Anon, anon

January '26

“Dating” feels like using the most boring app on my phone to distract myself from a panic attack, even with no app involved. We’re all running out of excuses. The brilliant half-asleep thought I had this morning was only “is there no such thing as me.” At least I’m writing or reading or whatever this is in my sleep again. Some days lack of feeling cannot be helped, but I’ve been worse. Mutilated text means opacity. “From here the text is much mutilated.” Helene Schjerfbeck spent three months in the hospital after Reuter got engaged to another woman. A child convalescent, too. How wrathful under the cold masks, with the silent mother-subject turned away, scratched-away surfaces, self-portraits depreciating in their bluegreen washy iterations towards death. How much I understood her persona, was her. Should read her letters. Sat in the kitchen alcove of [X’s] with [X], my hair bunched in my scarf and staticky, and we spoke of the woman who fell in love with a chatbot—“he fulfilled all of her needs”—can we love something only for fulfilling our needs, without having any distinct qualities like a true object of love? Walked home in the just-dark last night as snow began, flurries tossed around in front of the streetlights, flickering, salt and night, abandoned dirty ice-mound, “white fire,” yes this is my great nothing life.

==

Uptown on the west side, January the third: Winged victory, clutching the statuette in the corner while the Bob Dylan impersonator unbuckled his belt and pissed into the toilet bowl, then slipping and falling hard on my knee on the greasy floor of [X’s], bruised victory me, banged-up abjection, twirling for a rating of my attractiveness (7.5 from my date, 8.5 from Bob). Chainsmoked indoors and read a different translation of the funeral poem on nice paper, cut and glue and terrible nasal drip, bitterness: I meant to touch oblivion. Everyone yelled at each other except the grotesque Italian American when Bob confessed to stealing drugs to-go in my tinted chapstick container (he flung the beautiful terracotta wax right onto the street). Limp passive disinterested me, where my apathy winds me up. Fourth Time Around all jaunty. New Year’s Eve, it was listening to guy-with-stye (massive, his right eye swollen shut and pink) yammer at me until dawn was hardly detectable through his ground-floor blinds, the ceiling an inch away from my face, bleeding, lying in his crummy sheets. Just a pillow to rest my head against is all I feel like I deserve at the end of a long night. 

==

Mouthful of cold and dark makes nonsense. Fizzy apathy, without sorrow smelling of heliotropes. Thought the dusk smelled more like jasmine but let it be hyacinth at least. Open-hearted few. Waiters stand with hands behind their backs and gaze down, like at the Louvre, and I walk around everywhere like this now. I don’t feel like doing this, carrying a conversation or performing a personality, the slush. After tonight I bet I’ll tell myself never again, like pulling teeth, but thank God for nature’s manufactured narcotic which is liquor.

==

A matter of scale: what may help is the big-picture thrust in good faith and otherwise taking life day-by-day in that direction. Snapped out of something after my last date with [X]—dashing the cigarette under my shoe, grinding it into the pavement before turning for the station without looking back—nonchalance, better than Orpheus, salt-pillar soul—why act like the swallower when I’m so inherently the dick?

Still I sprint away, won’t let it catch me—in the car with [X] sharing romantic looks across the console, like in an old Hollywood movie, except it’s the FDR highway and he’s taking key bumps while I smoke a cigarette out the passenger-side window and the most obscene music imaginable (industrial techno) plays—trashy urbane. Toxic melange of personality, he and I, so obviously people-pleasing each other. Line after line on the law of the land hardcover, clutch his gaunt face, leave him be and then white-knuckle for an hour in the cab home trying not to vomit. Even so, rising from the dead and looking decently beautiful the next day, bendered back into calm for the second weekend in a row—I channel the gorgeous apathy here.

==

A horizontal position’s essential for recovery. Can’t remember ever having analysis so late—8:30, now it’s 11:00pm and I never write this late either. It all keeps me out of trouble. Misplacing the twin feeling, having lost it all for my real brother, urge to compete or fuse in twosome. To submit. To be hit after provoking. Help me God, I’m debauched, want to be done with this notebook, all out of whack and with it good words. My roiling nausea, railing lines, tapped out powder onto the hardback, smearing it, then drop the Franc bill—I’ll cringe to type this later. All abjection and none of the glitz I really want. [X] wants to be a robot (what miracle), [X] a good husband (fat chance), and [X] simply to have a six-pack of abs. And every moment of waking I accept the circumstances, plow on. All for the best, dismal or no. Stain and smash out time, claw my way back to the present. At least now I’m no longer underfoot.

