Stream-of-consciousness under the pitiless full moon

Forlorn, a foal in a cheap two-piece suit. You’re a baby, and then you’re an ancient. You’re a pink tear, glistening like Venus, sliding down the glass, drop-shaped and delicate, until you’re a tear in the paper, irreparable, needy, marring a tower of manuscripts in your brokenness. You’re growing potential, then you’re wasted talent.

A square peg in a round hole, forcing the entry until the edges of me are all sawn off. No one is born to be Senior Marketing Manager. No one can manage to reshape the abyss in their image. The knife of life is something sharp and stupid. Wait, what?

Everything sounds right in my head, and then I have to go and say it loud. I hear my own voice echoing through the room and I recoil. Blood on a bullet in a chamber in a gun in a hand. Hand on the gun, outstretched arm aloft in a signal. Get away. Stay away.

It’s not my fault you’re not a frontiersman. It’s not my fault you’re trapped in your own life like a wet-eyed beaver in a newspaper-lined cage. I didn’t descend from on high to save your soul. I didn’t. I didn’t.

Sitting in the tub, wearing a coat of sable fur over my mind. Across from me, perched on the windowsill, the skinned animal. In the living room, toweling off my hair, I stand in the doorway; freeze the frame and the tableau, dismayed, stares back at me. The television, wearing my face, blinks blandly. It says: All my love and desperation to you, stranger. I say: All my contempt, all my sympathy, to you.

If only I could only do those things that enrich me, rather than numb me, if only I could do those things that warp me, rather than dull me, if only I could capture all those rays of light, all those fragments of planets that spin by and graze my fingertips like so many million missed chances.

Koukai City, 2024

Crying piteously in the back of a taxicab that is ferrying me, with the discrete resoluteness of death’s own boatman, across expressways wet with melting snow. A chunk of ice breaks off a sign above and, in an overdramatic show of overdramatic destiny, slams down, hard, onto the hood of the car. The driver and I jump in our seats; he meets my eyes in the rearview mirror and we both laugh, a little shakily. Are we both imagining it—the swerve off the road? The shattering of the blue eggshell over the water, the smash-cut to red and then the fade-out to black? A lonely deformation of metal, bone and blood among the breakwaters of the freezing Yellow Sea?

I flip through books at the library, my eye catching on the repeated use of the word stars: shrug of stars, wheel of stars. The carpet has the flocked texture of a teddy bear. The fist lobbing between my ribs opens like a chest; a furred key, bronze teeth. I take it, hard. I let it bite into my palm. I drag myself through the mud; I lope across a field, only to hit a wall. Nothing comes easy. I take that hard. Moonrise, 2024. I lie on a stiff bed in an unfortunate Best Western, my mind purpling with hives. Mooncalf, 2024. Alive with a swarm of thoughts, I am alone but not alone. Obsessive worry is its own kind of possession and, in a way, its own kind of perverse comfort. How bad can I be, if I worry so much? Bad people surely don’t worry like this, do they? Outside the window, the snow blankets the tar.

The closest thing I have to religion is this: We’re born with nothing and have nothing throughout our lives. Only when we die do we finally latch onto something—a realization of roses, a dream of snow—and then, in a flash, it’s gone. In the meantime, I hold you like the water holds all us sharks and waves.

The first time

(A companion of sorts to: Hypercritical; Love it if we made it)

Here we are again, having a different version of the same conversation. The first time we did this, it felt like playing in a tropical greenhouse, the red, green and orange reflected on the glass like something from a gilt-edged fairytale. In the background, the blue-winged butterflies trembled, then soared. We tiptoed across walkways strewn with nettles and yellow leaves. We let our hands rest on balustrades of twisted metal. I met your eyes from between the pink, purple and white petals. The intimacy was strange and new and welcomed.

This version of the conversation, a million years later, lies between us like a neglected hotel pool: greenish, milky, off-putting. But it is a part of this, a part of things. Entry into the water is already included in the bill, and therefore we are obliged to wade in, to feel its discomfiting warmth. We do a few laps, unwillingly, and then towel ourselves off with our backs to each other. I sit across from you at the breakfast buffet, my hair still wet at the ends. I hold the fork and knife stiffly, in lieu of sword and shield. The happy chatter of the other guests is overwhelming. We agree, in silence, to pretend this never happened.

If I cleaved myself in half, so that the chunks I inherited at birth fell away in perfect synchronicity, like the boosters falling off a rocket blasting into space, what would be left? What pound of dust, what cracked fistful of red-ribbed stone might be mine? Sometimes I think there’s nothing original to be found here, in this flesh that is less flesh and more an accretion of tendernesses, but that’s a paradox, isn’t it? Wouldn’t that mean we’re all just duplicates of the rotted body of the original Eve? What a curse, indeed. Each new duplication, a lessening of the first soul. But it fits. I do feel less, I do feel lesser. Every year that passes, I feel myself diminish. I feel that something is being slowly eroded away. Then I look at you and feel almost unendurably embarrassed, at the totality of the selfishness that is inherent to my self-loathing, at the vanity of my paranoia.

