Deep in the rotgut of Pennsylvania there’s a world so small that even the most absurd kind of thinking seems entirely practical, a clan of vulcans ruling a small dead-end pocket of town just across the tracks, leaving only under the cover of darkness, a hitchhiker flying thumbs and otherwise naked save for the little white slip of a dress she wanders along a reservoir, begging for a lift, only to disappear into a foggy wisp midconversation, a tunnel that leaves cold greasy handprints on the windows of cars if the driver turns the lights out and taps the horn seven or eight times. All of the forests are haunted. All the gothic homes are overgrown and empty, all haunted house cliche like, but for no good reason. There’s a house with a chicken wire cage in a coal cellar with a plexiglass window where they kept the mutant chicken boy until he died. His ghost is in there now watching the world go by creeping with his ghosty bird eyes. An empty court house where people piss and write their names and other garbage on the walls and kick out hand-turned banisters and scare each other. There’s bodies under the face of every reservoir and pond. A crane at the bottom of a flooded quarry that you can touch if you dive down deep enough. A rotten Appalachian Atlantis under a lake. There’s a lookout on a cliffside where the founders of the town were boiled alive in a giant cauldron by the people who lived there first, you can hear their beating drums if you try hard enough. Everyone goes there to think, to make out, and fuck. An ancient burial ground here. A god damn pet sematary over there. A portal to the land of the lost through a tunnel dug straight through solid rock face for no reason. A desert with a forgotten town not far from the Juniata River where people go to blow shit up, light things on fire, drink warm watery beer, and fuck. There’s a midcentury ice cream stand where you can still get a cheeseburger and crinkle cut fries for two dollars. Dollar soft serve. A can of pop for fifty cents. It’s called Mr. Twistys. The people wear white paper hats and you expect them to smile, but they never do. There’s a diner with foot long hot dogs for a dollar and a whole ass breakfast for two more. The waitresses cackle like witches, calling everyone babe, sugar, honey, sweet thing, and so on. The cook lumbers over the small flattop behind the bar frying up potatoes and onions. He’s got a long wallet that doesn’t quite fit in his pocket attached to a long chain attached to his belt. He stinks. Greasy hairs on his head and on his knuckles and face. He complains to himself, “God dammit. ‘Member when we could smoke in here?” He spits a bit on that last “ess” sound, dribbling onto the flattop. No one knows anything different. A winding road leads up through a forest to an abandoned mountain zoo. It’s called the Storybook Forest or something. A sore thumb retaliating its own obvious reclamation by green things, its yellow and red circus neglected since the eighties. Its cages filled with the ghosts of mount’n lions and bears and gators, trick squirrels and opossums. Somewhere in this forest someone is cooking shitty meth. Popping dollar store pseudoephedrine out of cheap blister packs, picking at their buggy faces in the twilight. Someone else is running a still off of a natural spring, goin blind. Some kids are on a burn cruise, crammed into mom’s car fighting over seedy weed, hotboxing that shit before detailing the interior with body spray, and then their bodies with more body spray and visine. Someone else is out there shooting guns in the stark blackness, drinking beer by the light of muzzle flash and starlight, without a single fuck to give for anything beyond their periphery. Two kids fucking probably, or trying to. Fumbling around in the dark missing everything that feels good about fucking, still telling each other that feels good, that it was the best. Someone else summons demons on a tree stump altar, playing with pigs blood, weaving pentacles out of young branches, leaving them lying around, giggling like an asshole. Someone else has come to this forest to die. I’m nineteen years old and afraid of every damn thing. Ghosts. Mutant Chicken boys. Gothic architecture. Loud noises. Sex. Rejection. Vulcans. Cops. Meth. Nuclear war. Love. The opposite of love. My selective service card. Jail. Being alone. Maybe probably being queer. The ringing in my ears. Talking to girls. Guns. Roadside ghosts. Trespassing. Cranes at the bottoms of flooded quarries touching my foot. Appalachian sand dunes and hidden cities. Dead bodies. Raw chicken thighs. Getting hooked on dope. The shadow that follows me around. Damn near pretty much everything. And so, to get the better of my fears I become my own ghost, my own myth. I drive this road set on dyin. In the dark, sure that I’m alone in the middle of the night I close my eyes doing sixty or so. The road winds. It zigs and zags. In some places if you hit it just right you get that funny feeling down there like you falling or scared shitless. I shut off my headlights for a moment at a time, holding my breath, both hoping this is and isn’t it. I open my eyes and breathe. I speak of this to no one. I am a quiet kind of ghost. For a moment I am the living dead, dressed in black rags, roaming these forest hills, both in and outside of my grave. Looking at it from the outside in and the inside out. Driving it like hell outta there on home into my trailer park bed, cradled by cardstock wood paneling. The dawn’s gross vindictive light grows, but I am made safe by the black blankets nailed tightly over the windows. I fall asleep to the sound of everything beginning to come alive again. I sleep alright, deep like but disturbed, about as well as a living dead boi does.

