..I went to a friend’s Eid party and left within five minutes, because the moment I got there I knew I was in no state to be there, to be around people, the truth is I’d been spiraling out for at least a week, one night I relapsed, went out drinking with Christian and tried to buy coke at three in the morning and asked him if he would ever fuck a trans woman, to which he said no, but Harvey told me that was a lie, or wasn’t true (something that’s not true and a lie are two different things), and the next day Xylea came over to take care of me, she brought over cute little Daiso items and a cactus and held me in my bed and told me I was a beautiful person, and I told her I was in love with her, to which she said nothing, or almost nothing, and then the next day, or the day after that, I burned our friendship to the ground, because of the usual shit, namely that intimacy is terrifying and impossible after you’ve been hurt a certain number of times, at a certain depth, I apologized but it was too late, with someone like that, who’s been through what she’s been through, you fuck them over once and you’re out, which is kind of how I am too, but it feels like shit to be on the other side of it, I tried to explain the changes that were happening inside me, how love and sex and trauma and transphobia got all mixed up inside me, like those albatrosses in the Pacific Ocean that are found decomposed with a cornucopia of plastic fragments in their guts, I didn’t say it’s not enough to share my heart with someone, I need to be wanted so completely and impossibly, engulfed by another’s desire, or I feel like I’m going to die of metaphysical rejection, and when I got home from the party I called Harvey and we talked about obsession, the cultural vertigo of obsession, the inflationary nature of obsession, that if we were to strip obsession in its various guises from our lives there would be nothing left, and we talked about how when people die these days no one is able to mourn them, they die and they’re forgotten, but also not forgotten, there’s an incomplete burial, there’s no context for their deaths just as like there’s no context for any of our lives anymore, like when Andy died and Harvey met his mom for the first time at the funeral and they talked for twenty minutes and that was it, and all his art went to his ex-girlfriend whom he wasn’t even on good terms with, so that Harvey had nothing of his to remember him by (I remember when he died because it was in May, 2019 and I was in a detox ward when Harvey called me to tell me he’d overdosed and was in a coma), I save every little post-it note and doodle from my boyfriends, they said, create these little material reliquaries of the men in my life who died, as if I know they’re going to die soon after we break up, or while we’re still together, from Xylea, I said, I have this little notebook in which she wrote on the first page “ball busting fetlife” and a phone number with a San Francisco area code and that’s it, there’s nothing else in the notebook, and a hoodie she gave me that I wear every day, and a corduroy vest she left at my place with sewn on patches and flannel pockets that smells like her, like her body odor and stale cigarettes and the streets of the Tenderloin, and that’s all I have, but for others I have even less, or nothing, I tattooed the first words of my grandfather’s suicide note (“enuf is enuf”) in his handwriting across a knife on my forearm, I wear a little Magen David necklace to remember my ancestors, though my connection to Judaism feels entirely ghostly, most of my life is contained in my writing, I said, and without that I really wouldn’t exist, I have no friends from before I was thirty, I’m too fucked up to go to a party, I hold onto certain bitter memories and revenge fantasies that blur the contours of the face of the past, and yet keep the past alive, something of it, a year ago might as well be a century ago, like how almost a year ago in May we were in New York together, and the year before that you moved in with me and we got fucked up for three months straight until you overdosed and I had to bring you to Kaiser in the middle of the night and they had to narcan you twice and you asked the nurse with burns all over his face what the fuck was wrong with his face, and then you moved back to Sacramento and with you finally gone I took hormones and got sober, I’m only able to stay sober these days, they said, because of my obsession with being the most sane person in the world, I say to myself, Harvey, you’re going to be so fucking sane it hurts, and that’s how I act in such an emotionally mature way, a so-called healthy way, but in reality I’m just as sick as I was before, and I don’t know where I’ll be in ten years, thinking about that seems impossible, I’ll have to have left Sacramento, it’ll be too hot by then, thinking about the future hurts, up until very recently, I said, I agreed with Walter Benjamin that revolution was the “emergency brake” on history, I believed that up until about 2020, I think the real meaning of Bernie was that for a couple years he was not only a prophet but a source of mental and emotional stability for people who were thoroughly broken down, especially for young people, like a guide on a horrible acid trip, and I think the George Floyd riots (so that’s what we were doing in May 2020, to fill in the gaps) were a moment of collective hope, too, that was the last time anything made sense, that was before the infinite barbarism took hold and “the dream of socialism” died, whatever socialism is, or was, but now I’m an accelerationist like everyone else, there’s no other way to be, Xylea used to say she liked Grimes, that you can’t hate on Grimes because that would be hating on hoes like us, and that disturbed me about her but also attracted me to her, that she wanted to go to Elon Musk’s fascist Mars colony and continue the hoe class struggle, and I guess I’m there, too, now, I don’t see any other way out but through, the planet Carl Sagan talked about is dead, you know the speck of dust in a sunbeam on which all human drama unfolds, the species has made a qualitative leap towards death, a future and futurist death, even being a bimbo is like that for me, an obsession with death, the bad infinity of a bad death, which can often be mistaken for sex, but it’s not sex, it’s an apocalypse without end…