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.
Dylan reads a lot of popularist literature and spends time culling an intellectual mandate from the internet. It’s easier for him to learn who he is through other people’s interests. ‘They call it chemsex,’ he says, ‘but it’s just fucking on drugs, not something new or whatever.’ Perverse curiosity crinkles his brow and he looks at my feet. ‘You ever done it?’ Only if anti-depressants count, I say. The mixture of depersonalisation and impossible to culminate erections were certainly something. I could go for hours and feel nothing, not even remorse. ‘Most people like smoking crack,’ he says.
The minute I meet her eye, I can tell she’s gonna let something out. There’s crazy wafting off her like cartoon stink lines. ‘Poisonous being,’ she yells. The elocution is sharp despite being parsed through the hanky clasped to her face. I shouldn’t be mad but she’s pressed her prejudices into an open wound and the sting makes me yell. Fuck you, cunt. Under the self-induced surprise, it feels good to vocalise. ‘No,’ she barks back. ‘Fuck you, poisoning the earth.’ I give her the finger with futile juvenility and walk away, my body still vibrating with rage.
Carter slips his palm into the small of my back and leads me in with unnecessarily chivalrous flair. I can feel his greed in the pressing of his fingers, the probing, eager electricity working its way into my spine and consuming my sense of security. ‘It’s right this way,’ he says. I don’t want to be wanted, by him or anybody else, but I bear it under the burden of politeness. I try to find ways to extricate myself from the mores around me, to bring my scarring to the surface and scare off my pursuers. I never succeed.
If you opened Pandora’s box just the littlest bit, I imagine it would sound like one of Jonah’s sighs. When he squeezes my hand gently and lets one escape, like demon vapours, I don’t say anything, but squeeze back and wait. ‘Sometimes I worry about breathing spider eggs in by accident,’ he says. ‘What if they hatched in my lungs and I didn’t realise.’ Jo doesn’t need placation, he just needs to be heard, to be witnessed. I fasten my fingers through his and look forward. You’d know, I say, you would know if something was wrong with you.
I watch the amputee kid playing soccer with his folks for like an hour, something about his happiness heckling my wellbeing. He’s got one of those shiny carbon fiber looking prosthetics, like a real athlete. Running around and giggling and celebrating, they all look so well adjusted. Kid can’t even be ten, got his whole life ahead of him and he’s already grappled with horror most people never contemplate. Everything must be easier from there, like growing flowers in manure, beauty born from shit. I envy his tragedy, the worst of my life will always be waiting for me.
I found her vibrator when I was putting the laundry away, tucked in a sock amongst the innocent pairs. Sadly, we had less sex per year than anniversaries total, and the gap only ever got bigger. Its presence inflamed something seething beneath my skin. Why would she need it if she didn’t need me? Passively furious, I stapled the sock shut. Maybe I thought it would lead to resolution or a healthy conversation. Probably I just wanted leverage for my anger. Wrapped up in myself, I waited to explode. It never occurred to me that she had other avenues.
A Few Short Words 