David says hello. David says I miss you, I love you, how are you? Are you dating? How many cute girls have you kissed? David says tell me all about it. David says you ought to live each day like a cigarette. He adds, “be thankful for the next one, because that might be all you get.” I can’t say he’s wrong. The trouble with that is David spends too much time with misery. David says he’s an awful, rotten son-of-a-bitch. David is lying. His heart is bleeding on the floor and on his sleeves and on his notebooks and on his guitar. David’s heart is always bleeding. David says he remembers a time when his face was bleeding. David’s just a little boy sitting on the steps where he’s just smashed his little face. David’s face is bleeding and he’s crying. David says he isn’t crying because it hurts, but because he can’t understand what made him so unloveable. David cries because no one is home to wipe the blood from his face or the tears from his eyes or the snot from his nose. David says he’s dancing with the devil tonight, Friday night and then again on Tuesday night, singing with him too. David says the devil makes him quit bleeding. David says the devil makes his throat burn. It burns like his daddy’s cup. David says he likes the way it feels. David says things he doesn’t mean among the company of the devil. David says it’s a small enough price to pay for feeling fine. David says the man who kills the landlord, but spares the broker is nothing but a fool. David says that’s because they are the same. David says Hellraiser is the greatest movie of all time, maybe. He thinks the things he does are like Uncle Frank or Julia. David is lying. David is a pinhead. David is a chatterbox. David is a Cenobite: a little boy with a bloody face inside a monster’s clothes. David says pain is the kind of thing that never quits. David says most of the time he thinks he’s dying on the inside. David says I gotta let go, but David's hanging on for dear life. David says you need to think of Sisyphus with a happy face. David didn’t say that first, but I think he says it best. I think it’s easier to believe that a person perpetually suffering has joy in their heart because what is inside of them is whatever you believe it is, but a person smiles because they’re happy or at best they want you to believe it and that’s harder to see. David says you don’t have to love someone to fuck them. David says this but David loves hard and reckless. David says he likes kisses and snuggles and making chicken soup, but there’s just some animal thing to him. David says his art is not art. David is lying. He is the second most successful artist I can say I know looks like in their underwear. David says you gotta cook a red sauce all damn day. David says if you don’t you’re fucking up. David says he likes my cooking even though we don’t feel the same about red sauce or spaghetti for that matter. David says all fancy restaurants are called Dorsea, like from American Psycho, that place where no one can get reservations. We laugh about it, but still eat at those places anyway. David says you wanna go to Dorsea with the sashimi and quail eggs? David says you wanna go to Dorsea with the cured meats? David says remember Dorsea with the mediocre barbecued meats that used to be the microwave powered vegan place? David says that was whack. David says he’s gonna call me back but I don’t really ever expect him to, not while I’m awake at least. David says a good story is timeless, by timeless he means Victorian, I think. This story is not that. David says a story should be without things like text messages or emails. David says that’s because these things are bound to die, eventually. David is an idealist. David says what does this mean? David says why won't this work? David says what's metadata? David says you just made that up. David says I'm crazy. David says I'm out of my fucking mind. David says he loves me nonetheless. David says one thing and then another and then another. David says things like I say things sometimes—birdbrained in leftfield. Our conversations are long and tread around the shallow parts and plunge deep into the thick of it, like a knife in a belly. Like idiot little boys who know more than they should, giggling about dicks, crying over spilled milk, played devil’s advocate for moral imperatives and objectivity and suicide. David says things unlike the way I say things other times—calculated and precise. And I tell David that I don’t know what he’s talking about, sometimes just for fun to make him angry, but other times because my brain doesn’t work that way. David says a lot of things. David says I love you. David says kisses. David says goodbye.

