‘Nah, man,’ Jessie says, ‘it’s not like that. She still loves you, of course she does, she just wants you to love you too.’ He rubs at his nose idly and watches the other patrons mill. ‘It’s gotta be hard for her,’ he says, ‘I mean you’re pretty fucking annoying.’ Anyone else might have gotten under my skin, but I know what he means and how he means it. I’m told loving me is like living with an unscratchable itch. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he tells me, ‘I’ll always love you, just ease up on the torment and so will she.’
I’m terrified I’ll never be anything, I tell him, that I’m not capable or special or anything and I’ll destroy my life pining after somebody I’ll never be. Damien puts his hand up, a palm out pause, and starts rummaging through his desk, overturning papers, shuffling drawers, and rifling with a bandit’s abandon. I let it last long enough to appreciate the theatrics before asking for the punchline. ‘I’m looking for fucks,’ he says, ‘I swear I had some for you but it looks like I’m fresh out.’ His words sound sincere but I listen to his eyes instead.
I’m on my knees at the foot of the bed staring at a point above Shelly’s head where the window moulding’s loose. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so fucked up,’ she says. ‘You’re too smart to be so fucked.’ Her voice sounds like pressed flowers. I tell her, being able to describe a hole doesn’t mean you can climb out of it. ‘But why’d you have to tell me,’ she says, ‘we were doing great.’ Inside the crack is a darkness that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the room, I crawl towards it until there’s nothing of me left.
He looks at me with an almost destitute seriousness and sighs longer than lungs have a right. ‘I want to fuck them all,’ he says, almost aquiver. ‘I can’t help it.’ Tense to the point of pain. ‘It’s killing me. It’s destroying me. I can’t see them as people anymore. I can’t see people, just fuck things and the rotting blackness inside me.’ And after, I ask, when you’ve fucked a thing? ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘beautiful nothing for long enough to notice, then horrors again.’ He closes his eyes and looks at something I’ll never see. ‘I feel monstrous.’
Caleb doesn’t look at me while he talks, it’s like he can’t spare the processing power. ‘I’ve automated my relationships,’ he tells me. ‘I started by scheduling updates, you know, cute little memes and shit, fluff. So I designed a chatbot that integrates with all my mail and social media. It’s got to the point now that the thing is even picking out gifts for me. It’s got better taste than I do.’ I ask him what happens when he goes out on dates and he just shakes his head. ‘I’m not doing this to meet people,’ he says.
The lily’s leaves are browning. I don’t know how to help. I’ve moved it in and out of sunlight and watered it more or less. It doesn’t want to thrive. I understand. It’s old now, half a decade at least, the roots must be knotted and cramped against the terracotta hull. Does it imagine there’s more to be had while it curls against its cage and feeds upon itself? Does it know open fields and boundless soil? I’ve never said anything, but the knowledge must be inside it, the pent potential of all living things trying to live more.
I’m not even human anymore, I’m just a composite of anxiety and idiom being dragged through a series of haggard experiences, collated daily and draped on chronology like a string of shitty pearls. I found out consciousness doesn’t exist and that was the end of it. It’s just data on slides with a discernible delay that puts the I into irrelevance. I mean, I didn’t need much convincing of something I already suspected, but it still hurt, you know. All my hope took away and replaced with determinist programming. There’s no purpose in it, I think, therefore I’m meaningless.
My girlfriend’s girlfriend is a cunt. I’m not allowed to say that, of course, but here we are. She’s archetypically composed and wields bias like small arms fire. The whiff of anything remotely heteronormative makes her rabid, even the shape of my masculinity, vague as it is, enables her to hate me for being something I never had say in. Sometimes we stay up drinking wine and yelling at each other while we wait for Katie to finish work. ‘You’ll never understand us,’ she says, but I do, I love them for it, it’s her ignorance I’ll never get.
She was living in the lounge by then, just boxes, a bed, and several ways to drink wine. The emptiness of the space moulded the acoustics into something desperate; sounds lost their sharpness in the gaussian echo. The room took her words as she talked and smeared their meaning. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked. I was invited once, I told her, neither of us sure it was true. She lay down beside me and we spooned for a while, autonomously generating warmth between us. ‘Be mad,’ she told me, asking as always for something I couldn’t give her.
In the nothing space between songs I tell her, you remind me of somebody that I used to love. She drops my hand with deciduous firmness. ‘They all have bow strings,’ she says, even the drummer.’ Non-traditional is the norm now, I say, it’s the hipster hegemony celebrating snowflakes. She sips her vodka and looks out over the heads. ‘Pink is pink no matter how you shade it.’ The band plays on in dissonant symmetry. I reach to retake her hand and she pulls away. ‘I don’t want to be the same anymore,’ she says, ‘it’s not enough.’
I often wish that I could take out the part of me that holds affection for others, not remove it, but present it in tangible presence to the target. I suppose that I worry my emotional inners are translucent and appear to the outer as little more than lace dressing on a dilapidated facade. I would cup my love gently in two hands proffered and couple the offering with supplicant intent lowered over my features. This, I would say, is the weight of your worth to me, misshapen maybe but undeniably real. Take it, it grows only for you.
We have no digital ties, no friends in common or group interests. If I’ve ever been in the same conceptual space as you it’s been as two people on the same crowded street, anonymous as foot traffic. There’s no reason to know one another, but you’re always at the top of my suggested friends list. How does it know? Do we look the same to a computer? How does an algorithm distill two disparate people into a calculated friendship? If I click ignore, I wonder if we might still meet one day and hit it off inside the overlap.
I dreamt of punching myself in the head. I so desperately wanted to hurt myself, but I couldn’t get any traction. The blows felt like nothing and the frustration, while palpable, only made the desire for pain worse. I’ve hurt myself before, in life and in dreams, and the satisfaction, though fleeting, is utterly real. Not being able to gain anything from myself in subconscious felt like the worst kind of misery. I woke wrapped in furious loathing and thought instantly to realise my dreams, though I can never actualise and live inside the fear of being mediocre forever.
There was glass in his cereal, so his wife wrote a letter and won them a settlement, enough feed for the debtors and moderate respite. One morning after, they woke to find the floor covered in shale. She reported it to the police but they were dubious and unhelpful, though tested the couple for substances at her insistence. His results were negative, hers were complicated. When her water broke nine months later they rushed to the hospital. After a length of agony and effort, all that she could produce was an occluded amniotic sack filled with nails and sand.
I take the thing from my pocket and place it in Sebastian’s hand. It squirms a little there, mildly galvanised ferrofluid. ‘Heavier than it looks,’ he says, what everyone says. Shy, slender tendrils probe out into the trenches of his palm, an apprehensive chiromantic inquisition, and Seb’s face drops into pallid reticence. ‘Is it supposed to hurt?’ Only when you know it’s there, I tell him. ‘And you always carry it around?’ For a moment I consider running, the horizon, and the lightness of a life without. It’s always there, I tell him, even when I wish it wasn’t.
A Few Short Words 