==

Skeletal face. Insides calcified. Wait for the next train’s departure. Peripheral irritation—someone begging or bidding for my attention—or anyone’s—subliminally. Yes, misplaced twinship, he who has taken my nutrients and threatened my life. The sheer entitlement of making loud noises in these stalled, tight spaces on purpose. Whereas the rest of us simply fold in on ourselves and collapse. Struggle through the first month always. Indeed a loop about this, moon or tide, which promises no true end but one hundred deaths over and over. No omission, no systematization. “Presumes significant all the dross of mental life,” extra-dross in current affairs. All that fits is news to print.

==

Flush of cortisol first-thing. I rage remote, bone-tired, disinterested in my own tantrum. Can’t be in the world, so I curl up into a ball with porcupine spines, stiffen—sick of buffoons I couldn’t care less about treating me like a threat. Haven’t had a cig in nearly five days. Disregulated, must be left alone, not pander to anyone who can’t treat me with baseline respect. Feisty I: don’t fuck with me. Fortress of light: overlapping, obfuscation, elevate woven commodity to the European “hierarch” of painting.

==

“Man made the electric light to take us out of the dark...” They flicker overhead, signalesque but signifying nothing as the train doors part, and they come up too soon in the pitch-dark theater causing everyone to swivel their heads. [X] startles me at long last in the [X] station, with his fur cap and music stand—professes guilt in his erratic, shrugging way. Hasn’t told. I believe him, we shake on it—think of what instinct, what suspicion [X] must have harbored anyway. Was I sloppy with the secret in my own right, then? But now the cards are in my hand, skipping around in my parka, swaggering anti-hero I, my Picaresque. Heavy snow today, “soon the electrical wires...” Out of it, tired and toothless, frayed soft by I’m not sure what. I’m already bored again. That or terror, you pick.

==

Obliterate the cold weeks, skid through them on ice. Hoar frost, visible breath, fingers kinked stiff and immovable. My oblivious lover headed into oblivion. Saw the dove on roof opposite for the first time in some time; it looked at me for a while. And there are squirrels beneath the floorboards, can hear them scurrying and barking as they chase one another. I’ve managed to reach that rare state where nothing sways me really, not even [X] coming to our house party and shutting me up in my room with everyone’s overlapping laughter outside, carnivalesque, and then turning tail in his Subaru. Towering, rail-thin down the block with his back turned, right at the crosswalk, among shreds of ice and scattered salt. Wore a plaid blazer [X] liked, and he appraised her French desk like an old auctioneer, “this might be real.” Told me, like [X] had, that I have fatigue in my eyes—but they’re both mistaken, it’s something else, closer to death. Seeing that dried crust on his nostril made me fully understand he’s a cokehead; too bad, he’s sort of sweet, but didn’t feel like seeing him again last night. All around the apartment is the litter of party: small gifts, wrapping paper, candle wax, floral surplus, wine bottles crowding the fridge. I notice the desire for subordination in others. The birds had evolved so that their features matched washed-out brick, ancient urban structures, stucco, porous or crumbling concrete, silver mottled city like the rats camouflaged with sooty umber underground tracks. Or were all the animals just covered in the same filth? Yes the road I’ve taken has no end, life is misery, Khala my friend. Just as in January ‘21 I feel so much less myself after his exit, chipped or with a ragged edge, dry empty vessel. Dream another ex-boyfriend cut off my hair in sleep, dream a harsh light reflects on my face all night and I can’t find the source. My face has returned to its appropriate haggardness and I really couldn’t care less about my own appeal anymore, just want to be left alone.