I heard you’re living in that loft above the empty gallery in garfield. That’s not far from me, some I’m sure you’ve seen me. I’ve got a feeling like you’re up there watching over me, but I spend my time looking at my feet. I recognize a coat laying on the sidewalk. A coat I distinctly remember having folded up in the back seat of my car for years because you insisted you wanted it back. A sort of creamy tweed thing with a collar that pulled up above the ears if you wanted to be warm but looking sort of foolish. I couldn't look at you wearing that coat with the collar pulled up and not laugh. You couldn't look at me laughing and not laugh. We are giggling idiots. It’s clearly made for a person who either does or does not take themselves too seriously. You are more or less both. And so this coat fits you best. Someone with a distorted face is taking things from the back seat of a running car and stuffing them into the trashcan on the street. Jamming through the small hole designed for cups and chip wrappers. I ask them where they'd found the things, but their words are underwater or on the other side of a thick wall. They just point to Uncle Donny's frosty window. I recognize some other things in the trash can and start digging. Old note books and clothes mostly. That ridiculous white feathery, faux-fur coat I saw from the corner of my eye when I saw you last from across the street and I knew it was you, but told myself it wasn't. In a swarming crowd, in a random second, in the dim of street light, everything else gone February dark. I looked over my shoulder and you looked over your shoulder and our eyes were caught up on each other and our stomachs sank or were suddenly full of pterodactyls like I used to say or you used to say or like we used to say. I can't remember. That’s how I knew it was. Beneath that feeling, beneath that coat, I unearth a strange wooden box. I open it looking to see if it was the ring I gave you. A ring I would never ever give you now. Not because I don't love you, but because that stone lacked any sense of understanding of the mashing of the deep and discordant love we'd come to know and share at a distance forever or closer in some other dimension where we chose to be less selfish, where we either recant or never said or forgot all the awful things we'd learn to say; where we'd still kiss all the intricate ingrown hair-sized nuances and secrets; where you're always picking flowers on the side of the road and I am always smiling from the driver's seat saying I love you. I love you. I fucking love you so much; where you're always certain and I'm never ever cynical or self loathing; where we'd never know just how awfully casual the nature of falling in and out of each other really is. That emerald would never live up to our obsidian to our garnet to our ruby to our pearl. No stone could touch our wisdom teeth; better out than in; still bloody, dipped in varnish and fixed to gold, my roots long enough to be made a band for your tiny fingers. Your roots too short for my thick fingers. Your roots dissolving. Your tooth trapped in time, half forgotten dipped in resin, floating in formaldehyde in a vial in the unmentionables compartment of a vintage suitcase in my closet in my bedroom far away. The thing. That thing in the box. It wasn't the emerald wrapped in silver I thought it to be but some kind of metal testing kit. It was just an engraved plate of silver fastened to wood with nails and a small tool for testing the softness of metal. I was really looking for anything that was mine you may have thrown away. My favorite t-shirt. Letters. My other favorite t-shirt. My sweatpants. My pillows. Those two books I'd lent against my better judgment: Seamus Heany's Death of a Naturalist. The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo-Kwa Mei yen. No luck there. I quickly pass over papers, fingers-crossed and half-cringing my eyes squinting hoping for none of the lofty, treacle and sickening poems I wrote you about your body or our sex. Hoping you burned them long ago. You must have. Thank god. I tear through more clothes, hardly breathing. Fearing what a deep breath of you might do to me. Who it might make me be. Someone hopeless enough to pick up the phone, stupid enough set the world on fire, mad enough to cut my own heart out and place it here bleeding, wrapped in these flowery dresses and things. Silhouettes hang in the doorway though you never really appear. Only the outlines of figures who look sort of like you or at least the way in which I remember you. I am grateful and I keep nothing.

