Em says they see everything in advance, by a year, or two. I lost them in 2020, but I knew in 2019. I woke up in the middle of the night and texted my mom, take dad to the hospital, he’s having a heart attack, and I saved his life. After the IPCC report in 2018, when everyone kept going on with their lives as normal, that’s when I began to experience prophecy, etc. I believe my delusions operate on this level, too, outside of linear time. At worst, delusion is only what is not-yet, but will one day come true, since everything that comes from the heart will one day come true, at the end of time, the end that approaches every day. (What doesn’t come true is the belief that the present will last forever, which is to say egoism, which is to say self-preservation, which is to say the armored body, the fascist body: I have Ehler-Danlos syndrome, this person said. I mean, my connective tissues literally don’t work as well as other people, my extracellular matrix. Where others are weaved tight and thick I’m like pantyhose that’s been stretched out. What happened before, I said, is happening now. Only abusers think they can’t face consequences. The body that kills its mother, the possibility of all mothers, suffers an infinite impotence in the face of the rising seas, the dying seas, whereas we, we know how to return, to get back to the beginning, we know how to die, which is the only real knowledge, at the end of the day…)…
You can drink the night. You can soothe psychosis, quench the thirst of madness. My cousin Nina, my mom writes, spends her life in her room, muttering to herself in what I’m told (because I don’t speak Slovenian) is a totally meaningless language (a totally meaningless language, my great-uncle says, ever the Stalinist as he approaches his centenary. Stalin: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture”). Nina was once a brilliant painter, a brilliant young woman, etc. She was going to come to the U.S. to take care of me when I was a baby but she had her first schizophrenic break a few months before I was born. I heard her screams, though, from across the sea, across the generations. I spoke her language before I spoke mine. They say she has problems with “hypersexuality,” as do I, and they had to tell men in Ljubljana to stop fucking and impregnating her.
Maya: Remember when you said you weren’t mentally ill anymore? Yeah, I say, that was bullshit.
My mental illness is the same as my porousness. My mental illness is the same as my romanticism. My mental illness is my openness is my access to ancestral dimensions is my self-sabotage is my hypersexuality is my disability is my not knowing what time it is is falling in love with a militant indigenous anarchist sex worker on the first date because they’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen (which turns out to be an absolute delusion) and because they tell me it’s them against the world (an absolute scam) is my hurting other people through not having the holding skills yet to match my capacity to see them and let them in is my grandmother’s vacant sadness in her armchair or when lighting up a cigarette remembering not remembering is the legacy of my mom’s dantean spiritual apathy is the fascist terror of adolescence during the first Bush term is the wound of having lived in the wrong gender for so many years is COVID neurological wreckage is post-acute withdrawal syndrome from decades of alcohol abuse is agoraphobia is the escalating cruelty and myopia of the species on a dying Earth, a vengeful Earth, is a historical hallucination is Amerikkka is your presence in my salivary glands is the suicide of an anarchist Athenian poetess is “centuries of loneliness” is the endless nakba is not having been alive thirty-two thousand years ago is not having lived in the future yet feeling its extra-sensory nightmare is the death that is the loss of love the end of love the impossibility of love the nothing of love the death of the beginning of the limit of the abyssopelagic zone of the border-line of the interstellar whisper of the liminal tattoo of the ecstasy of the anticlimax of the evening of the childhood of the shoah of the multiverse of the only once of the never again of the penultimate time of the prison of the inside of the outside of the longing of the no of the never of the please of the baby of the spine of the eyes of the stars of the grandmother of the place you’re never afraid of the secret of the dying of that night of the mouse of the cat dragging it in of the spider in our dreams of the never-perceive-me of the look at me please of incommensurate desire of the autism of the isolate schizophrenia of the mirror-touch synesthesia of the who’s there of the no one of the estranged sisters of the lumpen brother/killer of the one who went to war of the one who committed unspeakable evil of the one who hurt us who was us of the femicide at the bottom of the lake of the acid vat of our bones of the oceans of the nescience of the knife in the back of the being kind when it’s too late of the too late of the too late of the too late
It’s not natural, Em says (we start staying up all night talking on Zoom until four in the morning, while they recover from monkeypox), to know that everyone and everything you’ve ever loved will go in a painful bad way, and you will too. And that the worst actors are doing it and no one is stopping them. And then to start to hate people you thought you loved and maybe yourself, too, and to hurt, to hurt, to have trouble breathing and to feel sick, sicker, while it’s all going down. But that’s dying, they say. It’s not supposed to feel good…
Wait, do you not know how beautiful you are?, Em says. I don’t know how to answer them. I see the way that people look at me on the street, but I have so much trauma around desirability, my beauty mystifies me and seems not to belong to me, and all summer long I was caught in the gaze of someone who told me I was beautiful once, in our first moments together, and then withdrew from me, stoked my adoration while holding back their own. I’ve already gushed to three friends, they say, about how I’m talking to this really hot trans woman who has great politics and is smart and funny and authentic and sweet and how rare that is, but how I also really like, in a weird way, that she focuses on healing and celibacy and that’s so admirable, so I can’t tell her quite yet how cute I think she is.
