3/19

I’m getting ghosted by a guy who seems to be really focused on his performance art career right now, which is fine, actually, because I’ve been tweeting a lot about suicide and am in no state to put a wig on or whatever the fuck else such a man might require from me. I can’t do anything that anyone requires from me right now, besides pay rent on time and in full. It’s nice to have money and I can easily keep hold of it because I don’t do anything or go anywhere. Three now-sober alcoholic guys are trying to fuck me with varying degrees of effort and I can’t seem to make anyone understand that I only want to be viewed in that way by strangers who can give me money for it. If I know anything of your personhood or character and you come toward me with that glint in your eye and that sway in your hips and that curl of your lip you are as good as fucking dead to me, brother, you understand? Don’t pitch your voice down that way, don’t invite me out, don’t tell me to go on a walk with you. I can’t walk more than ten minutes these days without feeling like I’m going to die. I can’t eat anything at that restaurant. When you get needy like that I can feel your cock bursting through your clothes and prodding at my skin as I stand there stunned and silent, robbed of the little bodily autonomy I have left. You are taking everything from me. I appreciate the effort on some level, considering that at one point in my life I’d respond to such advances with a swelling, cloying gratitude, a gratitude so cheesy and theatrical you’d think I just got adopted, but that was then and this is now and you’re never going to sleep with me. Ever. If you did fuck me, which you won’t, you’d get drunk from how much I had to drink to make myself penetrable, like a contact drunk, and that relapse would ruin your life so don’t even bother. I want to want to fuck you and for you to hate me, never the other way around. I get the first word and the last word and everything in between. You sit there and take it until you get up and leave and I’ll still be talking to the wall. When you look at me like that, like you want me, I can tell you’re a really sick guy, someone who unloads their burdens into women’s bodies and then wakes up the next morning completely restocked and ready to do it again. You’re here to steal from me but I don’t feel well. I don’t feel well. Do you hear me when I say I don’t feel well? I can’t breathe anymore. 

The ants are back in my apartment, by the way. I can’t leave my room or they’ll get me. They’ve been crawling up my legs while I sit on the toilet. I am not safe here. I’ve been hallucinating a knock at the door. I’m nauseous right now. I slept all day yesterday after getting up around noon to steal steaks from the grocery store next to my apartment. If they catch me I’ll have to start taking the train to get steaks which means I’ll never get steaks again because I don’t go anywhere. I retain the right to stay perfectly still. I woke up to a text from Georgia saying she heard that the guy I fucked at college exactly a year ago doesn’t need oral to get hard and that he lied to me. Well, duh. The sky is blue. I remember him telling me I needed to “rip the bandaid off somehow” so I “might as well get it over with”. I don’t feel raped by this, actually, because he was right. I was excited about the idea of getting fucked back then so if I had to hunker down and give some toothy head to unlock the game’s main quest, I would’ve done it, and I did do it, even though it was with a sigh and an eyeroll. I was just in that guy’s hometown a week ago but I couldn’t feel his spirit. It seems the signal has gone down. I don’t want to call the company and get the router fixed so I’ll stand not to know him anymore. I don’t like him all that much anyway, never did. 

I’ve been keeping the body on ice for three months. We don’t have a date set for the service, it’s been an overwhelming process, I’m sure you understand. It’s important to keep nasal spray on hand if you’re doing lines alone in your room. It’s important to fall asleep to a looped fantasy of something nice, like having your head held underwater in a public pool surrounded by children and families who don’t care. It’s important to stop kicking and accept that the fight is over. The ants are back and no one can hear me at all. I could mop so hard that the floorboards break and dust would still collect. Cut yourself in a nice hotel to feel closer to your favorite dead celebrities. Get sent home from work for screaming in the bathroom. Shit yourself at a movie theater. Take a twenty minute break after walking three blocks and then make up an excuse to go home. Squeeze an ant between your fingers. Pray the diagnosis exists. 

My roommate insists on it being eighty fucking degrees in this apartment and I obviously get no say in anything. I wake up in the middle of the afternoon in searing pain and my hair is wet and my shirt is soaked through and I smell like a tin of fucking anchovies but I can’t do anything to the thermostat because she’ll be the next set of footsteps padding behind me down the hall to undo the change as soon as I’m done. I am stuck this way, I know it. If the hurt is this severe, this scathing, and I’m not even twenty-five yet, I know it’s bound to get so much worse. I have to clean the bathroom today but the ants are everywhere. I went in there last night to grab something and there were two dead ones on the underside of my sock, my fuzzy sock that I put on to make myself feel better, by the time I stepped out. If I stay in there for twenty minutes to clean they will really get me. I can’t believe dust collects the way it does. There is no such thing as clean. 

