CHEETAH

Ch a pte r. 3

4851 September minutes. A three minute track. That’s 1/480th of a day. Every day, that’s 1/480th that’s mine again. The other 479? A struggle that ends with me locked inside a barrel of oily black quicksand, with each track adding maybe minutes for my lungs to whine and squeal and suck in bits of grey soot into leaky pipes that trap it in sticky morass, slowly succumbing to the pressure that builds like an anvil against my diaphragm. I can’t really blame anyone but myself for how thick the quicksand is. My hourglass is upturned. Added time only delays the inevitable. Quick sand. I beat it, until it runs red and spotted. But it cheats me. 4851 September minutes I’ve clawed back and shoved deep inside my head. I clutch both my ears in hopes of trapping the 4851 flakes of 24 karat gold, praying they don’t slip out from the gaps between my fingers. Like pop rocks, they crackle and burst softly against my wet, swollen eardrum. Endless background noise driven by a midi controller with a faulty circuit. But I know it hides meaning. Like a wolf, stalking its prey in an industrial winter, walking between walls of brutalist grey, I find myself yearning for the release of its teeth sinking deep into my arm, the tension in its jaws effortlessly snapping ligaments and reaching bone, its saliva drawing stringy blood. A refusal to let go - and I can’t tell between the two of us anymore. This midas bite is truth. It is triumph. It is meaning. The bite is my escape into a paradise far beyond this rectory of false prophets. A departure that is truly permanent, one I can’t slip back from like all the other times I’ve been tricked into believing.

My days spill into each other uselessly like split milk. They ignore all the lines I’ve scratched into the ground and they drip, seeping into the cracks, staining, reeking, culturing rot. My lines have no respect. Like the lines that stretch across my palm without boundary or direction, they lack meaning. Every time I clutch my left palm with my right in prayer, I dig into the crevices around my knuckles with the tips of my fingernails until I feel the cartilage pushing back. Resistance. My own body protests against the lines I mutilate it with. Has this always just been about a power struggle? A deranged dictator whose subjects have long overthrown their parliament? No, it can’t be that simple, can it? This is about the lines I draw. My lines are sour and fuzzy. My lines mock me. They curl and twist like salt on leeches. They pull me deep into wet and suffocating mud, down below the roots, aggressively warping into barbed wire leashes that hook around the sides of my neck, and force their way into my mouth. Hot with friction, they thrust past my throat, bitter like iodine and rust. Cannibalistic parasites; they mock me because they know I can’t live without punishment. My punishment. They know that I’m no different from them. I have nothing else. I am a tapeworm. My lines, creased and withered, lacerate my skin, branding it like a pig sent to slaughter. I am lost to noise, drained by impedance, phasing between gluttony and hypocrisy. I am a tone-deaf pseudo-postulant succumbing to the harmonics of a higher calling. I dig into my skin and form burrows and valleys and trenches and hideouts, drawing lines that wrap around me and run ruthlessly to divide and discourage. I stretch and crawl and weep, stripping myself of all my lines, but they reappear because they’re deeper set than I imaged. I am in ecdysis.

I have power. Power inside my hands. To mutilate my body. To starve it until I see the bones stretching my skin translucent. To not care how I look. To not care how my body looks. To not care how my body looks to other people. To not care how this body looks at other people. I am not my body. I will claw my way out into the nothingness that blankets my consciousness. My body is gaunt. My body is drained. My body is dying and taking me with it. Taking me into the blackness that envelops my consciousness. There’s nothing out there. There’s no one out there. Everyone is encased in flesh. Encaged by ribs that stretch skin. I will not leak out into life decimated by choice, willing sacrifice, pseudoaltruism, so much for the greater good (or is it a greater God?) but ultimately tricking yourself into believing you can see wonders of scales unimaginable in a blackness that coats my consciousness menacingly thick. I think. My body thinks. This body reacts. I enact. My body trips. This body is false. I am nothing as long as I care about this body I possess. For as long as I care about your body, I am nothing but consciousness sealed within a tempest of nothingness. A tempest of nothingness. This is no realization. This is no discovery. What did your body expect? I am nothing without my body. My thought is a lie. Your thought is too. I am greed. I am gluttony. I am no different. I am a hypocrite. I won’t let you inside my cage. A dome of ivory white, plastered over and over and over, layered to conceal, to hide what’s always been beneath, yellowed and cracking and yet pure and continuously endless. This constrictive claustrophobic dome is an echo chamber, an echo chamber into whose floor is gashed an angled entrance that's barely wide enough and I stand hunched over with my back against the wall in eternal paranoia, armed with a sharp stick forever pointed at that unknown intruder for it must enter from below. I will not leave this dome because the dome is my home, the singular constant, and I am this dome, this singular constant, a constant that at times is a reminder of comfort so intensely longed for but never here because I stand within, trembling. My arms lacking muscle lost from years of strain, my stick remains clenched, making naught of what remains of my dwindling urge to survive, this dome will collapse onto itself, leaving me nonexistent and shattered, a million little pieces strewn with intention, careless. Lost in blitzkrieg, I wander the vast and endless plains within this dome and I sway constantly, unsteady and with unease, awaiting a singular bullet, one that never arrives, my body suspended with crimson droplets dripping down my forehead and running so gracefully into my eyes, staining them a deep ruby-red that won’t wash out.

