…I walked by the Sacramento River the day before my thirty-eighth birthday, along the train tracks to an old rusted truss bridge. It was the first time I’d been alone, I mean alone in physical space, in a long time. I’d spent the Christmas holidays with Harvey, who had an excruciating toothache and no health insurance, and with Amber, this trans girl Harvey had just started seeing. Harvey never complained about the toothache, though. They wandered around their bedroom trying on different outfits, showing off their possessions, infinite sentimental relics, displaying their favorite dick pics on their phone (especially the cum vids), making jokes and asking surreal philosophical questions, while Amber fawned over them, which annoyed Harvey, though they kind of liked it, too. Harvey wanted to be seen, to be loved for their capacity to be seen, for their mere appearing in this world, epiphanic ephemera, the brute autistic weirdness of their creature-existence, but they didn’t really like being complimented, compliments made them uneasy, always seemed silly if not outright suspicious, and they liked being romanticized even less, though they knew it was this resistance to romance in themselves that invited it from others. At night we watched movies while Harvey fluttered in and out of sleep, moaning. One movie, that had come out a few years after 9/11, was about this Japanese voyeur who masturbated to footage of the World Trade Center towers collapsing and left little cards around Tokyo encouraging girls to sign up for this internet cam show. It was Amber’s favorite movie. She said fascists masturbated to the crystallization of forms, to individual beautiful truths, but that true beauty was in the dying away of forms, that the Empire dying liberated form itself, just like a cum vid, just like cutting off her dick had been this forbidden incision, a raid on the taboo of womanhood (that’s hot, I said), or something like that. At the last minute before her bottom surgery her insurance company denied coverage, but she went ahead with it anyway. I said you can’t repo this pussy, she said. They even wrote an article about it, about my pussy, in Vice. The director was a leftist who’d fallen in love with and married a fascist femme fatale who’d become his muse, Amber said, he was fascinated by the sheer glamor of a woman like that. I really like Harvey, Amber said, while Harvey slept. It was sweet, but I pretended to be asleep. Even though if I’d been in bed with someone I’d recently started dating, and was head-over-heels in love with, and their best friend, at four in the morning, I would have found the moment unbearably romantic, would have said the exact same thing, with the same wistful adoration, hoping to make my love real to this other person who’d known the person I was falling in love with for so many years, who herself (the friend) would take on a kind of aura and a kind of vertigo, in the way that when you’re falling in love with someone their shadowy temporal dimensions become deeply erotic, the others who’ve known them while you had not yet woken from the sepulchral place before love seem to possess a mystical knowledge, as if there were a mystery religion built up around the person you love, ancient deliriums, delphic murmurs and tongues. Amber was cool, she had good taste, she liked the same weird niche music and industrial aesthetics as Harvey, she said we were in a culture war against bad taste, and also that the reason she liked Harvey wasn’t just that they had the same taste, but the same sensibility, because sensibility was the spiritual expression of taste, the reason for taste in the first place. I couldn’t really relate to any of this, just as I couldn’t relate to when she said Valentine’s Day was her favorite holiday, and she didn’t understand why people get so miserly about it, she’ll make Valentine’s Day cards for her favorite songs or personal objects, I fucking hate Valentine’s Day, I said, bitterly, simply because I was tired of not telling the truth, or of yielding to another’s rhapsody. Usually I only spent a night or two in Sacramento, but this time Harvey didn’t want me to leave, they were worried about me being alone on my birthday, but also about being alone themselves that day, because that was the anniversary of Mondo’s suicide, Mondo who’d taught them everything about how to be alive, which included how to die, I guess, with Mondo, and with Andy, too, they said, I keep expecting them to just walk into the room and say hello, grinning, as if their death had been a big joke, or a little joke at everyone’s expense. Harvey read me something from one of their journals about the moss that grows over their love, and final forms as the ultimate stupidity of thought. They spoke with their mouth nearly shut and a funny hiss, like Elmer Fudd. On Christmas itself we went over to her aunt Bonnie’s house. Their mom was there and so was Sierra, her boy bride, whom their mom had started seeing when he was nineteen or so. Harvey had their mom’s contact saved as “Cougar” on their phone. They’d moved up to Arcata recently, which seemed to do wonders for them, because I’d remembered Harvey’s mom as being kind of a misanthropic bitch, and weird about gender stuff, now she was still misanthropic but she seemed happy, at ease in herself. Bonnie misgendered me twice though. She showed me her writing shed (we had bonded originally over the fact that we were both writers). After dinner we played Taboo. When Bonnie pulled the card for “Bill Clinton,” she muttered for a bit and finally shouted “suck my dick!” When Amber pulled the card for “breast implants,” she said both Leila and I have these. Amber and I had very different feelings about being trans women. She’d transitioned in high school more or less, started off DIY, believed her transition was something out of the Cronenberg movie Crimes of the Future, said her pronouns were she/they/he, said she felt like a faggot boy inside, felt more comfortable around men than women and found blanket misandry to be a red flag, and believed that gender was all fake, discourse was stifling people’s minds and murdering the beauty of the world, benefitting only the psychopaths in the ruling class, etc., while I agreed that gender was probably fake, but also I was pretty comfortable being a binary woman, kind of liked it actually, well secretly eroticized and worshipped it, I hated men, I said, my only interaction with men these days is through sex work and there it’s a pure performance, I