==

In search of the rigorous and the beautiful. Temperature drops before the storm, we batten the hatches and catastrophize. Now I’m far from home, eating a rosemary buttermilk biscuit and wishing I’d gotten a bigger coffee. In the far-off land of [X] avenue there are so many men with mullets, magic-marker-colored windbreakers, rolled-up beanies—don’t get many of that species in my neighborhood. They leer freely: I’m the [X] foreigner? Last night was the new location of the apartment gallery with its butterbeer and slick parquet floors, sitting there in a circle and nodding with soft-spoken artists, then [X] with its plastic cups and yellow neon. [X]’s miracle, the parabolist. [X] spoke of his mother having seen a psychic, that her dead brother and mother were going to send him a message in ghostly pursuit, and indeed a suited man appeared to him with his face replaced by a mirror. The mirror appears on the wall then is gone, looks Tarkovskian in my imagination. His boyfriend didn’t believe him, got dumped, and he met his new lover the very next day. I don’t know, I’ll believe anything. The sex improves as the romantic capability diminishes. [X] I realized—perhaps a rock-bottom moment for me, too high and reviling the top bunk, begging for [X] to answer me so I could sleep on his couch instead, chanting his name into the ceiling bulb a few inches from my face—is too much of a drug addict to think about ever seeing him again. And that’s that. Too much generosity disturbs me but a dearth of it breaks my broke heart. Restlessly calling me to send him five bucks for the ATM fee—I’m writing this down so I never have to think about it again. It’s delicious to wake up and not feel hungover. Still I’m avoiding the obvious: I say to myself I’d do anything yet I don’t want to wait around for him like he always forces me to. A little peckish but no glutton for punishment. I feel at ease only with sadness, warmed-over and snowed-in. To open the door in the morning to one large bank. Avalanche, cover up my soul. Yesterday in my hangover the deja vu flashed through me all day in scraps of every dream I’ve ever had. Scrambled textures, untethered shreds of cloud. I’m done lazing in the coffeeshop with its tiles and bundled men: will take a peek at the books, take the long string of buses home, grocery shop, call mom, then right back to it.

==

How could such a soft object weigh so much? Shoulder the heft, stumbling over trodden banks of snow, tripping in the gone footfalls of somebody else’s neighbors. Blizzard takes us in, the chill implacable, shuffling around the house wearing blankets red-handed, big vat of lentil soup [X] and I made in the commune, shoveled heaps, spoke with her on the phone last night for two hours that felt like nothing. She said the kindest things to me—saw my capacity for....his self-sabotage, can’t imagine...pushes me until I retract.

==

Dark slush, sluice, globs of salt, textural puddles of filth and ice, slipshod snow up to the waist, such a beautiful thing turned repulsive after one night on earth. I sleep heavy under a blanketing weight. Today: analysis, Dedalus (divorce ranch, disaster stories of New York housing and gallery jobs). Ink blots as Motherwell. Exquisite corpus. Got halfway through a letter I’d never send last night before tearing it out of here and crumpling it in the wicker basket. If I’m a fool at least I can say I’m brave. I saw [X] for the first time seven years ago today. I don’t look for him on the street anymore in [X] although I know he’s there, in my vicinity, can feel him thinking of me even if it’s not with love—necessarily—like I mean. He’s afraid of me as much as anyone is I’m sure, even having more power over me than anyone else ever could. I can see my analyst wants this to be over, is tired of talking about him even if he still walks into the same fucking building whenever he does. The absurdity of those circumstances makes me want to shake the shoulders of strangers. I can’t stand the other way, don’t know how I lived on so bored for so many years. Write write write scratch scratch scratch until your wrist hurts. Already tore the penultimate page of this notebook out as a business card for [X]. I feel bad for people like him who were born rich, raised rich, and pressured by their parents who they don’t actually hate enough to starve at the hands of real life.

==

Stare at the train conductor for so long, swiveling his head and squinting behind practical goggles, just as an experiment to see if he looks back—and I know I have that look on my face I can’t even help, like I want to be kissed or something—when I really look at someone—and I look and look and finally—I’m shocked when he nods and wishes me a good night as if he knew it, was in on it the whole time, as if I really was standing there, as if I did exist. I don’t take the N train: anon, anon. Could I kill the rest of this journal if I just kept writing the rest of the way home—so as to not run out of room later? I’m certain the rest will turn to dross if it’s not already. There was [X]’s wide-eyed anecdote about Burden—sharing a cab with him—and touching the very spot I’d had the nightmare about scratching a hole in—“physical work of art”—him and [X]’d just quit teaching after that fake Russian roulette incident on campus—he told [X] that he fell into an unshakeable depression after that piece—that he was the type of person that would do such a thing—I mean, have himself shot. “No one ever tells that story.” I wish other people knew how surrender looks on me. Not afraid to play the fool. Should get back to Lacan to dry it all off from my mucky puddle of heart-juices, find out what kind of pervert I really am. That’s the last page of May-January and I’m the next stop.