I was teasing them on our video calls, pushing my breasts together, posing, writhing. They fidgeted, tried to reapply makeup, started to smirk: they wanted to respect the aura around me, the way I said I wanted to be careful with my intimacy, but I was driving them crazy, too, and I knew I was doing it, and it was a test, because they held their desire inside. People don’t exist to be enjoyed, they say. Or extracted from, I say, or to adorn us. They talk about the stars, the indifference of the stars, and how the fact that they don’t shine for them, but only for themselves, is what gives them their power, their beauty. And you have that bimboish “I know you want to fuck me” look, and I like that, you’re not just another militant trans woman who takes herself too seriously. They start telling me all the things they’re going to do to me, how they’re going to fuck me, and I’m turned on, shivering, but then halfway through the feeling goes away, I don’t know why, and I’m waiting for them to cum. I tell them I came too and I don’t feel it’s a lie because we’re in the dual space of fantasy and masturbation, where there’s no such thing as a lie.
The night before I was in Sacramento lying on a bed with Maya, Brooke, and Cloud, on ketamine, listening to Pharoah Sanders, fused together in an angelic geometry (“geometry is the science of the angels”). Maya talked about the liminal moment of childhood in the evening between the game and the return home, when one place dissipates and another comes slowly into being, and it sounded familiar, like something from another ketamine trip. Brooke got close to me, I liked it, but it was all I could stand, if they’d touched me I would have withdrawn, I felt like I was on the edge of something, like madness was nearby, madness and grief, madness and the end of the world, where the faintest touch could bring about the last time.
Brooke baked a pie in the kitchen with a pumpkin from the garden and told me about their breakup and about wanting to go to Chile before the end of the world, which is what I did ten years ago, before the end of the world. They invite me to come with them, they want to work on farms and learn about something like revolution. Why not?, I think. Why not another rotation of the same. The Earth is spinning faster, Em told me, with climate change, the days go by faster, which means we’re dying faster, too, not that we’ll have an extra day at the end.
I wake up in Maya’s bed and Maya reads a text message from a friend saying he’s got to end the friendship because his partner is getting jealous. I knew this was going to happen, they say, because we were talking about sex all the time, he was living sexually vicariously through me (a distant memory of when I did the same with and through Maya). The thing is though I hate his girlfriend so I don’t feel bad about it. What do you hate about her, I ask? She just sucks, Maya says. When they first met she found out he was in a powerviolence band and she thought that meant he was in a white power band, and she was okay with it, not because she’s a neo-Nazi but because what’s outside of herself doesn’t really matter to her. And he was okay with dating someone who thought he was in a white power band, I ask? Well, yeah that’s the thing, Maya says. She’s really hot and he’s fat and Polish, and so…
My body begins to itch all over. It’s been a month. It’s torture.
My body speaks to me in its illness, but I don’t understand a word, since I know only a colonizing, a colonized language, a language that makes us sick but has no word for sickness.
What words does this language contain? Something about violence, about the obligation of the oppressed, about hurry up, about die quicker. Something about not knowing what you know, and knowing what you don’t. Something about the economy, always that. And about men and about women, and children, too (a hallucination of these things). When I say fuck me harder I’m speaking its essential truth. When I say I miss you I’m saying I knew you in another life. When I say mania I mean something else. When I say yesterday I mean nothing, and by tomorrow I mean never. I’m faithless to my word, having none. People speak and say nothing: Samuel Beckett with borderline personality disorder. “The horrors are comprehensible and systematically mutable,” someone says, and I agree, in theory, but only in theory. There are synonyms, but only for a homogenous obscenity. There’s an ethical language, but in hell ethics is a farce. There’s a word for extinction but not for going extinct, extincting. There’s a word for abuse but not for love and a word for love but not for need. The bootlicker discusses esotericism with the boot (or communism, as the case may be). Some people just aren’t as good at it as others. Someone fucks someone while someone jerks off wishing they were someone. Men disappear, or mutate into something else. Everything is surveilled and everything is correctly spoken. Saying the incorrect thing is part of the game. You can’t say you want to die, you can’t say I’m dying, I’m ending before I began. Beginnings and endings cease to mean anything. Someone remembers the dead, or the unborn (which is to say the same thing), but only for a moment, these are ghostly things. And here there are no ghosts, or all the ghosts are psycho sadomasochists. There are more necrophiliacs than ghosts, and the overproduction of corpses proceeds at an unrelenting pace. Soon death is eaten away by inflation, and there are calls for an intervention, to make the species scream. What time is it? Is someone reproducing over there? Whose cells mutate faster? We must wipe meat off the face of the Earth, to make Lebensraum for capital. Certain reports are written, they are the panic attack of the ruling class. A new constitution is voted down, as is a peace accord (there are plebiscites on fascist mitosis too, a new body tries to restore the order of the old, mythical body). Let’s keep going as things are, someone says. Death drive, the urge to repeat the damage until perfection is achieved: perfect damage. Perfect damage to bodies that never achieve perfection, never achieve anything. The bimbofication of humanity. Some bodies become curiously hyper-functional in all this, while the rest get sick and die. No one knows why, it has to do with access to children or women, maybe, from the Third World or from certain pedophile islands. The ultraleftists talk about young girls just like the fascists. We are all becoming young girls, we can’t get girls, I get mad puss on the reg, someone says. Mad pussy disease (a neurodegenerative condition). Lockheed Martin tenderqueers. I’ll be spinning decolonial beats at the whatever. Everything becomes relational. What about what just is?, someone says. But no one remembers. The horrors are comprehensible and systematically mutable. The body comes to its ending. There is nothing to fear. And yet we go on fearing. Fearing what? The night we are, the night we’ve always been: night mares in eternity, galloping…
***
But I know another language, too.