I am a cold, dull blade. I am the pain that pierces deep inside my abdomen. I am a dark alleyway at night on a November Tuesday. I am the cold night rain that drizzles down, shimmering softly in the street lights. I am the gentle breeze that stirs the tree leaves awake in a hush of white noise. I trap myself in the strangest of places that are yet familiar. Do you recognize me? Do you remember where I am? What makes you read these words? Why are you here? Does peering into my state of mind make you feel better about yourself? Do you enjoy playing a voyeur, some twisted fetish in this broken charade? Does this make me an exhibitionist? Do I entice you? We’re no better than each other. But that idea sickens me. It sickens me to my core, because I know I’m not like you. I take pride in my suffering. I’m a hypocrite. I am miserable. I am the list of all my burning bridges. I am the worst person I know. I am my numbingly intense hurt and loneliness. I am the constant dulling of my senses. I am the damp bitterness that lurks at the back of my mouth, right behind my molars, probing the length of my gums, licking the insides of my teeth with its sulfurous fumes. There’ll come a time when I’ve written down enough here, on this indenture to God, for my existence and suffering to be borne weightless and translated entirely into a bunch of meaningless letters to no one. It will be, at this point, that I’d have no reason to live anymore. What would you do then? Would you end your own life too? Or would you find someone else just like me, to consume and digest and break down and shit out? I know who you are, reading this. Fuck you.

This is a transition from arbitrary to abstract concepts, a transition driven by greed and selfishness, one driven by pure restlessness and cold, agonizing envy. This is a transition that’s trapped within my horizons, framed by rolling hills of the everyday, the same, the predictable, the tasteless, the “sometimes” in my periphery. This transition is a lens that’s been sanded down to capture memories of moments smudged beyond recognition, smudged beyond perception, a perception of disdain that’s lost on everyone else but me. Because I’m so different. Ha ha. The hills roll away from me. What is this a transition to? I was hoping you’d have the answer to that. I’m sure you do, and I know it’s just that you’d rather not tell me. You keep things from me all the time. I know this. I’m never really present when I’m with you anyway. I’d rather be tossed aside, spending my time dreaming of foreign vistas, swept away by trains of wonderful intoxication to tantalizing scenarios I make up in my head, some of them even involving you, but they all inevitably end with me drifting back down to solid surfaces, reminding me that that’s all they are - fantasies that remain wrapped up within themselves - and that that’s all they’ll ever be - fantasies that trip and fall and shatter into a million little pieces too small to tell apart. And I bend down trying to pick these shards of maladaptive daydreams back up but they prick my fingertips, sending jolts of current up to my elbow and all I feel is pain. Yet, I try again, and like an idiot, I try again, and I try again, making the same mistake over and over and over again. I learn nothing. I’m really mad at you this time, and it hurts. I just hope you understand that.

