women for centuries and then flip the script in the eleventh hour.

“What are you thinking about?” KittyAnn blurts. 

She breaks my fantasy, and I’m salty about it.

So I turn up the heat. She looks cold. And the white noise cuts the tension of her puppy dog attachment nonsense.

This isn’t like her, to trail after me like a lost duckling. Not since — well, that whole thing.

She changed after that.

“Nothing,” I lie. I know she knows I’m lying, and I’m comfortable with that. So I don’t say anything else.

She makes a little noise in her throat, like hmph, only it’s flirty and nonchalant. Not bitchy. Which feels unnerving.

She’s quiet for a minute. I pull down the visor and check my makeup in the mirror. My eyeliner always smears for some reason.

“When Clair was a baby,” she says, “I had this little umbrella stroller. You know, one that folds up, collapses into something a bit bigger than an umbrella.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” I say.

“Of course you haven’t,” she says. “Why would you? You’ve never had a baby.”

I mean, she’s right. So why is my face stinging?

“Anyway,” she says, “I’ve just been thinking about that. About how the greatest virtue of an umbrella stroller is the fact that it squishes and contorts itself so that it’s easy to move around. When you’re not even using it. It’s loved by people for what it is when it’s not being used for its intended purpose.”

I take a deep breath. The hair’s standing up on the back of my neck. “Sounds deep,” I say.

“Oh, incredibly,” she says. “Or maybe not at all.” Her voice sounds like laughter and Pixie Sticks in the back pocket of a forty-year-old who’s still wearing jeggings. Somewhat ridiculous. Absolutely out of style.

“You’ve really never —” she starts to say — but she’s interrupted when I slam on the brakes. I clench my teeth and brace against my right foot, arms rigid, as a frazzled fawn darts right in front of my car. He skids in the road, sacred shitless, and leaps away like he didn't almost just kill all of us.

For a minute we just sit there. Nothing’s broken. No leaking fluids, no broken glass — just two hearts wrecked up side by side, chests heaving, adrenaline and sweat and racing blood and then the moment starts to crash and I remember that we’re not any closer to where we were trying to go than when we started this drive but maybe that’s the point.

***

Sometimes when it feels like Mercedes is blowing me off, it’s because she wants me to stop following her and just be her.

She gets tired of being admired, described – objectified, essentially. She doesn’t exist to be talked about and pontificated on, yet that’s often how I interact with her. I treat her like a novelty, a mystery.

But she just wants to be a person.

I’ve been chasing her for weeks. Our last interaction showed up here, remember? She crushed a cigarette under her foot and flipped me the finger as she walked away, heels clicking against pavement. And we hadn’t talked since – until now. With this piece. Where she’s no longer an object but the actual protagonist.

Stop looking at your life from the outside in, she says. You’re afraid to step into my skin because I have an intensity that you can’t dim or control.

And she’s right.

Because the portal to every next level is through the parts of yourself that you avoid – and I’m beginning to understand that what I’ve been avoiding is self-ownership.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — get in touch with me. I’d be honored to hold that space for you.