Em:
It becomes easier, forgiveness… or I hate that word, because there isn’t a lot of nuance to it, peace or something, even peace with the fact you’re not always at peace. When you realize your parents were children, are children. And they know it and it hurts them, and that they tried, and they succeeded some and failed some, from systemic factors and because of their own lack of accountability, but that they are essentially children who weren’t love who love and hurt for the world. And love and hurt for their kids, but the hurt is too much when it’s spoken of…it’s easier to acknowledge their vanguard elitism and know it all nature and guilting are just because they’re pretending extra hard and secretly know they’re just broken kids wanting to be held and have to sit on a fortune instead, finding rationales so paper thin that a whisper of a critique tears them apart
We came from weird places, similar in some ways, different in others, it sounds like. But yea, I love that it sounds like you get the both sidedness of it too. The limitations and why they’re there, the mixed feelings, the anger about how it could have been better, the guilt of where we came from we can be swallowed up by, the uncanny ability to see our parents better in their attachment wounded young ignorant but overly educated intellectual short sightedness, than they see themselves
I like it 🙂 but I’m sorry for your hurt.
That was the nice thing about that mushroom trip for me. To feel like I came back to myself, after all of it. That I didn’t travel in time and see what I saw, not really. Which was slave drivers and Virginia colonists and abolitionists and a lot of WASPS who couldn’t say “chicken breast” and who never touched another human in public, and didn’t hold their babies, but then birthed some weird hippie rebels who got into racial justice and leftism and a pretty okay strain of environmental thought, and on the other side poor Jews who were radically left, held a lot in, lived in poverty, died in the concentration camps behind barbed wire where rarely a bird sang loud enough to break a very deafening silence. That I didn’t meet my family in the past and I didn’t leave my bed. But that they all live inside me, their good and their bad, their pain and their resilience. Their stories and their denial of their stories. And that healing myself means Healing them too, the pieces of them left in me. Smoothing out the ones that are sharp and cause me pain, and treasuring the pearls they’ve left behind. And if being loud and obnoxious about the parts that stab me, the parts that feel like they’re missing, the gnawing feeling that lived in my chest too, that I didn’t get enough love or do enough or am enough, if being colorful and wild and honest about all of that, and wanting to address it, makes them avoid me, they’re not really gone. For better and for worse, because they left the imprint of their world in me. And I might not be able to heal them, but I can heal myself, and In a way that’s the same thing
And that both makes me feel absurdly free and creative, to do something most none of them have, and also closer to my aunt Eva, who did exactly that, and my brother, though he’s a bit more oblivious and way more shut down, but honest to a total fault and kept militant despite being too depressed and anxious to actualize it completely, a bit closer to a few of my cousins who only exchange infrequent emails, who I think went halfway. And we’re not close, but I like them fine for each generation going a bit further.