I am such a fucking fake. I live only to be seen by other people. I’ll never really open myself up to you. Every shattered fragment of myself that I put out into the world before you is an advertisement meticulously designed and crafted to influence the way you see (through) me, the way you read (over) me. I am a block of opaqueness. I am a sellout. I am entrenched in valleys of suffering and self pity and loathing, valleys I have designed (and redesigned) with nauseating intricacy, zig-zagging into disorienting oblivion, created as a byproduct of wishful thinking but in whose image? I barricade myself against the very last corner of my everchanging labyrinth, sending my infantry out to capture and contain your careless intrusion into my walled palace of pestilence, barbed wire, and muck. I have been digging a hole for several years now. I have made decent progress. I am consistent in the efforts I put in. And remarkably, every few dozen months or so, I dig to end up at grass. I’ve somehow hit surface beneath the soil. How can that be? I find that I’m back up at ground level and I’ve lost everything I’ve worked towards. I must have started digging horizontally, and upwards, I guess. I see things clearly now. I can’t believe I’ve been so fucking stupid. I’ve been in free fall, deluding myself with promises of redemption and escape so sweet it tastes bitter. I can see everything I’ve done now. I need to refocus. I cannot let this happen again. I will punish myself, learning a lesson I’ve learnt a million times over. “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.” I hate myself for leaving the gates to my gutters open to you. I’ve been careless. But my feelings for you are hard to place, morphing into shapes with boundaries that feel absent when I trace them with my fingers. You’re an ugly person, but that idea remains severed from you as a shape, distinct and separate. I hate myself for admitting that my feelings for you toss and turn, tumultuous and restlessly binary. But I’m lying to myself. They aren’t really in motion or undecided or uncertain. They’re frozen in place. They’re frigid and lifeless. They’re preserved in epoxy resin. I am divided into two equally worthless halves, both equally obsessed with you. Two halves, unsymmetrical and separated by one miserable mirror that reflects each half onto the other blown out of proportion and form. I’ll slice these feelings thinner and thinner and thinner until there’s nothing left of them, and one day I’ll finally forget all about you, a day that I will never remember, lost in blissful ignorance. My aggression is palpable, and I’ll make sure to keep it burning, prodding at it every couple of minutes to receive in response a growl, sometimes a yelp, and I’ll make sure I remember that I am unwilling to settle on mediocrity because I am not you.

There’s a soft fuzzy hum of electronic crackling in the back of my head. It’s those flecks of gold dust again. But they’re louder this time - loud enough to drown everything else out in the noise. I’m at the bar of a sweaty, blacked-out concrete nightclub, standing next to an even sweatier dance floor. The air is stagnant and humid with bodies pressed up and pushing against each other to the meditative drone that’s blaring out the speakers and thumping against my chest. There’s something lodged deep inside me and I’ve been trying to flush it out with alcohol. It’s been a while. The sound rushes back in and the speakers are so loud that I’m having trouble thinking. Things would be a lot easier not having to deal with whatever’s inside. I gulp down the last of whatever’s left in my glass and grab a bottle of Absolut as I walk away. I’m drifting in and out of the present. It comes and goes in waves and I’m barely escaping drowning in the tide. I’ll blame the tides on the moon. I’ll blame the moon on you. What’s your sign? What kind of music do you listen to? What kind of money do you make? Hold on, how old are you? I’m taking control of my life again and I’ll prove it by ruining everything I hold onto with white-knuckled desperation. I’ll never be caught off guard. I am vigilant. I look over my shoulder every fourth step. My lips remain sealed shut. I look both ways before entering my house. I double-check my locks. I trust the weight of metal. I keep watch in my concrete outpost, from within my coliseum of ash encased in glass. I laugh at the notion of paranoia. This is warfare explicit. This is a channel of pure white hatred and blood-red rage. This is the rebirth of undead ego. This is my Alexander Wang Adidas Originals Q1 Jacket. This is the nicotine that drifts off my cigarette, so nubile, deep down into the winding passageways of my lungs and lifts me off my feet and up above the angelic swirls of smoke, to the heavens with graceful and innocent spirit. I’m washed out; I’m baptised and reborn in the church of my new faith. Did you fall for it again? Did you really believe in my operation of pretense?

 C h  a  pt       e            r 4

I’ve been hiding again, veiled by this horrible labyrinth that weaves endlessly in and out of phase. I saw you again today. I wish I could blind myself to your sight, to your aleatory presence, because once you’re inside, you show no interest in leaving. You are my very own personal loiasis infection. I’m obsessed and I can’t tear myself away from watching you. But you’re really nobody. You’re nothing special. You’re just an idea. A construct that I created. I see you, and I watch the details of your face, its shape, your hair. I catch myself staring at your lips, and they’re always pert and perfectly still. I’ve never heard them speak. Will you make me hate you with your words when they someday fall mistakenly heard? How easy will it be for me to find faults with your tone, your accent, your intonation, your emphasis, your opinion, your interests, your points-of-view, your obsessions, your addictions, your vices, your fetishes, your voice, your flaws? Maybe I stare at your lips hoping that they’d open mine up to play softly with my tongue. God I wish I could stop thinking about you. I saw you again today, walking away from me and I pretended not to care. You turned around and I averted my eyes in adagio, shifting my line of sight from your ass to the vacant horizon, but I still watched you out the corner of my eye, hoping you’d try and steal glances back at me but I couldn’t make out the details so I’m left to assume that you didn’t. You make me question myself, my worth, my presence, my vanity. You nudge me off the roof of a very tall building, soft like a feather and gentle as a lie, to float down adagissimo to a slowly growing pool of blood; to go quietly. I am possessed by this idea of you that I made up. A self-inflicted disease. A voiceless idea. An idea that is so self-centred and narcissistic it makes me sick. I will never speak to your lips because they, like mine, remain pursed and seemingly sullen. I really hope that whatever lives inside you is what I have pictured inside my head. You make me so possessive. I’d like to strip you someday - of your clothes, spending hours carefully undressing you, poring over every little detail and imperfection that brands your skin distinctly yours, then peel through your personality, and finally your skin, tracing along every inch of your outline, feeling your texture against mine, tasting your scent, inhaling you, until my fingertips are stained sticky with blood that tastes sweetly metallic. But you’re just so pretty.

