[an excerpt from something new]
.. Yesterday, before heading over to Amal’s to get tattooed, I sent an email to Heidi that contained an email address, a password, and the contact info of three people: Benj (who’s been my editor at First of the Month since I started out as a writer), Mike, and Rebecca. I don’t mean to be morbid, I said, but I want you to have access to the account. It’s where I’m going to be sending my unpublished writing, the manuscript I’m working on, whatever I don’t release immediately into the world. If something happens to me, I want you to share the account details with these three people.
..It was one of those days where death seemed right around the corner, felt as certain as the ineluctable arrival of a new season (a secret winter within the heart of my summer), where everything felt like a prefiguration of death, a native language spoken by death, a whisper from somewhere else: from the void? Who the fuck knows?
…..
..When I got into the Lyft, the seat belt was broken. I almost ignored that but I decided to move over to the driver’s side, which had a working seat belt. That was something I always did since childhood, I’m a cautious person at heart, it comes from the Jewish side of my family (a common anti-Semitic motif, one deployed by the Germans in the concentration camps, is that Jews are overly attached to life, overvalue life, etc.). The driver, a young Arab guy named Mohammed, was clearly intoxicated and he started speeding down MacArthur in a way that made me feel unsafe, but I decided to ignore it and listen to music. I was listening to Emily Yacina (“my delusion is soaking through/makes my whole world wet with the idea of you”) when the driver ran a stop sign going at least 55 on a 35 road and t-boned another car. So this is it, this is what a car crash feels like, I thought. I got out of the car, in shock, not knowing if I was injured or not. The driver though had hit his head and he was really fucked up. He didn’t seem to know where he was and he lay on the ground talking to himself. A bunch of people crowded around him and I kind of sneaked away, no one seemed particularly interested in the trans girl in the backseat. The other driver, an older Black guy, seemed okay, pissed off. By the time the cops arrived I had already left the scene. I called Amal. I’ve been in an accident, I said. Where are you?, I’ll be right there, they said. They arrived ten minutes later with some kind of drink infused with various herbs and a stone of some sort, maybe a crystal?, something that was supposed to calm me down if I held it. When I got in their car I realized that I was actually in excruciating pain, most of all in my tailbone, but my neck was pretty messed up, too. Amal convinced me to go to the hospital. Or no, they didn’t convince me, they made it clear that it was my decision whether or not to go. When we got to the emergency room they went in and came out with someone with a wheelchair. I’d called Christian in the car, I didn’t want to take up all of Amal’s day, we weren’t close enough for that. So Christian and I waited in a hospital room vaping and talking about past injuries, his being particularly gruesome and numerous. I was just in here two weeks ago to get my knee stitched up, he pointed out the doctor who’d seen him. The doctor recognized him when he came in. Don’t I know you? Yeah, he said, you stitched my knee up a few weeks ago. You still skating?, he asked. Yeah, Christian said sheepishly, having been instructed to stop for a bit. Well, the doctor said, you gotta do what you gotta do. They gave me some pain meds. It hurt badly to move, but the shock was wearing off, and I realized I was probably okay. The x-ray didn’t show any broken bones. So Christian took me home. I got in a hot bath and listened to songs about car crashes, which were also usually breakup songs. Harvey was coming to stay a couple nights and they were due to arrive at the train station around ten. When they got here, I gave them the most intense hug of my life, I swooned into them, and began to cry. It’s so good to see you, I said. They’d been there for me while I’d gone through hell in the past few months, at times it had felt like they were the only person in the world I could turn to. We sat on the couch catching up, but less than ten minutes after their arrival I got a text from Sara. She was breaking things off with me. “Unfortunately I think I’m at a place where I’m not feeling this connection in a romantic capacity in a way that I wish I did…I think you’re really amazing in a lot of ways, and I mean that genuinely. I’m sorry to have to send you this text…” She asked if it was still okay to read my writing. I broke down sobbing. What the fuck is wrong with me?, I said to Harvey. Why am I not desirable? This hurts so fucking bad, I feel this visceral self-hate in my body, which I already hated for being trans and disabled. I tried to fathom how she could be the same person who’d said all those things to me about how beautiful I am, who’d kissed me so “selfishly”. I wish I could devalue her right now, like say she’s kind of basic, but the truth is I fell for her really hard, I really liked that girl, I dreamed of doing those simple and boring things, you know like going to the grocery store together, I dreamed of going on road trips together in her car, I dreamed about us fucking all day (I don’t know why, it’s out of character and usually dysphoria-inducing, but I joked about how she didn’t even get to know how amazing my dick is, how things might have been different if she had), I would have loved her with everything I have, etc. Harvey apologized for not being the best at comforting people, but I didn’t think they had anything to apologize for. Emotion used to make them uncomfortable, but now