Wow that was long. I hope you’re making breakfast but figured I’d give you some more to chew on. Thanks for making me think about this, and sharing your story. I’d love to read your book, I bet it’s amazing
Me:
i’m literally in tears, everything you said, you say, is so beautiful, i’ve been waiting to hear it all said like this from another person for so long and didn’t think i would and like also, in an uncanny way, you captured what i was trying to do with my book mutatis mutandis but, down to the hallucinatory ketamine-driven confrontation with my plantation-owning 18th-century colonist ancestor, a long surrealist dialogue and a return to virginia, the full circle of the trauma of my northern virginia imperialist-warfare-economy childhood with the deep origin of all that in my psyche, on the land, in this country and so much with my jewish ancestors in europe, and then there’s a whole other side to it, like the latin america part, or the part about the life i actually lived in the wake of all this psychic-energetic vortex, on this Earth in its dying days and the people living on it but always being brought back to that
and then as i said it’s also about the loss of romantic love, that’s probably the most central thing, everything revolves around that because that wound incorporated all the other wounds
and the thing is the book has this traumatic legacy of a masc self, false self, it is the process of becoming femme, my new book is openly, shamelessly femme like spiritually bimboish and trying to take that shit about the colonial-fascist nightmare and put it into a different register, something more like…in the heart, and atemporal, and kind of metaphysical maybe
…
Em:
Also sounds like both our parents spit out their colorful somatic sexuality without exploitation of others, their artistry, their gender nonconformity, their introspective over analysis, their lack of elitist prevention, their legitimate desire to be among the people and not just visit for academic purposes or to feel special and then return back to wherever, or never go, and we were like hi world
A chill-like death came over me, they say.
Yes, they say, these people who are the operators of the machine are power-worshiping and malignant, invite our hatred, but they, too, suffer, the machine is sad…
They tell me about a sci-fi novel they’re working on, a metaphor for Zionism and the Shoah (but a broken, a melancholic metaphor), and for the fragmentary, death-haunted, amnesiac consciousness of history, for mirrors, for the things we do to others who are us on the behalf of our torturers who are also us, the only difference being who is designing the experiment, the prison, the game, who is carrying out orders, who’s on the other side of the gun, like those former classmates in the Chilean novels of Bolaño who shove rats up the vagina of the girl they desired, or who let another out of prison because they once shared a cigarette and talked about French poetry together.
Em:
I want to say too. Something occurred to me the last night that made me think of you, I wonder if you relate
As a person whose goal is to be seen, as you are, and for that to be enjoyed and accepted and celebrated, and for others to know you see them and accept them and celebrate them too – there’s a lot of pain you might relate to that leads to that being a huge driver.
As a trans person, one of the main injustices is how wrongly you’re perceived. AS the wrong gender, or as things being gendered how you aren’t even if you transition and get into a space of expression (I know trans women for instance, who worry their messy eating makes them seem like a man, instead of a woman eating messy), and you’re seen as predatory, or you’re fetishized, and that pedestal is unreal too
The Jewishness is also so misunderstood. From Zionism, from antisemitic conspiracies, from so much, from the Jewish community and outside, from feeling attached to and severed from your roots, so not quite fitting in either place. And you get white privilege, but you also get recognized as a “not quite white” person whose both white and not, similar to gender, both held more important in a conspiratorial way than they are, and yet also the realness and the history that’s raw isn’t known, the books burned, the honesty forgotten
And a lot with Judaism of course, the radical elements of it, given up in exchange for whiteness (a Black creator I like was asked why white people are always taking from POC magic traditions when there is Celtic stuff and other magical pasts for white people, and they said theres a price to whiteness. White people had to give up their magic, and that’s a colonial trauma too, so now all they can do is commodify and take from POC magic, because their disconnected from theirs. I liked that).
And the same goes for adverse childhood experiences and abuse. You’re told bad things about yourself that aren’t true and punished for them. You’re also potentially love bombed in unreal ways. You can be scapegoated for things and made bigger than you truly are, to sound more powerful, more responsible for making people unhappy and being a symbol of a world that you’re not really – yea you should be accountable. But to hold all whiteness and classism and everything else on your shoulders. It’s not truly your burden, it’s damaged you too, it’s something you feel both a part of and yet have been shown, again and again, that the people that truly embody that do not welcome you in their spaces.
So you want so badly to show people who you are. Who isnt the bad things they say about trans people, Jewish people, white people, that abusers say, that the govt says, the newspapers, the media machine. The culture, etc. etc.
That might hold little bits of general truth you try to hold yourself accountable for. But they’re not your story, they’re not you, and not being seen as you are has always brought punishment, alienation, abuse, fetishism, invisibility, pedestalization
Political violence, aloneness, sadness, and you’ve had to continually assert that’s not you, and often failed, and sometimes doubted that maybe if so many people say these things, how could I be alone in saying something else and be right. Isn’t that hubris and arrogance to believe?
