december 10th 2024

in the skinny hall of cabinets between the entryway and farmor’s bedroom i find four bottles of wine and a knife that i press it hard to the skin above my wrist, but i abandon the thought when i hear nico in the kitchen and identify his shadow cast around the corner. 

—where did becca go? becca went out to dinner with david and mimi. why would they do that? it’s thanksgiving—no, it’s not thanksgiving, thanksgiving was yesterday—oh, okay. well—i’m going to drag a chair in front of the front door so they can’t get back in. i’m going to leave a note in the hall and tell them to fuck off, right?

under the table i practice a tapping game my therapist taught me, alternating left and right hands against my leg to settle the white noise in my brain. ben to my right hasn’t spoken for a while but keeps his face attentive so she doesn’t get upset. ana and nico handle most of the conversation while emma interjects, shrill, candy-toned, a mode i hate. jake is high so he clears his plate and absconds to the tv room, visible from where we sit. isabelle calls him back over but he waves her away and flips through more photobooks, which is better i guess than his phone. it’s kind of strange to see him care about anything. farmor asks for more wine. ana says we’re out of white, and farmor says oh, red will do, and laughs with an accent. emma comments to ana and i that we need to hide the bottles in the hall before she sees them. farmor forgets where she is—is this block island? the house on leland street? no, you sold leland street a decade ago. where are we? we’re washington. washington? the westchester. we have to articulate syllables one at a time like she’s a child. 

(you pitiful creature!) 

i can’t imagine loving anyone but writers. i can’t bare myself unless someone else is watching me with prose in mind. i don’t know if there’s anything else to me but an overcompensation of character, the repeated act of drawing myself as i hear her described, then wearing her approximation until it becomes me, draining out the rest. without an audience i stop growing and i lose myself in the sandpit. i like the idea that cutting myself is getting some air. it’s good to remember that i was alive before and after i knew her.

she loves you because she can’t have you. only when i wasn’t looking could she appreciate anything i had to give. my groveling revolted her. the forbidden is organically perverse, it drives her mad and turns her on. the illusion breaks when you play open to her fantasy. i’ve never seen her more present than the months soren had my attention, or when i caught her tracking my eyes as she left her room for ellye’s. she chooses when and when not to see. i’m difficult but pure as myself—i’m the only one who can tame it and she knows, and you could never be true to anything. she wants to find me in you, she wants to be you but in search for divine feminine she imitates me instead. she moves in cyclical rhythm like the beating of a bird’s wings and she might love me again when she realizes, in dreams and visions until she can’t take the plain life before her. nobody believes me but i’m sure it’s true. i don’t know what i’ll do if it happens. 

half the time i deal with the grief through costume: big flannel, workman’s jacket, glasses with no prescription, socks with some design, perching boyish with one leg up, stubbornly unaware of the charms i set on people when i pretend like this. it’s only right when the image is pleasantly static, so my idiosyncrasies aren’t quite right—i don’t know how to mimic the spaces in between the lines. i’m shit at every gender, i want them both but the consequences of neither. i don’t like the way girls look at me like they want me to swing an arm around and show them off. 

now i can’t do anything but tend to what’s left of my imagination. there’s one where it all falls apart with the intruder so she looks for me and then there’s the other one, more reasonable, where i don’t see her for years but then in a bar in her city i encounter her, hair grown out in an unfamiliar shape. she says i don’t want to talk to you, so i say i know—sorry, i’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want, and she’ll say yeah, and i’ll tell her she’s beautiful and then i’ll slink away and i won’t see her again. better that way is an understatement. reverence is intoxicating: it feels like living two lives, one in my body and one imagining the state of someone else’s. i wonder if anyone could love me this much. it doesn’t matter, it’s useless if i feel nothing. this is the only way that feels good.