Carve

Hello again, it’s been ages. Well it hasn’t really, but when I am away the words that build up inside my head come to rest in my hands, full, heavy, swirling with a confident certainty but also with the half life of a hydrogen isotope. The hours that pass as I lie unmoving press away at these thoughts I once had, water drops on folded sheets of tissue, and when I finally wake, I find my arms aching and my fingers stiff, clutching at a scrambled mess of letters, empty vestiges of all that I once thought and all that I thought I knew. I string them up in random orders looking for sense, logic, familiarity, I calculate the permutations, I solve the puzzle. No. I do not. I never can. Instead I give a trick answer and erase the past few days. If there was nothing there to begin with, there is nothing that I could have lost.

The Friday before Thanksgiving I took the test. I do not have thanks to give to myself. But I have thanks to give to all of the friends that texted good luck. The people that for some reason continue to believe despite my ever constant failures. A testament to either my severely warped view of self and maybe also to the fact that I spoke of nothing besides the test for a full month. I have thanks to give to some odd twist of brain chemistry in which I somehow did not immediately spiral post-test as I have done before, often. I pray to all of the gods I can think of. I tell myself it will all be fine regardless. I pack up that part of my brain and slide the box across the floor. I close my eyes. I try to vanish.

I wonder what it is others think about when they’re trying to sleep. I wonder if they think at all. Most of my boys don’t seem to. They lay down and close their eyes and disappear. It takes no effort, no stress, no thought. But for me, in this gap between conscious despair and unconscious bliss, seconds pass like hours. So I imagine myself standing above a body that I think is mine and give my hands something to do. She lies on her back, asleep, alone. And as I do my nightly ritual, I ignore my own awareness of normality and slip into the only comfort that has consistently granted me rest.

I take a gun and hold it up against her forehead, off-center, right where her skull begins to curve, in between the arch of her right eyebrow and hairline. I know it is not real because there is no sound, no recoil, no resistance when I fire. The trigger slides like a heated blade on ice. The bullet cuts through her head diagonally and disappears into a floor that my mind has not bothered to imagine. But the pillow flowers with blood, fringed by beige, and I lean in to breathe in the iron. I always did like the smell of blood. I place the gun on the nightstand and pick up the knife. I start at the top of her face, cutting down clockwise down, past her baby hairs, past her left ear, down to her jaw and start peeling. It makes me think of the Boltons. Of Ramsey and Miranda. There’s someone out there for everyone. Not me though.

I open up her face and scrape the fat from under her skin, around the eyes, by her cheeks, and I tap it into a jar, pulling the blade across the rim each time. It’s tedious work, and when I am done, her muscles have stopped twitching and the jar always holds less than I expect. I lay the skin back over and slice a little extra at the corners of her eyes. I take the spoon and scoop out the eyes that are always too small and when I look inside the socket there is nothing but pooled blood. What did I think I’d find? I saw through her neck and shave off her hair. I crack her skull like an egg into a pot of boiling water. And when it’s ready, I separate it by lobes and drop them one at a time into a black mortar and grind them into a paste, smooth, gray, sticky. It tastes rich, like butter, but with the bitter of squandered dreams and broken souls, truths you can never face, the skirt you splurged on but never wear, the past of a lover you’ll never see again, it’s nbome without all the fun not even salt or spice or serotonin can fix this maybe I’ll use it as a moisturizer instead.

I come back to the rest of her body. I switch out the bird’s beak for a larger pairing knife. Left side again. Across the base of her neck, along her shoulder, all the way down her torso, and back again across at the waist. I open her up like a book and edit out all the blubber. The jar is maybe half full now. It is a large jar. I slice through the flesh and scrape along the bones until they all smile back at me. I flip her over and saw along the sides of her spine where her ribs attach. And back over. I scoop up her ribs in my hands like loose staples and put them aside. I pluck her lungs out like wilted petals. She loves me. She loves me not. And when I cut her heart out and it doesn’t beat in my hands, I wonder how she ever lived at all. I sprinkle some salt to feel something, anything. Nothing. I shave off the fat with my baby knife and finally use that metal straw cleaner that’s been sitting in my drawer for a year and a half to clear out the veins. I pull apart at the muscle with tweezers, fiber by fiber like string cheese. They are awkward enough of a length that I cannot braid them. I can’t do anything with them. It’s usually here that I fall asleep. The next step is the liver. I’ve never gotten that far.

I don’t cut in real life anymore. Over the past week I’ve re-watched the entirety of Orphan Black and so have been thinking a lot about nature and nurture. And about the reality that while I am sure I would eventually want a child, I should never have one. At the tail end of last week, I was deep in the suffering. When I dragged myself out to see Poutine and friends, I stood in the subway station. I walked to the yellow. I went to end where the subway would enter because it would be going the fastest there, before the conductor would fully break. My parents always warned me to stay far from the edge for fear that someone might push me. If they did, it would absolve me of guilt. Not that it would matter anyway if the train was going fast enough. So that’s one more thing to add to the list of cannot-do’s when feeling down. No candles. No fire. No cooking. No blades. No heights. No open windows. No dangerous streets. No going there alone. No drugs. No robes. No belts. No gym. No more pain. And because I am still here, I begin to wonder if I am ever actually suicidal or if I just idealize death, as I do with so many things, as this unattainable luxury, unreachable reward, unrequited love.