I’m not trying to say anything because when I say things, they become real. You’re being too much. You are the dust that I find in all the places I’ve brushed over. You bleed all over the hardwood floor after I’ve cleaned my house. This is over now. I’ll remember this time. I’ll go back to grunts and snores. My head is spinning, I’m dizzy. I touch the metal. I am one with soil. I am pure. I am full of shit. My fingers are numb. My skin is clean. This is over now. Why do you hurt me like this?

I don’t understand why this has to be so complicated. I don’t do well with sigils and unspoken signals. Won’t you wear your corsage of eyeworts and delicate nigella? Maybe you know they take me far away. I’ve stumbled into a strangely foreign meadow of wildflowers, tucked-away somehow, somewhere within this landscape of rot, beyond a lake of dark twisting shadows filled with strange fish that gleam and flicker like the stars on a moonless night. I know these grounds, but this is new. Is this your work? Maybe. You hand me flowers everyday, with that ever-stoic expression, frigid and neutral, leaving me trembling with uncertain dread, and I drop to my knees and hold my hands out in anticipation. On Monday, I find them holding cherubine trumpets of lophospermum. On Tuesday, they clutch Queen Anne’s Lace. On Wednesday, I find in them your elegant thorn-apples. On days like these, I wish I could look into your eyes and not feel disdain. I look for you everywhere only to shirk from presumptive potential. But I can only lie to myself so much. On Thursday, a tiny eyebright graces my palms. On Friday, the white hyacinth and crimson hibiscus. On Saturday, your junipers and humble pansies. And on Sunday, a solitary burgundy rose. I crawl around helpless, with scratched knuckles and bleeding elbows, in service to you. I want a world where a flower speaks for me. My pathetic existence culminates in handing you a flower, born from my blood and perfectly yours. And to this end, I spend years growing flowers, and spend even longer choosing only the unblemished and very best for you because I won’t settle for anything less. I look at my rosemaries, my pincushions, my daisies - my truth, dissembled. My pining, for you, my anemone flowers, my buttercup. But I can never decide on any of them. I am surrounded by flowers in full bloom - posies of clovenlip toadflax, small bunches of white clover and corncockle, and the peach blossom. This valley engulfs me, with its sprays of golden cowslip and daffodils. The flowers wrap around me, break me down, and fuse with me. I am the ever pensive Dame’s violet, the black mulberry. I am teased by the diphylleia and the frigid ox-eye daisy that always seem to side with you. I am the pale moonflower, the white egret orchid, and for you, I grow my fingers into wild germanium and purple hydrangea. I’ve been dreaming of the prairie phlox, the humble vervain, and they turn to slowly reveal visions of you as a pretty, little arbutus; you spin me round-and-round, like the charming aspen. You are the balsam, the bellflower, the mauve carnation, my catchfly. We pass by each other sometimes, and these moments blossom as heaps of the Dutchman's pipe cactus and yellow rue flowers that grow like weeds at the banks of the lake. I know this lake will drown me one day, and I’d be happy if I were consumed by these flowers all to return to you.

How am I so fucked up by this idea of you? One bad day one bad day one bad day one bad day one bad day and I continue mashing my keyboard, pushing my buttons in as far deep as they go. Shame on me. Shame on me for letting myself go like this. Shame on me for falling for it all again. Shame on me for believing. Shame on me for being such a bitch. I’ll end up drowning in my tears. If it has to happen, it will. You make me so unhappy, which means I make myself so unhappy. I get lost in the folds of your skin. You can tell what you’re supposed to be in life, like the role you’re meant to play by some arbitrary attribute assigned to you arbitrarily - like your name, or the shape of your face. I can’t really place you, which means I can’t really place myself which means I don’t recognize these attributes and I can’t place them which means they’re out of place which means they’re just not meant to go together, which means we just aren’t meant to be together. Does this make sense to you? Sure it does, because it makes perfect sense to me. Is this the truth of a run-on sentence? A sentence to what? As I said before, this is my penance. You are no one. I feel waves of calming indifference wash over me. Maybe I’ve been too harsh, too stubborn, too volatile; I lose everything the moment I’m confronted by the pitch black silence punctuated only by the absence of that incessant crackling hum of 765 kV power lines.

