46
I will have sex with anyone. I will probably even have sex with you. I’ll probably be too shy to ask you to use a condom. You can even fuck me in the ass if you want, you don’t even have to kiss my afterward. As long as you don’t expect me to tell you that I love you - spit on my chin, dripping down in a pool between my legs. This is how I’m alive. The whore lives through me, splitting black and gold through my ruptured fingernails. She eats a chasm through my navel, bites down on the spine, drags it through my empty core. While I want to cry in the corner, listening to Portishead’s “Sour Times,” that little whore knows how to have a good time.
I suck cock in stairwells. I tonguefuck girls under the table while their fathers’ ask them if they did well in school today. I throw off my clothes in parks and gardens and courtyards and shipwrecks and volcanoes and asteroids and fuck like a long scream.
Don’t feel bad for me, this feels better than you could imagine. It’s the last kicking rebellion of a system trying to suffocate me on sexual purity, the failsafe mechanism trying to jumpstart the last burnt out part of me that still wants to pierce through the shell of dead skin and fingernails and hair.
47
On the Halcyon, the writer wakes with bruises on her thighs and throat. Shaking, she gets out of bed and almost collapses on the ground, not used to the sudden lightness of not being constantly devoured by insects. She checks the schedule on her wall, she’s supposed to meet with her counselor for consultation. He isn’t in his office. The hallways are empty. Everyone already seems to know where they are supposed to be, all doors bolted and locked, the humming of the “OCCUPIED” signs louder than her lightened footsteps. She asks a robot in the hall where her counselor has gone.
“You’re supposed to be in art therapy, down the hall,” the robot says, then returns to sweeping the floors.
The writer heads to the room marked “Art Therapy.” Inside is darkness.
“Hello?” the writer calls out. She walks into the darkness. A hesitant step after hesitant step, searching for a drop off with her feet, her arms held out in front of her searching for the walls. How easily she could disappear at any moment. Inside this room, it’s like she’s already disappeared. She thought, maybe if I reach out for my waist I’ll feel nothing but cool air, hear the hiss of my body collapsing underneath my head like smoke.
Well, this isn’t right. Where is the construction paper and the glitter? The clay and the acrylic paints? Where was the travesty that was “art,” like ipecac and cranberry juice, sprayed all over the walls? Where were the other empaths, sitting quiet at their stations, hands dipped in blue and yellow, lips smeared in gold, and hypocrisy, and eye-rolling when the instructors weren’t looking, and breaking pencils between their fingers?
Art therapy. What a fucking joke. Everyone knows that it’s a fucking joke.
A humming filled the dark room. A humming, throbbing, stretching kind of noise that pulsed through the writer’s heartbeat. It grew louder the further she walked into the room. She thought she should go back, but there was no place to return to. The door was still gone. There was no light to see by.
Her throat vibrated with the humming until she couldn’t swallow her spit. Her legs separated from her torso. Each step reverberated into another step, crashing, echoing, heaving pools of noise like guttural bombs, heavy in her, rising upwards in a conical arc, dashing her stomach, flinging her hair to the ceiling.
She leaves pieces of herself behind, little strips of skin.
Sillage (from French) in perfumery - a veil of scent that a person leaves behind when walking or when you enter a lift and smell that someone has been there before you; perfume can either have soft or heavy sillage depending on the type.
And when the ceiling opens they turn off the anti-gravity and she floats upwards into the light, the buzzing quells. She’s left gasping, pushed to the dome at the top of the ship, her arms suspended like the cross against the shattering diamond windows. And her fingers aren’t real, and her body isn’t real, only the moment, the upheaval of body, the emanation of self and other melding into synthesis. She reaches for the self outside of the self. She reaches.
When they pull her from the ceiling, they stroke her hair and hold her until she weaves back into her brain. She’s guided back to her dormitory, stunned, quelled motion, sobbing about each moment she’s lost being attached to the wounded dantian in the bottom of her stomach instead of pushing herself outward into the flow.
“Now that you know what it feels like,” they said. “You can begin.”
Note: This is part of my Psycho-Surreal Memoirs Series. You can find more by looking through my feed. They're designed to be able to be read in any order.
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