they were able to sit with me in my pain, and though they still showed some of their old coldness, their analytic brain made up for it, they knew how to keep it real, to talk about life in an unsentimental way, without empty positivity, to acknowledge the senselessness of love, the misery of love, the failure of love, how hard it is to find someone to love, who will love you, especially people like us, intense people, people who bring so much authenticity but also so much difficulty to the world, people who’ve been traumatized, who’ve made a home in the darkness, the only home we’ve ever known, whose very desire to love, the purity of that desire, can be alienating and hard to deal with, etc. After I cried for awhile we went to my bed and put on another Aubrey Plaza movie about a mentally disturbed young woman who becomes obsessed with an Instagram influencer, and then a truly unsettling documentary about a cult at Sarah Lawrence run by some kind of fifty-something charlatan ex-CIA agent who took in a bunch of students and sexually groomed them, took total control of their lives, gaslit them and turned on them sadistically, and while we were watching it I thought about Emily, I thought about the sleep deprivation tactics Emily had subjected me to, the all-night interrogations in which at the end I would confess to any wrongdoing simply so they’d let up, but believing it, too, looking, as one of the students described it, through endless contexts for a clue that didn’t exist. Harvey and I talked about how a decade ago it was mostly only middle-class suburban kids who could have fallen for this, but now we live in a reality where epistemic violence, reality-warping, selling others on something, is universal, and then Harvey said that so many people live their lives worried that it’s all a dream, that they’ll wake up one day at the end and realize nothing had been real, and so we’re always trying to pull other people into our orbit, trying to convince them of our reality, bring some warmth into the cold night of our reality, affirm that we’re real, that we’re not solipsistic figments, that we’re worthy of love, worthy of being wanted, worthy of being seen, while all along we feel that we’re disappearing, disappearing, disappearing. I know exactly what you mean, I said. That’s been the fear that’s haunted my entire life, the fear of solipsism, of being stuck in a life-long dream, a dream prison, and being unloveable, and I’ve tried so hard to reach out to others, to open my heart to others, to find some kind of mirroring, but in the end I went about it all in the wrong way, like with Sara, you can’t make people love you, you can’t make people see the world the way you see it, you shouldn’t want to anyway, though of course you want people to see you through your own eyes sometimes, to love what you love most about yourself. Today has fucked me up, I said, has torn away another veil, shown me once again, on the most physical and primordial level, how the world absolutely does not care about me, my body can be thrown around like meat or a ragdoll by our civilization’s death machine, a girl I’ve fallen in love with can totally dispose of me, can revoke her attention, her gaze, her desire, and there’s nothing I can do about it, absolutely fucking nothing, because there’s some kind of metaphysical principle of the universe that makes it so that consciousness does not matter, consciousness is an expression of something else, maybe something beautiful but also maybe something evil and maybe something that is totally without meaning, Spinoza understood this, you know, and the truth is most of my ideas about reality haven’t been true ideas, they’ve been mutilated desires, erotic fantasy, childhood wounds mistaken for perception, a fever, a cheap hallucination…After awhile my mind started to wander off into a gauzy place, a place where the self slips away, and I cried myself to sleep, but I was also floating above my body, watching myself cry, watching myself disappear…
..I text Sara back this morning: Damn sara, i appreciate u being real with me? To be honest, id rly developed feelings for u, but i get that things dont always work out the way we want them to. idk i guess im a bit confused bc i felt like we had a strong connection and am now wondering if it was mostly in my head. Im in a vulnerable place rn but id rather be truthful abt what’s going on with my heart than disassociate or pretend im not hurt. I felt very close to u in the brief time we got to share together and yea i think ur wonderful. I hope the future brings u wherever u desire to go and u keep becoming more deeply urself. U can read whatever u like and also reach out if u ever feel like it
..Without effacing emotion, without taking solace in delusion, without the impulse to be cruel or to devalue, I tried to think of things about Sara that would make this easier on me, reasons why she wasn’t all that great. But none of that mattered. The truth is that she’s beautiful, I thought. Physical attraction is everything to me, I said to Harvey last night. Everything follows from physical attraction, which is also emotional attraction. And so of course I take rejection as a rejection of me physically, of my body, of my sexuality. What else is there, really? What are we besides our bodies, besides sex, besides desire?
..Last night I decided, taking Qiu Miaojin as my ideal, that after I finish this book I’m going to kill myself. Of course, my suicide won’t have the same “Eastern” meaning: suicide as apotheosis, as the highest expression of self. But I’ve always created my own meaning, and my own meaninglessness. When you’ve felt the way I do, the way Qiu did, you understand that a body cannot live without love, without mutual understanding, outside a state of erotic grace.