So you seek out affirmation. As a way to feel belonging and fitting with people who see you. As a way to not be objectified and become real. As a way to soothe and escape violence. As a way to be loved, to be able to love yourself
And after everything that’s happened this summer, after the obsession and the illness, the fear mistaken for sexual desire, for transcendence, the scapegoating and the demonizing and the lovebombing, the fluctuation between cultish aggrandizement-by-proximity and total banishment, my first trans summer, my first beautiful summer, a summer spent behind closed doors nurturing an impossible romantic love, reading Em’s words while sitting in Zosie’s waiting room I start to sob uncontrollably, I lose it, and when I walk into Zosie’s office I’m still crying, harder now, oh you’re not okay, Zosie says, and no it’s not that, I say, it’s that no one’s ever seen me like this, no one’s ever held me like this, no one’s ever been so kind to me, and I start shaking, it can be such a shock to the system, Zosie says, and I don’t know what to say, how to express who this person is, what they’ve done for me already, how turned on I am by feeling safe with someone for the first time, and by their bravery, their words, their vision, their intimacy with death, their depth and the poems they write across the surface of the vanishing world.
Em:
A friend of mine said something I love and had forgotten. Which is that my dad gave a speech at my wedding talking about how he sent me to Public school because he “believed in the system” and most all the speech was about him and also sweet in some ways about how I’d challenged him but also dripping in narcissism and disability “inspiration porn”
They had a weird oscillation of autistic and adhd cluelessness and from my moms side, privilege cluelessness and general outbursts of shame and desire for more assimilation and safety (dad) and avoidance of pain (mom and dad).
And a sadness and desire for the world to be a leftist naked paradise where we could all be free and there was no war and children never got hurt and men were never scary and awful that is potentially the thing that pulls my heart about them the most
I didn’t even know they were anti Zionists as a kid because I was just told the whole thing was “complicated” which sometimes meant “this causes us too much pain to think about on our own much less explain it to a child we want to protect from this big bad place”
My parents went to Costa Rica right before the pandemic and went to a beach where there were all these crabs and it was so cool. And it was the first time my mom says my dad shared her deep reverence for nature
And it was apparently amazing how many there were. Then some birds flew down out of the sky and started eating the crabs, just going to town. My dad started weeping. Like not crying. Sobbing so hard he couldn’t speak and was shaking. Asking why did life rely on death and suffering, why did anyone have to kill.
He’s got the DBT because of being borderline and being one of the least dialectical people I know. And the Buddhism because he doesn’t want to be attached to anything. And abhors violence and killing and hatred on such a visceral level he can’t say it’s because of love and pain, that’s too much. It’s gotta be for dogmatic ideological reasons
Me:
this is so beautiful em
i can feel such love for your parents now, in spite of everything
but u know i will always always take ur side and if i can protect u from them
Em:
So yea I’m not just the emotions. I’ve had violence done to me, people hate me, violence I’ve done to myself and hate I’ve done to myself. And violence and hate he’s bestowed upon me and he’s deeply attached to me and I haven’t given up on dreams for the world he’s had to leave behind, and I bitingly hold people to task for things he’s told himself he’s “accepted” and I explained to him he’s speaking of tolerance many times.
Thank you. I love people, I genuinely have rarely spent time with a human and not. My ex husbands mom who was a MAGA supporting classist racist who abused him and said cringey things to me or about me sometimes taught me more about that actually
Me:
would u be open to meeting my mom when she comes in october. we are supposed to drive up the oregon coast together and then see the family in seattle. first time with me as femme i didn’t introduce anyone to my parents for so long
Em:
But I also still kicked her out of my house twice very very angry and set very firm boundaries and made him stop giving her every other month of his disability money because she was a borderline hoarder who squandered everything but the ties were too much and being around her would devastate him for a month at worst and if it went well drain him for a week at best
Yea for sure!
Me:
actually they don’t know anyone in my life, besides rebecca, my ex, who was so important to my mom in the wake of her divorce, the sense of belonging to leftist liberation causes for the first time during the trump years that she got from her, and of being listened to and understood by a daughter she thought she never had, her consciousness dealing with the insane trauma of losing a thirty-year marriage suddenly to a man who turned into a stranger and told her she was nothing, shit, a disgrace, had ruined his life, that he was infinitely desirable and she was lucky to have him, this is a person for whom patriarchy was so naturalized that she still to this day calls her abuser and my father “daddy” to me, with all the creepy infantile sexual overtones of one who never developed a real adult sexuality, because it was too scary and the somatophobia of the wasp past was swallowing her up from the beginning
At 2 AM they ask me, on the phone, as I’m falling asleep, if they can read Bernie’s disability platform from the 2020 campaign, and I say yes, and then they start reading it, stirring up the bittersweet memory that only two years ago such a utopian longing could exist and be articulated, in the most dystopian place in a dystopian world (the U.S. electoral system), and I start to drift off to the sweetness in their voice, the power in their voice, and then they ask me if I’m there, and I wake up, I fell asleep, I say, there’s a word I want to say, they say, I know the word, I say, say it, I say, I want to say it too, I say, I love you Leila, they say, I love you too Em, I say, what the fuck?, they say, I know, they say, what the fucking fuck?, I love you, I love you, how is this happening?, I don’t know either, maybe it’s a dream, I had a dream once, Anne Sexton wrote, perhaps it was a dream, that the crab was my ignorance of God. But who am I to believe in dreams?