C    ha p—te r5

I can idealize anyone. I can sanctify you and build you up to immeasurable proportions. But I don’t want to see you anymore. I’ve had enough. I’m going to burst into tears. My tears will drown everything out. I don’t care about you anymore. I don’t want to think about these things. I’ve had enough. I’m tired of searching for it. I’m willing to accept that it doesn’t exist. But then why do I still see you? If cigarettes wear my body down, what burns through my psyche? I know what does. In the end, I know I’m going to die alone. This is not a truth that frightens me. Like a rock that’s fractured open to reveal nothing remarkable, it’s been here since the beginning, waiting patiently. There have been three creatures of habit that have prowled the streets of my city. These three creatures have owned them. They reside in the forests that border this city, stalking its margins. My city has been long abandoned, cleansed of the contagion of social dependency, a chimera of shame. My city now only houses the harrowing and lifeless shadows of these three creatures, my ceaseless discharge. I piss out straight unadulterated diesel. My piss begins to pool, then runs down in elegant streams, along the winding streets of my city. I can raze this city, bring it all down to the ground, back to peaceful, lifeless grey. With eyes that are paired mirrors, I judge this city. I judge everything. I am the screen and the projector. I am the slides of film being obliterated with violently sterile light. I am everything you see. I am cyanotypic; I am exposed, I am useless. I drop a match into the sprawling streams of froth and ammonia. It’s wondrous how easily my bridges burn themselves and I realize, as they burn, that they were all useless to begin with. So much time and so much effort spent forming connections of brutal proportions that now leave me feeling conned and defiled, so much time that could have been used in so many better ways. These bridges have never once sustained weights other than their own and the strain they yet bear still supported - an unbearable strain that finds itself released with squeals of smouldering delight as they collapse into frigid waters, heaving with bellows of thick black smoke - looks me in the eyes and echoes the question of how much I am willing to let slip. How much am I willing to let go? What if I recede from participation? I make my own currency. My own time. I abstain from the eternal.

It’s shocking to see how much of myself you see. This is dangerous chirality. It’s not loud enough. I’ve grown tolerant to my addiction, as a slave and it shreds through me, but it’s still too delicate. My life is over now. I saw you again today, and I imagined you seeing me. I stare down at the concrete that’s chipped along its edge and riddled with plastic scabs drilled down into flesh that’s alive and breathing and fills my lungs with lead until my body sinks down to the bottom of the deep end of your pool and you drag me out and pull the pack of Marlboro Reds out my back pocket and it’s just as wet as the lighter in your fingers and you tilt it and the water pours out like sparks off of propylene fusion sealing my lips shut around it and breathing in and my chest is heavy and congested but you grab my hand in yours and hold it tight and for a moment I’m brought back to the moment but that moment passes unremarkably and I lose you again and you never looked at me but I still turned away to look down at my feet planted on the ground and it’s cold earth frozen over but that’s your gaze but that doesn’t exist and I drag my feet and I run running fall down scrape my knees blood scab rust clot lovers sine wave saw down 50 hertz 60 hertz 119 hertz at 90 breaths a minute of cold congested films of sweat and ecstatic and unreal and I fall down scrape the skin off my knees and shove rocks underneath and it seals over leaving you inside me under my skin crawling towards nothing towards indiscriminate air thick my bruise hidden unseen veiled in nothingness but I think you see me and it’s loud and it’s a lie drags you closer to noise to sound to fucked over this line that divides criss-crossing and runs falls scrapes my skin and blood bleed clot scab peel flashbang faded I reach but I can’t feel because you neever say anything I havent heard your voice and this riptide i drown these phrases subdivided i lose timing trampoline knead money won’t but you never see me do you and i’m left wondering dreaming at the back of the house over chipped cement yellow sunset faded childhood memories pitch shifting doppler hesitating fall sibilance fall syncope fall scrape my knees letting it out for the last time because you never see me through the glass you stare through frosted in the weather and i speed up running fast i cant make this up anymore this feeling of reason and purpose and meaning and i’m the stranger here because i’ve lived everywhere a migrant unwelcome and unnoticed yet disapproved of with bated breath let out for the last time fogging the window up never frosted but your gaze is cold clear never seen this ends here before i fall scrape bleed clot scab break shift pitch break holding your hand never touched in air cold your voice frozen over chipped concrete blood clot scab.