You should find yourself in whatever position you feel most fit. Seated at a table or desk. On the cold floor or on your $80 buck wheat cushion Lying in or on the bed or in the tub with or without water. Or from the hole you’ve dug yourself of which you’d like to come out of. Place the palms of your hands facedown onto your thighs or knees or at your side and imagine that they are weightless though tethered in place. I ask that you close your eyes over, so that they are nearly shut but not quite. Now pick a spot on the wall or ceiling and begin focus in on it. Now allow yourself to look beyond it. It could be anything. That stain from that time you tripped over their boots while carrying a plate of spaghetti with red sauce and you knew you should have laughed but you were just so angry that you missed that spot. You are laughing now. Their fingerprints on the wall where they’d hold themselves up giggling, trying to kick their boots off. You are becoming lighter with each exhale. That yellowing spot on the pillow where they drooled an ocean each night, insistent that they didn’t. You are smiling. A peeled back swatch of paint from where the Polaroid of y’all smooching used to be taped. You are lighter than air. The sunlight pushing through small tears where their cat used to climb the curtains and despite how much you loved that cat enough to let it destroy your things and sleep between your knees you could never call that cat your own. You are holding yourself closer. The orange suitcase in the corner filled with one side of the story told from letters and artifacts: the love letters they sent you from that monastery in Vermont that first summer, half of a matching set of Polaroids in which you are each sobbing that last Autumn with the last shred of dignity to be shared. You are crying. A greasy spot on the window where they’d push their nose and cheeks against the glass to make funny faces and blow you kisses while you were outside shoveling snow. You are all of these things and lighter. Allow those memories to be present. Allow yourself the space to accept them for what they are and let them pass with each breath. Now repeat the following: Breathing in Breathing out: The universe is chaos. Breathing in Breathing out: Existence is hinged on the absurd. Breathing in Breathing out: I am blessed. Breathing in Breathing out: I am omnipotent.

When the twisted blue feathers, sunken red breast, and closed over black marble of an eye peered through the lush green leaves at me, breaking my aloofness, a chilling sensation arose in a wistful kind of breeze; coupled with a small, faint, uncontrollable tremor of gooseflesh. I firstly came to wonder if, in fact, I’d feel the same awkward sadness for a human. Within the very shallow and illusory surface of antecedent conscious thought, it comes to me that it would not be so, and I know that is taboo, wanton; a criminal thought even. Over the course of a few protracted days, I sat in contemplation, smoking in front of my door without any kind of haste, yet attempting to quickly pass time. I considered burying the body: carrying it to the heap of waste at the bottom of the cracked and crooked-tooth-like stairs at the end of the yard, at least. Yet, something has prevented me from doing so. It's not the shovel, nor the trowel. Because both are within reach. Their splintering and aged handles leaning against the equally sun-worn and splintered fence. It isn’t indolence persay. Nor lethargy specifically. I can’t be sure how it had come to be. Had it fallen from the ether? What audible sound had it made when its small body took its place; falling to the lively summertime blades of plush grass with an elegantly triumphant thud? Had it fumbled gracelessly through the air attempting to remember how to fly; as I sometimes flail about momentarily attempting to remember to breathe or swallow? Of what decibel is the breath of the robin? Perhaps the small thrush had not fallen at all. Perhaps it’s stillness was dragged to me by one of the many feral cats who make their paths through my garden. Their offering to me for safe and unbroken passage. Their frivolous apology for the deafness cast over them in regards to the clicking of my tongue, and mock rodent sounds of my lips. More feasibly, their impenitent move to present to me the spectacle of my own need. This, their wasted feast. Their plaything. The bounty of their facility. Their very own ancient spectacle. Their practice of effortless inquisition. This body. They hunt simply, for the maintenance of their own capriciousness. Mere boredom. With full bellies, they wake from quiescence to exercise instinctual malice in the name of primal sadism. Even the standard house cat has no grounds for understanding why they must bite and kick that which encroaches upon their bellies. Only the limitless mysticism that automates their ritual. I sat with the body to envisage the spirit of everything and commenced to recognize that a comparison may be found in my own instinct of mystery to feel a sort of malefic playfulness when that which encroaches upon my own vulnerabilities approaches. A subsequent preoccupation with trepidation and premonitions of turpitude. My vacillation is a plummeting bird. My proclivities are a spirited cat. In either case, substantiation is the lone desideratum. That is why the body is there, in amenable performance; a feathery and deflating bag of tiny bones sinking into earthen acquiescence. And I am here, in observance, sitting in the wake of it. Somewhere between melancholic and euthymic. Among a dandelion shrine to the boundless need which I possess.