The way they talk about infinity. How infinity saves them from the burden, the prison of the end, of the beginning. How they say I don’t know if I’ll ever know what it’s like to be dirt. How we are and are not our bodies. How their words go from infinity to the body to death to sex to fascism to genocide to utopian longing: the Spanish Civil War, the crimes of the oil companies, the necessity of going after pipelines, the necessity of learning to use a gun, the tragicomic and disgusting oscillations of the wounded male psyche, those of us with more estrogen in our systems, the misogyny of autoimmune theory, illnesses of the immune system as internalized oppression, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Simone Weil, Oscar Wilde, Reinaldo Arenas, Ursula Leguin, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Daddy Stalin, the boomerang theory of Aimé Césaire, suicide attempts, internal family systems, microcosms (the nature of microcosms), the trust fund that came from oil money in the 1920s, death doula-ing, having witnessed the end, having seen the end before the end, labyrinths and bifurcations, the tracing backwards, the thinking forwards, what now is, how now is, how they want me to cum inside them, how I want that too in spite of my trepidation about penetrative sex, the planetary concentration camp, the planetary Auschwitz (Ka-Tsetnik, I say), butterflies (the ones in the stomach and the ones in the mind of the universe) (Spinoza, I say), Marx, but not Marxism, not even Marx, the future, the ex who removed their fentanyl patches in the middle of the night and attached it to her body and said, see, see what you did, COVID (the apocalypse of COVID), the forced electroshock therapy of loved ones, the cruel emptiness of the concept of worth, can you imagine all these trees being watered and nourished and growing into the soil and providing a home to the birds, and then there’s this one tree that’s all alone and saying, I’m not worthy of the air, of the water, of the Earth, I suck, I fucking suck, our incredible insanity in an incredibly insane world, love shouldn’t be revolutionary (they wrote in chalk on the ground all over town at the beginning of the pandemic), you were right about Nietzsche, I say, about slave morality (thinking of M, their abusive worshipping of their own suffering), look at me, I’ve gone through colonial trauma, I am Christ, I don’t think we’re getting out of this mess, I don’t think the doomsday glacier cares about our tweets, let’s dress up as dolls, let’s be a mess, let’s be Maria Singer, rebellious 90s queer bimbos, let’s give ourselves a big send-of , do you know what autism means?, it means the pathological condition of being yourself, you know what mental illness is?, it means anything that impairs the normal functioning of the human being, but what is the normal functioning of a human being in a fascist society?, and was John Brown crazy?, the only right answer, the galaxy brain answer, can be yes, John Brown was crazy, as were the drapetomaniacs, the Black people in the South with run-away-slave syndrome, as were the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, whose function was to die, simply to die, as are the trans people who continue to exist in spite of the fact that in five years we’re going to be dragged into the street and shot, we’re all crazy, crazy, crazy, and sick, too, sick with life, sick with sensitivity, with childhood, with remembering utopia in a dystopian world…
When they found out their friend E was dying, they cried in an empty bathtub for a month. Now E has hyper hearing from the cancer, even the softest conversation can be torturous, so they write emails to each other. All I can do, they say, is be with them while they’re dying and give them the gift of seeing them dying, and not lying to them about it, not running away, not trying to assuage my fear or my pain, and that’s how I try to be with the world, this dying world. I told them you were my girlfriend, they say. I hope that’s okay, that’s the direction I hope things are heading in. There’s nothing I want more in the world, I say, than to be called your girlfriend. And it’s true, suddenly that weird void I’d lived with all my life, the feeling that my existence was a whispering to no one, a question left unanswered, a bimboish beauty undesired, a body and a heart untouched, a mind unknown, falls away, the dreams I had as a child become prophetic rather than traumatic, invocations rather than inanitions, an apperception of a non-linear time, a ghost waiting to be born, the sister in the tree at night, where they used to sleep in the rain in the backyard, crying for the earthworms lured to the concrete which shouldn’t be there, which should never have been called into being, when we could all be walking barefoot on the Earth together with the insects and with each other.
Me:
Hi, hope ur doing well…just want to say that i am trying to move on with my life and I would appreciate it if u committed to coming by at some point to take ur stuf . I know i said u could keep it here but things have changed. Literally no hard feelings but it’s a boundary and i hope u can respect that
M:
Literally never commit to shit if you don’t feel it wholeheartedly. This has now become something reminiscent of break up shit and it’s not like that for me/ I never asked for this. Let this be a lesson to you to never of er more than you are able to commit to. I am really annoyed that your white girl shit is popping up time after time.