Studies have shown that depression can be genetic. And I haven’t quite figured out why I think the way I think yet but I refuse to pass on this kind of existence to another human being. Where every day is a fight and every moment is torture and everything that comes so easy for everyone else is something they will never understand. If I fucked them up I would never forgive myself. If anyone else experienced life the way I do, I could never forgive myself. They do not deserve this. I do not deserve this. If I had a child who told me they think about dissecting themselves in order to go to sleep, I think I would cry. I would not stop crying. And so I do not tell my mother. When people ask, which is more often than you’d think, I always say I’d want girls. At least two, because I always wanted a bigger family. I want to give them a life better than the one I’ve had. In my mind, that means none at all. Of course echoing deep in my mind is a sound bite of Randall Boggs saying older women have nothing to live for if they do not have children. Which is bullshit. I have nothing to live for regardless, even young. But I suppose it’s always good to immortalize the assholery as to remind myself of what to immediately run away from and how forgiving I once was. If I could love even him, surely someone should be able to love me.

Trumpet boy is out of the picture. He fucked off to Paris for a week and a week was enough for me to think rationally about my future and write him off in my mind. When he came back I wouldn’t respond for days and saw him one last time. His life is a little sad. He doesn’t really see friends. He’ll teach and play for meager amounts in short term contracts and that’s pretty much the height of his ambition. He eats his frozen foods and tries to save his money. He lives in a city where he’ll bear witness to all he may want but can never have. He’ll ask for more. They will not have more to freely give. His home life is very sad. His mother is financially dependent on a father neither love. His father constantly steals. They live in a part of Paris where he was regularly mugged. I respect that he managed to leave. That he got into Juilliard and learned English by watching the Office. Besides the not being able to sum tip on a receipt, all in all not a bad fling. Once, I asked him how he thought, if he had an internal monologue or thought in more abstract terms. He said that usually he’ll have these tunes in his head like “brushing teeth is good for you its good for you brush your teeth.” And of course how can I mourn his passing without immortalizing him deciding to use my goddamn toothbrush when he had one of his own. Just this morning when I was brushing my teeth, I was thinking about what other people think about when they brush their teeth and why I don’t have more important things on my mind and what should I be thinking about. Then I thought of him and could only laugh. Dumb boys have an unmatched ability to temper my instability.

I wonder what he could say about me. I don’t think I told him anything about myself. Maybe I had nothing at all to say, or maybe I thought he wouldn’t care what I had to say. Most likely, I couldn’t be bothered. He would ask, I just never gave full answers. How’s your family? My parents are lovely and my dog is cute. Is your dog cuter than me? What the fuck. I know his brain functions on a level… different from mine. I know I could never talk to him the way I would want and I am tired of monologuing the way I had to with Randall Boggs. Soot says I may have turned into a fuck girl. Possibly. Yet I was still sad when he took the hint and stopped responding.

I don’t want to do this dating thing anymore. I don’t have the emotional energy to meet people just for them to disappear again. Why do you think I never used to break up with boys when I should have? When everyone was pushing for me to? *abandonment issues* Well I’ve half-learned my lesson now. Half because my logical side does the acting, the half-ghosting never full ghosting so I don’t feel guilt to force their hand. And the soft side of me gets to feel the sad. And it’s not so much about the boy but more about the things he said he had wanted to do with me. I know words don’t count for shit. Apparently plans count for even less. And the Mar makes a gentle appearance in my brain because even when he says you are loved, you are not enough.

And for the first time ever I am scared that I will never be loved. Not in the way people do in relationships, the time-tested, never-wavering, always be there kind of love. The kind in the stories you imagine for couples you don’t know when you see a picture of them smiling and laughing, looking at each other as if there is nothing else in the world. I don’t know why I used to be sure I would find someone. I don’t know why I think that kind of love exists. My mother says I should go to business school to find someone. And the thought of that makes me want to vomit. Makes me want to hit submit death as a cheat code and not have to deal with any of it. I think I would be happy as a fun Aunt. I mean, for the first time I’m planning for life beyond 25. I’ll swing by with little outfits and toys. Take them out for ice cream and hang out with my friends. And when they get to have their family whole, I’ll retreat and get to observe like it’s a TV show. That’s all I do now anyways.

Roe is back in town and is forcing me to Hinge. It all seems meaningless. But then again, I’m sure it seemed meaningless after I bid farewell to Supposably too. And then I was all starry eyed with trumpet boy. Until I wasn’t. So yeah maybe it is all meaningless. I mean, look at this post. Look at these past few posts. Who would want to be with me anyway? I sure as hell wouldn’t. I wasn’t built for this. Wasn’t made for all that life is supposed to be. I know this isn’t what life is supposed to be. I’m a car with no wheels with a head start in the race. But everyone else has lapped me more times than I can count now.

These past few days, I’ve been sick. Sinus infection or cold or whatever. It’s kind of grounding to be constantly uncomfortable. I hadn’t exactly been attached to reality before then. I’ve gotten back into Game of Thrones. But not the show, moreso youtube videos of dialogue and writing breakdown and analysis. I think I should start recruiting at some point. I need a high paying job to compensate for all of my other failings. I need a job that takes over my life and gives me a purpose. A team that I will truly, fully, entirely bond with. After all isn’t that why I watch so many TV shows? To get an artificial boost of what a community is like. Of what love is like? Of what life maybe should be like? I always found it odd, the trope of the drugged up stay at home moms in media. I didn’t think anyone was actually like that. I don’t know anyone like that, but i guess it makes a lot more sense to me now. I wonder if I go to London I can start anew. Reinvent. But I know it doesn’t work like that. I am still in the big sad. But at least, at last, I am no longer mentally constipated. I’ll start to write again. Maybe even daily. All the minutiae, the mundane, the intrusions. Because after all of this, I realize I got a little lost in my head in the weeks of not writing. Correlation is not causation but at this point, what do I have to lose?