Certain in the wisdom in the destruction of everything, god is a teenager in love. With needles. With watching the Universe through the peephole of a wild-eyed boy with a pair of heartbreaking wings and voice gloved in cold sweat and mercury (silver) tenderness, his hands so much younger than tougher. God stands by the bed holding out their shaking panic, secretly burning a double millennia old promise to be unseen and unheard: in remission and in recovery. God unbuckles their belt with a distinct air of self punishment. Preparing for either flagellation or an injection. God’s desire is a pair of fretful hands with gravity and a forceful wildness pressed against their chest. These are gods shaking knees. This is the dirt under god's nails (chewed and bleeding). This is god's burnt tongue. These are gods stinking impacted wisdom teeth. This is god’s breath backed by god’s wet mouth. This is god's cock and this is god's cunt. These are god’s numb hands. This is god’s absentmindedness. This is god’s fractional impotence. This is god’s penchant for disappointment. The wild-eyed boy turns over and pretends to sleep. God does the same. God graduates from isolated love and conquest and comes to find the wild-eyed boy’s Midwestern approach to things familiar in the mournful emptiness of a house of nondescript picture and memory. His curiosity no longer filled the air. Nor his flustered squinting eyes. Nor the wrinkling of his summer ginger nose. Nor the puckering of his salty lips chased with limes. Nor the moments just before his great toothy laugh. God’s breath is hardly taken. Nor is the wild-eyed boy’s. In the dim and gray light of morning, the flicker in god’s face is otherwise bare and shoeless. God’s heart is atrophied and callous. A cigarette precedes god’s big square teeth telling the beginning of a story. On a napkin god wrote: 1,000 layers of pain And for better or worse I couldn’t seem to give you up. God folds the napkin and slips it between the pages of a book and leaves the wild-eyed boy sleeping there. For three days god wanders. On the third day, god resumes the form of a gathering of often misplaced and abandoned things: knives and forks... anomalies and idiosyncrasies... silk lingerie and dirty socks… vulnerability and combustibility... dirty magazines and empty houses... the paradox of love and discord... fingers and tongue... dominion and heart... shutoff notices and diplomas… star stuff and red number four hundred and twenty lipstick... undisciplined exuberance and clumsy existentialism... body and mind... the will to live and the fear of death… challenged spirit and crushing embrace... paragraph and eulogy... antilogarithms and abnegations... prospect of resistance and nostalgic postscript. All salvageable incarnations of character and adventure eager to be made whole again. The Universe went on indefinitely. The wild-eyed boy died of lonesomeness. God went on to receive many accolades for their illustrious ability to be overlooked. Later god moved onto other things, turning their efforts to their unremarkable bedroom rap career until fading into cult obscurity, never to be seen again.  