..I lay in bed with Harvey thinking about Sara, yearning. Desire is the second strongest emotion, I said. Grief is the strongest. Grief destroys the world, desire the self. And God, it hurts, desire. Grief is just desire anyway, Harvey said. Yes, I said, the desire for an impossible presence. Desire is grief plus hope, grief plus lust. Or maybe there can be lust in grief: lust for the dead, for those who have spurned us or gone away. When I was seeing Sara, I said, I couldn’t cum thinking of her, but now I’m pretty sure I could. Grief is masochistic desire, I went on, melancholic desire: the desire to obliterate time, to achieve a spiritual and erotic unity in death that was never possible in life. Desire itself is born from grief, from a primal melancholia, which itself comes from abortive desire. An Ouroboros: desire and grief, grief and desire…
Ugh, I said, changing the subject. What is it?, Harvey said. Just some bullshit I’m reading on Twitter about how art should be on the front line of the revolution, how artists should deploy all their energies towards the revolution. Ew, Harvey said. In a fascist world, I said, a world of pure death, it’s enough just to create, just to communicate, to make something meaningful or meaningless, something ugly even, to preserve a margin of freedom, of humanity and something beyond humanity: a kind of sub or infrahumanity. Yes, exactly, Harvey said. Let things be ugly and fucking meaningless. This world is brutal enough, and oversaturated with meaning. Everything is controlled and enclosed, why can’t art be a place to go to just be, just be alone for awhile, alone, together, whatever? Art that’s revolutionary in quotes, I said, is only that way by a confluence of circumstances outside the intention of the artist, it’s not even about a Zeitgeist or an archetypal consciousness, it’s just being in the right place at the right time, a certain aesthetic charisma, anti-charisma, a punk defiance that doesn’t try hard at all. So-called revolutionary art, Harvey said, is try hard, it’s fucking lame. Never push things, that’s what I think. Later, while falling asleep, I thought about how this conversation could be an epitaph for our friendship, how it encapsulated the understanding that drew us together years ago, before we both knew we were trans, when we were both in the throes of addiction, when we were still sleeping together. We were leftists, but not like other leftists: not moralists, not perfectionists, not savior-types, not sensationalists, etc. What drew us together was a shared fascination with the sheer weirdness and darkness of human beings, the ways in which they’re haunted and deformed, the desperate and lunatic ways they have of loving, fucking, hating, creating, and dying, a hatred of hypocrisy and prudishness and censoriousness and hierarchy, a hatred of oppression, but a hatred that laughs as much as it cries, a way of loving people just as they are, loving this world just as it is, while at the same time mourning its cruel and dystopian side, hoping and not hoping for something better, acutely aware of our death, our extinction, our ending. And yes, I’d wanted to spend the apocalypse with Sara, because she’s beautiful, but I couldn’t think of a better, a more fitting apocalyptic companion than Harvey.
..Harvey’s fiancé Rob comes to pick them up from Sacramento. They’re going to spend the day in Point Reyes for an early Valentine’s Day and then crash with his sister in San Francisco, who I think does porn like Rob. Rob’s a funny guy, he’s a nympho and kind of a fag, kind of not, he grew up in poverty in an itinerant military family, he’s the most mainstream-looking person in my extended social circle, a kind of generic white dude, but he’s a weirdo, he’s got a lot of autistic special interests and odd mannerisms, I like talking to him, Harvey seems to love him and he seems to treat them well, which is all that really matters to me. When they go out to get us bagels, I talk to Heidi on the phone. She immediately tells me she can see how Thursday made me feel suicidal, how that assault on/trauma to my body followed by the one to my heart, would totally shake any conviction that life is worth living. She tried to tell me how I’d intuited Sara’s breaking things off with me before it happened, and the usual shit about how a relationship is about two people, there are millions of reasons people click, people decide to date, mostly volatile and inexplicable ones. That’s bullshit, I said, that’s the politically correct answer. The truth is there are some people who are undesirable and who are destined to be alone, because they’re weird, they’ve been traumatized, life dealt them a bad deck of cards, they’re disabled, they’re trans, etc. Sometimes the world doesn’t fucking want you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So it is about me, it’s about fucking me. I reiterated my theory of physical attraction being the only thing that matters, or the embodied expression of what matters: my materialism of desire. But you know, I’m glad that car crash happened. Because it changed me, it opened my eyes to the fact that I’d been living with a lot of delusions and false self concepts, believing that the world cared about me. The truth is, the world doesn’t give a shit about me, I’m totally disposable. And Sara showed me that, too. How could she say those things to me, I said, about my beauty, about her attraction, about feeling safe with me, listing all these things she wanted to do together, and then just dip out? Some people are just opportunists, they get what they want from life, it’s totally normal, it’s not evil. But I’m always the one who falls in love, the one who’s left, who’s life is left totally fucked up, the one who doesn’t know how to ward off feeling, the one who’s too much or not enough, etc. I know this sounds self-pitying, but I don’t care. I don’t believe in the concept of self-pity, Heidi said. It’s just a way of stigmatizing people who are experiencing a painful emotion for the first time, or as if for the first time, and it’s weaponized against everyone on the margins. She knew I was vulnerable when we first started talking, I said, so she shouldn’t have said those things if she couldn’t back them up. See this is what I wanted to say to her, but I can’t, because I’d come off like a psycho, I mean it was “only two dates.” It doesn’t matter how long something lasts, Heidi says, the current of our emotions has a different temporality, an obscure calendar. Why not send another text with your true feelings and let some of that anger sit where it belongs? That’s the thing, I say. I’m always internalizing my anger. That stems from the belief that I’m worthless, that no one can really wrong me in any way. Everyone skates away from me without knowing how I truly feel, or what’s truly transpired, from my perspective. As if my life doesn’t make a sound: a silent car crash.