I will write words about better places. I will bruise wounds that are better placed. I am backed up against this wall and I am bound by vast emptiness on either side and I am nauseous and claustrophobic. This is my prison. My grave of shit. I can feel my interest in you grow soft and pull away, shriveling up dry and withered, fluttering away, pretty like a Monarch butterfly, with the same weightless grace with which it first arrived, with a simplicity that scares me. This melancholy melody. This dawn chorus, ruined by so many unknowns that it becomes absolutely pointless. Every Monday, I’m looking forward to that Friday evening cigarette, and she anticipates her Saturday morning sister. Envious of others’ imperfections, I will die alone. My hair is thinning and falls out in clumps. I’m brought back down to my knees, swallowed by that same lukewarm question. My obsession is pointless. It is futile and it is raucously disappointing. But you won’t know this. I feel dirty in this skin. I don’t want to find out I’ve been seeing things like when I stare out at a liquor store signboard with another neon galloping horse on it. I never wanted you to feel the way you might. Things have happened, things that I wish hadn’t and I know they never will but I wonder because I know thinking of things can rewrite and so history is rewritten, yes in your head, but that frightens me because things have happened that I never intended and that’ll be the way you end up seeing this. I would leave. I really would. I never want to see you again.

I have no thoughts anymore. You walk in. You walk in daunting steps. You step over me thinking you go beyond but you don’t. And I think everyone sees that. I don’t think you do. Sometimes, I think you try. But that’ll never work. Your personality is lost on me. Fake loser-core boring plain tryhard and unconvincing. It doesn’t work the way you think it does. I overhear you saying you don’t care about these words or how deep they cut; I know you lie a lot. You lie to me, to the world, to yourself. Gaslit and broken. Are you really, though? I don’t think you mask these things well. I’m really tired of talking to you. But there’s no one else. These things don’t flow with you anymore. Spending my time with you, I’m tortured. You try so hard to change but you won’t. You can place your palms against your eyes to try and rest your mind but it won’t work - it never has and it never will. You can draw your fingertips to edge the frame of your mind back into place but it’ll glance along without effect. I know you had a bad day today. I also know this isn’t new to you. You can try to convince yourself that you find joy in the little things in life, like the pens you write with and the money you don’t spend, but I know it’s getting to a stage where the lie grows translucent, thin, and harder to believe. There is no joy. And you pick at the skin around your fingernails, squirming in place out of discomfort in being, in being seen, but by whom? People have no value in your eyes, so judgement. Opinions own you. Opinions of no worth or value, or so you say. Aren’t you sick of yourself? You’re delusional. You’re performative. You’re cheap. I wish I could stop staring at your face. I can tell it cut deep today. You were really hurt weren’t you? It’s never been this bad. It keeps getting worse. There’s this grinding, a jarring shudder that grates past in heavy drags. Like the something in your food that chips your molars. The kind that leaves you with a relentless, blinding migraine and it hurts me so bad. I’m tired and feel feverish. My arms are heavy. My chest is congested. My back feels fused stiff. My neck is tense. I can feel the arteries in my wrist, and they pump oblivious. Fuck you for wanting to kill yourself in your twenties. Does the idea of suicide keep you alive? Does it keep you gnawing back hopeless and disgraceful? I wish you would just die already. Because I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m selfish. I’m afraid to hurt. I feel myself at the precipice of another complete breakdown. I need to dismantle, to clean, but every reassembly leaves things further displaced and unrecognizable. The pain keeps growing deeper, louder, violent. These words won’t ever do it justice. And you’ll never know but of course you do but you won’t. I need you to leave now.