I wonder how long it would take for me to be dead before someone finds me. I am so excited. I want it so bad. I need to start leaving the house more because nothing can kill me in here. I wish my neighborhood were more dangerous. More dangerous, less dirty. More dangerous, less dirty. More dangerous, less dirty. I wish the shelves at Rite-Aid weren’t completely empty all the time. Whole aisles with nothing in them. Someone forgot about us here. The only crime, really, is theft. I want to hear gunshots outside my window. Maybe the people at the Rite-Aid warehouse would be more encouraged to bring paper towels around if someone was shooting at the truck, directing the procession right through the cemetery gates. I have work to do. I have jokes to write. I don’t have any more ideas. All the pain pills have acetaminophen in them, which I’m allergic to, so I can’t throw myself into getting hooked on those. Drugs and alcohol are a waste of time because the feeling doesn’t last forever and you can’t spend enough money to make that untrue. I’m glad it’s still cold, I don’t feel obligated to go outside. I haven’t read a book since December. Whatever is wrong with me must be terminal and I hope it is. My skin is starting to feel like a weighted blanket. There is no one around for miles. I’m looking for ants the way a junkie would dig for coke crumbs in shag carpet. I’m on my hands and knees. I’m waiting for the flood. When it comes, it’ll be me and the ants and everything I’ve ever stolen swirling around in the great white force, waves beating and kneading into us but not wanting anything back. I hope my favorite crackhead from Instagram is there too. Becoming obsessed with her makes me feel better about my own life, because her darkness is darker than my darkness. I drink a $7 orange juice at the cafe across the street from my apartment very slowly and with shaking hands because I am convinced there is some sort of poison in it. Whether it be gluten or arsenic it’s all the same. A woman orders a smoothie and talks to the counter staff as they make it, asking the handsome cashier between demands for NO COCONUT FLAKES PLEASE how his recent exam went at school. I am the only one in the store not speaking. I pretend to read the ingredients on the packaging of a protein bar. If I don’t have anything to say, I don’t say it. I haven’t brushed my teeth in four days anyway so it’s not like the words would come out pretty. I pay for my juice and realize as I’m halfway out the door that I forgot to say thank you. I say thank you, the distance is wide enough where they can’t smell my breath, and the words come out of my throat in a weathered squeak. 

My mother booked my psychiatrist appointment for me because I was never going to do it on my own. I eat steak because I’m convinced it’ll make me better. I don’t care that it’s gray and overcooked and under seasoned and dry inside, I just choke it down and throw the paper plate out when I’m done like I’m taking a dose of medicine from a little plastic cup at the psych ward. I feel like I’m going blind. I just realized I haven’t used my hair dryer in a few months because I’m not getting ready to leave the apartment at night, and if I am to leave I am leaving greasy and sticky because I don’t care and I pretend that no one can see me. I should wear a nice outfit sometime soon and pretend instead that I’m not someone who can get a sharp object out of anything using just a hair clip or a pair of tweezers or nail clippers and some might. I should pretend that I am impervious to pain and that I go on dates with nice boys. I should get high and go out in public and pretend that I’m sober and laugh really hard about my secret when no one is looking. I’m watching myself write this from across the room right now. Chin doubling, back flat against the bed, phone propped up against my sternum, typing it all out with just a thumb. If I am unseen then I can perform miracles. I have no sense of tense. No sense no tense. Blah blah blah blah blah

I miss the guy from October who’s door was always open, who didn’t need to fuck me, who drank too much at Lisa’s one woman show and embarrassed me in front of all of my friends. It would be so easy to go over there and sleep in his bed for 16 hours and make him buy me candy again, for old time’s sake, but I don’t want to subject him to whatever it is that I’ve become. He has a really good heart. I’m sure I do too but right now I can’t be bothered to think about it. Instead I am having a really gorey intrusive thought involving my asshole and a pair of nail clippers. My acupuncture appointment tomorrow costs the same amount as a gram. I booked it when I was still keen on saving myself. Maybe the ants like it in here because it’s so goddamn hot. 5:40 PM is such an awkward time. I don’t feel like explaining why. “I don’t feel like it” is not an excuse that people can swallow, I’ve noticed. Chew it first, then swallow, then bring it back up and suck on it again. I used to do that with my food as a kid. I used to do a lot of things. Now I only do some things. It’s not yet nothing, though. I’ll call you when it’s nothing. I’ll call you when the shuttle lands. I promise I will. I’ve been really busy. I’ve been really, really busy dreaming at the end of the world. I’m sure you could understand if you tried. I won’t wait up for you to get it but I know you will eventually.