play a character of myself, one that closely resembles myself and may in fact be myself, with the crucial distinction that it’s still a character, sometimes I couldn’t distinguish between being a trans woman and being a whore, she liked crackpot gun-totting conspiratorial Amerikkkans, who she found secretly related to her socialist nihilism, or nihilistic anarchism, and her desire to overthrow the government, while I found these people fucking repulsive, enemy of my enemy etc., steeped in a conspiratorial worldview that was fundamentally fascist, neurotic and obsessive Male Fantasies shit, I said all their conspiracies amount to a hatred of bodily autonomy, sexuality, women, Jews, trans people and the Third World, etc. Harvey agreed more with Amber than with me, though both of them saw my side. Both Harvey and Amber believed the most important part about being human was experiencing the absolutely bizarre otherness of other human beings, they wanted to understand everyone, meet everyone, they got bored being around the same types of people all the time, whereas I really didn’t like most people, felt that I understood them intuitively, found them boring, often chauvinistic and violent but mostly boring, I couldn’t fake being otherwise, couldn’t put on a kind of open-minded awe, and didn’t want to anyway, and I wondered if this reflected our class backgrounds in some obscure way, Harvey and Amber’s working class love of surface, which I envied, especially the first couple days, but by the end of my time with them I realized that surfaces are as empty as depth, whatever you want to call that inscrutable security I have in myself, and yet at the same time it’s the rich kids who don’t know who they are, spiritually or aesthetically, or rather no one knows who they are in those ways, or in any way, but the working class seeks out spiritual and aesthetic forms in order to survive, in order to fill their existence in a brutal and stupid world with joy, novelty, connection, sexual sensation, etc., while rich kids stay obsessed, mostly, with self, with identity, a malignant illusion without which those at the top of class society would have no justification for their positions and actually for their lives, but then again, over the years, my life had turned in on itself, or folded in non-euclidean space, because the body I lived in was that of a tattooed trans woman kike whore with an FBI file who carries a knife with her in her purse, a body that was raped by a drooling coked up electrician a week or two ago, a body threatened with eviction from an abusive psycho landlord, etc., and in the end we become our bodies (the bodies we construct and are constructed for us, the bodies we fuck and die with, the bodies they rape and kill or just consign to a slow necropolitical nightmare that’s worse than death), our memories belong to us but they also belong to no one, to the void, lifetimes pile up, etc., Gypsy Rose Blanchard was released this year on my birthday, who most people, or most humane people, would agree was justified in killing her mother, in the same way I would find it justified for me to kill any number of people who’ve hurt me, who’ve violated that ontological intimacy they call a body, distorted my own understanding of that body, that body’s love for itself and its capacity to love others. I slept like shit on the night of my birthday, back in my own bed in Oakland, woke up with literal homicidal violence coursing through my blood, but I put on this ridiculously hot outfit and took pictures of myself with a red rose (I’d bought myself a dozen roses the night before), I’m not sure I’d ever looked so beautiful, all of December I’d been lost and fucked up by being in love again, though I don’t know if you can call that obsessive limerence that overtakes me four times a year (one for each season) love, because it hurts me, this time I was aware of its gruesome mechanics as it happened, I actually cried for myself, because love shouldn’t make us sick, make us hate ourselves, eviscerate us of our self-worth, make us want to kill ourselves, and I read Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless, the best novel about fascism (the true face of fascism, its lurid fucked-up psychosexual nightmare face) written by a trans woman that I’ve come across (by a trans woman, which is to say by anyone, because as far as I can tell only trans women are writing anything good these days), besides the books I’ve written, the book I’m writing, the one that will never end, or will end with my death, which is to say the same thing. I talked to Rebecca on the phone in Harvey’s bed, in the tender whispery tone of voice we use these days (as if we were afraid of disturbing the baby corpse of the past). We talked about her mom, who has a terminal cancer diagnosis, we read to each other memes from the JewBelong Facebook page, chortling, we gently unfurled an argument, the same argument we’ve been having since we met, the one in which Rebecca praises apocalyptic austerity and gives her theological take on revolution, how we’re entering an epoch in which all will become clear, in which the good will emerge from the necrotic chrysalis of individualism and materialism, forged into steel, while the bourgeoisie will burn in a holocaust of its own making, whereas I tell her that’s not how I see it, my heart breaks for all the suffering around us and the even greater suffering to come, accelerationism isn’t a choice because it’s already baked into reality, into the climate, into the war machine, yes the fascists will begin to sexually identify as attack helicopters, but we have no such sublimated pseudo-body to escape into, only our own frail mortal wounded fucked-up assaulted genocided femicided ecocided bodies, only these bodies, in which being good won’t save us, in which it will become increasingly impossible to be good, just as the word “revolution” will be forgotten along with so many other words that once had a purpose or probably never had a purpose in the first place, language itself probably having been a virus, at best a poetic virus but probably mostly a fascist brain virus, this language that hallucinated another body in place of the real one, in order to forget the one thing it needed to remember most, and in doing so forgot everything, as Bolaño said, these amnesiac husks we call our bodies, this cemetery-in-the-future we call history, this planetary concentration camp, in which no amount of work, no amount of love, will ever, ever set us free.