This time, this is the first time, this time that I’m once again so desperately lonely, longing to belong, with a feeling of what if and if only. I take another sip and it’s cold and dusty but I don’t feel it anymore. My head is pounding. My head is full and heavy. I brought this on myself. There’s no one to blame this time. This first time. There’s never been an upturned cigarette in my flittering stock. It’s worse because I see you now with no reason to. I saw your teeth the other day and they’ve trapped me. That pretty little canine leading the others, fuck. I see other people, and they all look a little like you. They ignore me the same too. I know it’s for the better. Maybe it’s just not worth trying talking to you. Maybe I’m better off left drifting towards you within, within myself, to lose myself within you within myself. This penultimate guilt still claws at my heels, biting the air and wetting it sour. I wrap myself within this constant idea of constants unchanging and remain in stillness that never remains. I dreamt of you the other night. You were with me, but you were with your friend. You were with your friend. I’d dreamt of you one other night too. But I don't have these dreams anymore. I was asked about you. I don’t invite conversation. I know how this body is seen. And that’s all that’ll ever be seen. I won’t let anyone inside; definitely not you. I’ve been thinking about ending it all. I’d do it in a brilliant flash of white suddenness. I will leave behind a mess of unrecognizable gore. A dedication to truth, and truth to a complete lack of legacy. And I want you to see it. You don’t have to see it happen, but I want you to be there before they mop it all up; the ichor of piss poor existence drained into a bucket of viscera. I’ve had enough. I want to go back to your teeth. I’ve been thinking about your canine a lot. And the way you blushed. The lightheadedness I felt, just like that nicotine headrush, only a million times better. But then we don’t look at each other. There has to be more to this feeling. There has to be more to you. Will this be forever lost to me? Sobbing alone and unrealized in a room that’s lit up briefly every quarter hour by the click and then the flash of a flickering flame that glides towards the plateau of each draw, it won’t leave me like you do, will it? It’s been a tough week. It’s been a tough month. It’s been a tough year. You haven’t made it any easier. Maybe this is all just the fallacy of my empty ego. Maybe it needs to suffocate, choke, and just die. My chest feels tighter and twisted up in knots these past couple of days. I feel sick. Is this your doing? No, I’ve done this to myself. I feel this topology mutate me but never beyond recognition. I watch thorns grow out and curl into my skin deep like the bags underneath my eyes and oh they feel so heavy. Songs about love are comforting. They’re as real to me as a prostitute. Now, will you dance with me? To shimmering guitars that weave into one another and kiss but softly. To the brushes that caress the snares and the cymbals. To something new I’ve discovered with you. To something new I discover for you. I don’t want to hurt like this. I wish you’d let me in someday. Some days I wish. Some days are long. Most days are long. Especially the days when I accidentally see you. It should’ve been me. These words are special, and they mean something to me. Maybe their meaning is in me meaning for them to mean something to you. I witness stories of longing and loneliness, and I read these words. Set me on fire. Isn’t that what you want? I run my fingers along the thread but it’s just as tight as when you first wound it up. Is this what it’s like to be in love? I get along without you very well.

I like you a lot. I wish you’d say, “what took you so long?” I wish things were as simple as back in 4th grade. I wish I could just invite you over to my house to play. I wish we could go to the sandpit and take turns on the swings and slides. I wish I could make you laugh playing pretend. I wish I wouldn’t overthink this. I wish we could just run off into the woods and have conversations about everything and lose track of time. I wish I weren’t misinterpreted or my intentions misread. I wish I could choose better words to speak to you with. I wish I knew how to. I wish I could ask you about your bad memories. I wish I could pass for a friend. I just wish I could get to know you. You are as real to me as a meat factory with broken machinery. You make me spill out; a tangle of gruesome tenderness. You make me fragile and I can’t put all the pieces back together. Your teeth, your skin, the structure of your face. I can’t be a better person. You may be beautiful, but you don’t mean a thing to me.

I drag myself down to such depressing lows. But these lows are good to me. They grab me by the scruff of my neck, sit me up, strip me, bathe me, and then feed me seaweed and boiled fish. It’s a simple outcropping. At the shore of a rocky beach that ends in jungle, there’s a small fishing hut. Within it, a cast iron pot that simmers over ochre coals, stewing perpetually. The fish smells putrid, but it’s food and I’m hungry. These lows take good care of me and I always seem to circle back to them. They aren’t friendly. If anything, they’re bland, acting in swift motions that are precise in choice and step. They say, “And you’re you, now eat” albeit wordlessly. You mean so much to me. It’s a repulsive thought. And I’m trying to move on. To forget because there are things that mean more to me. But things like you keep pushing them to the periphery. That’s repulsive. I’m lost to nails that rust at the joints of this barebones shelter. I’m united. You haunt me. I’ll live forever and I don’t want to. I’m stretched, taut and beaten. I lacerate. I reverberate hollow and breathlessly. I spell your name with a capital G, but my words aren’t picked apart and gnawed at like I’d want them to be; they’re glazed over mindlessly and passive. It’s sublime. Warm smoke rises slowly off the sides of the pot. I draw a blank. We don’t see eye to eye. Eat what I shit out and vomit it back into my mouth because I hear what I want to hear. I scratch my skin through till it bleeds. I employ malpractice at my factory of gore. I am unethical. I have a wet fever. Piss me off my coma. You have a phone don’t you? Then fuck off and don’t speak to me, tell me why. I’m feeling asthmatic. And leave me alone. If you’re always with present company, I’m reclusive to mine. You’re unwelcome but that’s not something I want. You decide this for yourself. I’m a patriot. I’m a nationalist. I’ll die for my country of clefs and for the swarms of embossed notes. Are those burn scars real? Because I can’t stop staring. I’m looking for a fight. The warmth of dull pain. I can’t stop coughing. I’m pathetic and these lows don’t make me feel any better about it. I’ve misplaced my translucency for transparencies. I want to forget everything. I want to blow my brains out and decorate the walls with cruor. I am my iron crucifix. When I kill myself, it’ll mean something. It’ll mean something to me and it won’t be for nothing. I’ll leave behind a puzzle. I won’t make it easy on you. My life is worth a 90 Hz square wave in inverse tremolo. These words have strayed too far this time. They’ll stand in the pouring rain, cold and trembling, stripped down and beaten till bleeding; this is my punishment, your vindication.