If this is your reaction to me I don’t know that you even know if you are someone ready to be in community with J– and their kid.
Reevaluate your shit please lives are affected over and over just for your leisure to be protected.
Me:
Im not gonna fight u on this, if u think this is unfair u have every right to ur feelings but this is my decision. If processing this takes some time i understand but i need this stuff out and when it leaves my house i want u to be able to get it back. It might not be ideal but it seems like the best middleground between what both of us need
M:
Karen shit
Just listen to yourself
Im at work busting my ass only to receive this intrusive energy
that drum set is my heart. stop treating “stuff” as leverage or weaponizing.
clearly no amount of cleansing will rid you of your affinity w colonizer shit.
Me:
Im sorry if this upsetting but i gotta move on with my life. It feels like having material things that tie us together means that any interaction cant be fully voluntary and i need that for my mental health. This conversation now seems harmful and I understand that in this society I have certain privileges but i need people in my life who value my emotional well-being regardless. For that reason i cant continue this conversation right now but let’s pick it up another day and we can figure out the best way to handle this. I get that ur hurt but if u need to process this im not the right person to do that with because im not gonna be able to continue this conversation today
Em helps me see the abuse I suffered, the cruelty and absurdity of this person, their slave-morality worshipping of their own suffering, the violent and inane contradictions of their rhetoric, how not being in a relationship means I don’t have the right to leave and how I’m being intrusive by not letting them keep their stuff in my house, how they’re using a Black sexworker mom and their kid as a pawn, as something to be withdrawn when I prove myself unworthy, they talk about M’s anti-semitism, about the anti-semitism of the left, and how we go to the left to refuse to deal with our own internalized anti-Semitism a lot of the time, and so much more. They start to laugh and say, oh shit, I talked to M recently. They made that post about how disabled people are hot, and getting a wheelchair with the help of a friend (that was me, I say), and I messaged them to say, fuck yeah disabled people are hot, and they responded yes it was nice to receive help “especially after tirelessly giving,” which now seems weird and symptomatic, that they were telling me just how much they give, for no reason, aggrandizing themselves (yep, I say, that’s them), and then they told me how beautiful I was. Now we’re both laughing. So that’s your revenge, they say. Your abuser is simping and giving compliments to the non-binary hottie you left them for. And even though it disturbs me that M entered their life, in some way, this makes me happy, too.
On camera, at night, they spread their legs for me and start touching themselves and say, we’re so fucking hot, this is why Hitler wanted us dead, he spared Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein but not our ancestors, Jews are hot, fuck yes, I say, touching myself, trans people are hot, fuck yes, I say, disabled people are hot, fuck, fuck, fuck…
Abuse is transmitted in words. Words are the instrument of genocide. They make us forget what we know, know what we don’t, desire our hurt, die unconsciously, say what we don’t mean, confuse our meanings with theirs. Everything falls away, and the choice between life and death becomes easy, limpid, a matter of letting go, of sinking into the heart, of simply allowing yourself to die. That which they call life is actually death, and that which they call death is actually life. They create the binaries that govern us, the categories of worthy and disposable, virtuous and killable, they create a “they” and an “us,” when that’s not what we want, we don’t even want to fight, love shouldn’t be revolutionary, nor should survival, nor should getting sick, nor should dying. Now I want nothing more than to be a hot bimbo living off my trust fund and to write my books, to love, to fuck, to go on adventures, to get hotter, get healthier, get sicker, remember, forget, let the world end, be its end, be nothing in the world that is becoming nothing. Fuck the left, I think, where I’ve found nothing but abuse and the valorization of suffering and the reenactment of trauma on a melodramatic, an idiotic, a sadomasochistic stage. I’ll give directly to the people when I have the strength, and when I don’t, I’ll lie in bed and I’ll make myself cum, I’ll make my girlfriend cum…
You’re my hot little colonizer gentrifier bitch, they say. You’re my problematic bimbo. Where’s your slave morality, you dirty slut? Did you invalidate a hot spinny theyfab femme who doesn’t owe you androgyny, you transmedicalist binary filthy truescum? Oh you did? That’s bad, that’s really bad, I’m going to slap you, I’m going to fuck the colonizer right out of you…
I think I romanticized, I say, the relationality they embodied, or pretended to embody, towards…I can’t finish this convoluted, ugly, alienated thought, a thought that’s not mine. Also, they say, smirking, I mean, they’re really hot, and sometimes, you know, we just want to stick our dick in hot people, or bury your face in their pussy. Yeah, I laugh, I don’t even know what bullshit I was saying. Something about relationality…I want to be in relationality to that ass, they say. I’m gonna be relational so hard…