This is more or less your formal invitation to: Dump on me. Dump in me. Show me your calligraphy: the sharp edges of your inky chisel-tipped frame of mind. Impart on me your graffiti: every single-stroked curving point of reference holding your place on every single free-hand fault line. Fill me with your unwants fill me with your remnants: your former self. Lend me every overexposed emulsified scrap of monochromatic negative every one last time one more chance not my faults slamming doors punching holes in bedroom walls. Every I didn’t mean to every long in the tooth baby you know I love you. One’s trash another’s axiom or treasure: another’s superlative pleasure. I take refuge in your effervescent refuse. I bask in discarded monologues and manuscripts fingering forgotten dialogues holding onto diatribes and puke-stained morning after vibes: those aphonic verbalizations just after that slovenly first kiss and just before that graceless first fuck. In between every teary-eyed if I knew what was wrong I would tell you. Every maxim. Every I will never, not always, kiss you in Dying punk house hallways. Every hot air, blue in the face slice of rhetoric on the meaning of eros. Every epigram and every epithet. Hit me with your water-trash soaked paper valentine heart turned to rosewater by steeped silk petals plucked from graves on x-mas day. With all of your running ink I love yous in birthday cards your mother thinks you’ll keep forever. Touch me with every thunderous trembling fear all that you would have said if only you had: the chance or the gall or the brave. Every grave matter trapped in liminality between a draft of a text message and a full on dissertation of the intersecting pencil-thin lines of pillow talk, smitten liturgy and idiosyncratic inspired vitriol. Because if you and I are a box of pale oblong blue shards of a grecian urn too broken to ever be whole again If our hearts only seem to dance in the bliss of remember whens on a floor of forget-me-nots let every fluid ounce of indifference, every I told you so/I wished you didn’t rest in a bed of chrysanthemums and know That for better or worse. Someday someone will make sense of all these broken artifacts all of our split relics. Running their sanguine and overzealous tongues over sugar cavities and potsherds Poking their fervent fingers in every god-shaped misgiving in the edifice of our ramshackle narratives All the pieces of you are becoming pieces of me becoming pieces of somebody else. All the pieces of you are becoming pieces of me becoming pieces of somebody else. All the pieces of me becoming pieces of you becoming pieces of somebody else All the pieces of them have become pieces of us and will become pieces of somebody else.

Jude wades through the hot fog of exhales and sweat secretions of the Golgotha Club. Dodging this and that body, this and that melding of bodies entwined. Connec ted at the face or pelvis. Jude passes through the collective body. Through the mouth and down the challengingly narrow throat to the orchestral pit of the stomach. Sloshing around on the slippery floor. Into the digestive tract headed straight for the colon backed up with impacted heroin shit. The part of the club where no one's really doing much of anything but scratching the inside of this elbow or that one. Squirming but not necessarily moving. Definitely not keen or aware enough to allow anyone pass by. The smell of dirty teeth and sex and onion permeates even the most deviate of septums. No one seems to notice but me. My back is against the wall, as deep as you can be in here. Jude's eyes meet mine in the impacted shit section and they make one last push through the crowd, spilling most of our drinks onto this or that immovable body, making their getup all dewy like. Jude is shyly under 70" tall with finger length auburn curly hair, square jaw, pouty candied lips, kissable little nose, and generally boyish from the neck down. Jude wears a ratty denim coat with vegan sheepskin collar, paisley green and pink navel length dress shirt buttoned to the very top, further flirting with strangulation with a choker of a black bola tie with silver ends, purple pants that cling to the skin as if they were perpetually wet, and run-of-the-mill work boots. I've been flirting with the idea of wearing only white no matter the time of year, which I guess is still faux pas or a fashion taboo or whatever. I might be too ungainly for that sort of thing anyway. For now I am found in black jeans tight in the thighs and ass, rolled up to mid thigh, met by black leather boots sparing only an inch of black socks between, a totally average length black dress shirt buttoned to the top and a half open black denim jacket. Black-framed glasses propped up on my nose, my nearly black hair pulled loosely into a bun. Jude sulks toward me with two half drinks. Their eyelids fluttering in the world’s hardest eye roll. It looks painful. Irritated Jude forces the mouthful or so of club soda into my hand. They throw back whatever’s left of the brown liquor in their cup. I sniff at my glass to make sure it’s not vodka or gin. I haven’t had a drink in years. I put the melting