Have you noticed I’ve stopped writing to you? You don’t seem like the kind of person who’d notice things like me. You can keep clinging onto her all you want. I know how crazy it sounds but I really don’t care anymore. I hate you. You are a disgrace. I hate my toothbrush. You have no integrity. I hate the ulcer on my throat. You are a constant reminder of all the things I choose to avoid. I hate my face. You are a foreigner. I hate tomorrow. You bring ill luck. I hate yesterday. You are a memory that won’t fade away. I hate the shallowness in my abdomen. You are cowardly and fearful of efforts to change. I hate the thinness of my arms. You are weak. I hate this feeling. You are the comfort that comes with pain. I hate my books. You are impatient and unnerving. I hate my wristwatch. You get my hopes up. I hate the heat. You expose me and you don’t flatter. I hate the numbness around my fingernails. You are a bad time every day. I hate the taste of my mouth. You are cynical. Things seem wilted and lifeless. I am loyal to a fault. I am compassionate. To you, I am anything you want me to be. I am distrusting. I am. I am working up the courage to talk to you. I am possessive of you. I am anxious. I am tepid. I am frightful. I am strange. I am scared to look you in the eye. I am the eraser. I am my reflection. I am my sunken presence. I am my eating disorder. I am your rule. I am my dissociation. I am my artery. I am my shallow persistence. I am my ringing allowance. I am probably. I am my excrement. I am my restrained dementia. I am arson. Stop. Please. I am my elbow. Dwell. I am my angina. I am sweeping, paralytic enigma. I am my rage. I am my damage. I am apparent. I am your stalker. I am my paranoia. You erase me. You reflect me. You are sunken. You are present. You are my eating disorder. You are my rule. You are my dissociation. You slit my artery. You are shallow. You are persistent. You are my ringing allowance. You are false and restrained. You are demented. You play arson. Stop. Please. You elbow. You dwell. Angina. Sweeping. Paralytic. Enigma. Rage. You are damaged. You are apparent. You are stalked. You are paranoid.

I don’t know you at all, and you don’t know me either. I don’t know if you’d remember me if someone were to tell you what I told you, but I know I could never forget your smile that night. How my heart pounded in my chest, how lightheaded and dizzy I felt, and god, your teeth. Was it meaningless and absurd and superficial to you? I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently. I don’t want to make things weird. Maybe they already are, maybe I’m overthinking this, maybe not. Maybe I haven’t registered at all. But you looked at me, didn’t you? You glanced my way, please tell me that was you choosing to look at me? You spend a lot of time with your friends. I don’t want to use the ones I don’t have. I don’t want to grow old and think, “what if?” And there it goes. Can you see it too? There’s that constant banging against the metal door again. And there, I’ve lost it. My mind, my beating heart, my sensibilities. Will you keep them for me if you ever find them? Keep them with you, unpossessed, unclaimed, and illicit. These words may have meant a lot to me, maybe even to you, but they’d never do justice. Justice to the way I feel about you. Would you ever know? Would you ever know me? Maybe I won’t allow that. Tonight, I’m not here. Tonight, I’m leaving. I’m leaving tonight and I won’t say goodbye. Not to you, no, not to anyone. I’m leaving. I’m used to this. This feeling I have tonight. It’s back. And here it comes. It’s here with me. It’s here with me in this room right now. It’s in this room, it’s here with me and with you. But you won’t see it. I’m leaving tonight. I’m leaving and I don’t want to see you ever again. I’m sinking into this feeling tonight, in this room, in the dark, in the silence, as I always have. This gentle feeling, I won’t see you again and I’m sure you’ll be alright. You’ll be fine. You won’t see this feeling that’s here with us tonight in this room in the dark in the silence. Within me. Dig deeper with me. Below the swathes of shit and false naivete, beneath all the faces I don’t show. Dig deeper with me and find a redness so raw. A redness, raw and acerbic and cold. Cold like the pain that radiates from a razor-edge cut along your tongue. A redness that’s dying. It’s dying alone, struggling, alone, and so, so raw. You won’t taste me. A redness so sweet and so tender. A redness that’s mine alone. A redness that feigns everything. A redness that hides from you. Tonight, I wait here, alone, in this room, holding this feeling that you won’t ever see. Tonight, this ends.