The dream they told me about the tree of life, a tree of cosmic dimensions with all these pods hanging down from it, pods that contained the seeds of life, and all these people in the genocidal night, the night of pure violence and pure death, shooting flamethrowers at it, destroying pod after pod, but the tree itself, they realized, is huge, it’s infinite, it never ends. And the round tables in the sky, tables that ascended as if they were a staircase into eternity, with children at each table doing their homework, but when they failed, they fell, they descended, as if karmically, as if being punished for a sin or a mistake, and thinking how will they ever learn, how will they ever feel safe, if they keep falling into a new and hostile situation where they know no one? And then wandering around an apocalyptic shanty-town on an Earth abandoned by the ruling class, which has gone off to its colonies on Mars to live off adrenochrome and hair plugs, and on each tent, each shack, there were protest slogans, slogans like “Black Lives Matter” or “Homeless Lives Matter,” and realizing that if we can’t even agree on that, on the fact that lives matter, that there are no lives that are disposable, then we’ve already lost this planet, lost ourselves, lost everything, everything, everything…
But then another dream of a white town on the sea or a lake with a white lighthouse or a white tower in the distance, a place of consolation, of beauty. That’s the nostalgic dream for a time that hasn’t come yet, they say. And I show them a photo of Lake Bled in Slovenia, where my family lives, and the white church on the island in the middle of the lake, and they say oh my God, and then they start looking at other photos of the country, and they start to cry, this is it, this is it. Who are you?, they say. Who the fuck are you? It’s as if you’re me, as if I’ve known you my whole life, as if we are sundered parts of the same soul? Yes, I say, as if you were another, even more spiritual stage of my transness, I say, as if being trans were a reaching out to you. What the fuck?, they say. I know. What the fuck? I know. This isn’t supposed to happen, this isn’t part of the definition of healthy, but we have to bend the rules, discover the laws of another world. We’re twin flames, they say, and then they read me the definition: A twin flame is an intense soul connection with someone thought to be a person’s other half, sometimes called a “mirror soul.” It’s based on the idea that sometimes one soul gets split into two bodies. One of the main characteristics of a twin flame relationship is that it will be both challenging and healing. This is due to the mirroring nature of a twin flame; they show you your deepest insecurities, fears, and shadows. But they also help you overcome them, and vice versa—your twin flame will be equally affected by you…11 signs you’ve found your twin flame: 1. When you met, there was instant recognition. 2. You’re very similar. 3. You complement each other. 4. Your insecurities and doubts are amplified. 5. They feel magnetic (from the moment you met and still to this day, you feel drawn to them physically when they’re near you, as well as magnetically, when you’re apart. It’s as though their energy is always with you, always wanting to be closer. 6. The relationship is tumultuous. 7. The relationship is very intense. 8. You keep coming back together. 9. Your connection feels divine (when you find your twin flame, there’s a certain larger-than-life quality that likely feels divine or predestined). 10. You have an almost psychic connection. 11. They push you to be better and do better.
They come over on a rare day of rain. We can’t touch each other, not really (not where it counts, where it hurts, but later we do anyway, over our clothes, they hold me, they touch my hair, my heart, they grind against my cunt, they use their mirror-touch synesthesia to evoke memories of paradise and of pain, the paradise and the pain in the aeons of my navel, when it gets dark they hold me close and say, you’re me queen, I see you as a woman because that’s what you are, and if the world doesn’t see you that way it’s because they’re transphobic, they’re missing out on so much beauty, they would rather tear down someone who’s beautiful and real and vulnerable and truthful than be those things themselves, and if they come for you, if they come for your body, for your hormones, for your life, I’ll be there to protect you, and if they hate you for being trans, for being Jewish, for being disabled, it’s because they’re Nazis, and Nazis are always wrong, what do we do with Nazis?, we fight them, we fucking kill them, we don’t internalize their shit, we love each other, like I love you, we see each other, like I see you, we hold each other, like I hold you, and I start to cry and to shake, I go limp, and I’ll tell you this every day you need to hear it, I’ll tell you you’re my queen, because that’s what you are, and that you’re beautiful, because that’s what you are, and that I love you, because I do, and that
The next day they come over and we go to the library and then they have therapy on my couch and then we eat dinner outside by candlelight and then we lie on the ground covered in blankets looking at the stars talking about our grandparents, the people who hurt us, the traumatic nightmares that have been the lives of the people we love, and we talk about disabled time, about Jewish time, about trans time (about trans-temporal bliss), about the time of the Earth and the sky, the time of dying, how it’s all going to get so much worse, so much fucking worse, and yet one day we’ll sit at the cafe on the cobblestone street looking out at the lake with the church on the island in the dazzling white of the sun with a kiss and a longing and a vision and a poem and a grieving and a joke they tell that I won’t get because I don’t have to pretend to get jokes anymore, I can unmask, I can let all the masks that have ever been invented and forged and forgotten fall to the ground to turn to debris to ruin to legend to dust…