ice and half flat soda to my lips and suck it in between my teeth. I dribble it back into the cup. “Jude, you’re certain this is club soda?” Still annoyed Jude makes a growling sort of sound with their throat. “It better be,” they shout in my ear. It hurts and makes my ear ring. They start off on a tangent about bartending, but I quickly stop paying attention. Jude’s voice turns into a half muted word salad over a staticky radio. I’m almost certain that it’s tonic water. Tonic water has a weird syrupy element to it that lends itself to being not unlike liquor. Still, I leave whatever backwashy thing it is on the floor between my feet. Jude may or may not still be talking. I try to hone in on their voice and search for my cue. That being an empty space to fill. And I say the first thing to come to mind, “I don’t feel good.” Jude looks disappointed. I say the next thing that comes to mind, “I have a headache. And…” I pause, and say like a guess, “My stomach hurts?” Without saying anything Jude grabs my hand hard and drags me quickly back through the digestive tract of the Golgotha Club and we emerge like puke onto the street. It would have taken me at least a half an hour apologetically excusing my way through. The air is cold and our bodies steam in it. Jude throws my arm over their shoulders and forces their thin body into my side. Jude looks around in the street and kisses me on the cheek where the jaw connects like a secret. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Jude whispers. The smell of Jude’s body hangs around and makes me feel somewhat drunk. I like it, I swear I do. I swear I want to kiss them right on their kissable nose and pouty lips. I try to smile because I know I should be happy, but I can’t. And I’m not sure why. “Goodnight,” Jude says, like they mean “I love you.” I swallow the spit in my throat and choke out a “Night.” I really do mean it like “I love you.” But it comes off either callous or insincere. Jude wanders off into the streetlight pulling their vegan sheepskin collar over their ears and wraps their body in the denim like a smothering hug. I immediately feel something like shame, but I suppose they understand. They must. I still feel scared and sad. I hold the half of my jacket Jude was hanging on up to my face and breathe deep like. I walk home breathing through it like a respirator until the smell is either gone or I’m made accustomed to it so it doesn’t smell any different than anything else. I drag my body up from the street to the studio on the second floor and sit down at my desk. My cat follows closely, chirping and crying. I mimic her talking, sort of mocking her, but lovingly. I write the word “intention” on a post-it note. I crumple it into a ball, place it into the palm of my hand, and flick it in the direction of my cat. She sees it for the object that it becomes, bats it around across the floor before throwing it down the stairs from my studio to the main floor where I eat and sleep and bathe and do nothing. And then down the second set of stairs to the street. Pushes it through the mail slot, delivering it unto the outside. Or otherwise suspending it in disbelief somewhere in the space between the wall and the bed or wherever lost things find themselves. Either way it’s dragged to the ether as if burned. I write the words “all my love” on an index card, fold it into a sad looking jacket and throw it from the studio window. It turns up in the living room. My cat is rubbing her face on it, nibbling, trying to break its collar with her back feet. I write the word hunger in the dust forming on my desk with my finger, my cat cries, so I feed her. When I come back to my desk it is clean. I write the words “a lack of emotion regulation” into a word document, print it out and tear it into unequal strips, and then smaller square-like shapes. I shovel them into my hands and hold them up to my face. Trying to feel something. Happy, angry, or sad, I’m unsure. All of them, maybe. None of them, probably. I make a drawing of something that looks like a tumbleweed and call it my name. I tear it into an oval shape and stick it to my face. I go down to the bathroom and stare in the mirror with my new face. This is what depersonalization looks like I suppose. I take off all of my clothes and trace the curves of my half lumpy body with my fingers. I pinch my belly and say: this is real. I pinch my thigh and say: this is real. I reach between my legs and pinch at skin that smells like sweat and say: this is real. I take off my new face and stare at a face that I suppose is my face with wide eyes until I shiver a little. I curl the lips and grit the teeth of the face that I suppose is my face and examine the gums for blood or abscess. I fishhook the cheeks of the face that I suppose is my face and look for cavities, spinach, or popcorn shells. I contort the face that I suppose is my face into a fake smile and then into a cartoonish look of disgust and hold it until I cackle. The face that I suppose is my face moves itself into a smile that isn’t quite so fake. I breathe fog onto the mirror and scribble with my finger in cursive: “you are really something.”