Let’s get on a train, you and I. Let’s leave this behind. The world flashes by too quickly, as though trying to escape being framed for a crime. But what sin could the branching light, the fallow fields, the crowded houses have committed? Come back, I want to say, my face pressed against the glass. I didn’t get a good look at you, the first time. What is all this, then, but a series of imprecise, half-formed, poorly-informed glances? Sometimes we catch the light but most of the time, we don’t.

Disembarking, late at night, we turn to each other. The dusk that has fallen is proud and unrepentant, the curtain to end the play. I came after you, so I have your hair, your eyes, your bony wrists and ankles. No, that’s not quite right, is it? You came after me, didn’t you? And what did you keep of mine, when you raided the attic of our shared memory? What blue baby blanket, what blistered personality trait, what shred of thread from a scrapbook? You are my past, but I am not quite your future. I never met your expectations. Our legacy is not one of trust, because we don’t have that between us, and never have. Our legacy is one of regret. But I have to laugh, at you, at myself. It annoys you, I know—I was you. A lidded pot of blood put to boil.

If we were both strapped to a polygraph, would we have the same answers? Would we make the same mistakes? I have to cry, at you, at myself. If we were free to go, would we run to the same places, the same pleasures? Writing like this to a past self, I have a sense that I am launching myself into the atmosphere, the stars wheeling around in panic as I fling the pages of our mildewed diary onto the ground below, letting the secrets fertilize the soil, then poison the water. But when I plummet back down, hands clinging numbly to the parachute cords, I open my eyes against the sting of the wind and feel the weakness drain out of me, as though a purifying needle had punctured some putrefying chamber of the soul and released something there, something from the charnel pit there that could never hear the God in the predawn mountain, in the tiny grace of a budding magnolia, that refused to try. This weakness is not immediately replaced by strength, true—that doesn’t come so easily. But, alone in the freezing air, a patchwork of snow and tides beneath me, suddenly I have the feeling that, though I am no swimmer, I could stand to cross any river, if only I could know that you were on the other side. It’s not newfound courage that motivates me, but the realization that you are not just a fantasy, not just an exit wound for the past. You are real to me. Arms folded across my chest, hands cupping my shoulders, I fall back down to the earth in a blaze of lilies. I see your heart-shaped face behind my eyes. Yes, you are real to me. We’ll have this conversation again. It’s not the last time.

Ruled by the ram

About a hundred meters away from my apartment, between two groves of trees and a red-shingled temple, is a bakery that has been shuttered for eight years, ever since the owner hung herself from a second-floor beam. This revelation is available to unsuspecting members of the public in the form of a brutally crude, unpunctuated, one-star online review. Oh, Google Maps, how did it end up like this? Did you expect to be the bearer of such news? Huffing, puffing, energetic information engine, then giant of advertising, and now painful prophet, dressed in babyish, primary colors.

At the local sushi joint, sat on a bar stool upholstered in soft-touch, brown plastic, I read the specials: fatty tuna, sweet shrimp, abalone. I strip the paper packaging from a pair of disposable chopsticks. A cracked speaker above a humming fridge bleeds floaty, 2000s-style synth-pop. I order shochu and watch my ego deflate on the counter. An octogenarian in a square white cap scrapes scales off a body and then hoses down the counter. The restaurant swims with odors.

I watch myself in the mirrored wall opposite. I watch myself, watching myself.

Online, I look up photos: cropped bob on a long face, crown of thorns. Lying on the couch, my feet against the wall, I nurse a tension headache. I feel like I’ve swallowed the full moon. It bumps up against the crevices inside my skull, unhappily. It has the beady eyes of a Lovecraftian infant, peering wetly from over the bassinet. “Can saints be made in these circumstances? Can souls be saved?” it hisses contemptuously. I pat its tender head. So much fear is disguised as scorn. Don’t ask me how I know. Wait, please come back. I’m dying for someone to ask me this question, or any question.

On the weekend, walking under the triple-laned overpass that connects Tokyo Bay’s manmade islands to the mainland, feeling the breeze and the blue-toned light compete for my attention. The gray concrete beams that hold up the road are unashamed of their unconventional beauty. The asphalt is painted in black, white and goldenrod. In this city, hours like these are ruled by the ram, ruled by the red planet, as I am. I have a feeling like I’m playing hide-and-seek, and have yet to be found.

Ecstasies of Persephone

Finally, fall. I roll the bike out of storage. Like the grass underfoot, the air is cool to the touch. I ride down a maple-lined street to the corner store, where I buy freshly roasted coffee beans and freshly baked bread. The sun sets between four and five. I climb up a paved hill, to the bridge over the tracks. I watch the cloud banks recede into the distance. I lean against the railing. I give it time.

I remember how easily I could fall in love. As an adolescent pustule, any glance in my direction was immediately captured, bathed in preservative, pinned between two jeweled panes of glass, then catalogued and forever hoarded in a sharp-edged, silver Rolodex. I never talked to anyone in the flesh world, but, in the paradise inside my brain, I was as voluble as a hyena, as capacious as the moon. Anything could vex me. Anything could captivate me. There was some quality that I locked onto—not beauty, not intelligence. Some grist of identity. In the chilled air of the basement, framed in the wooden doorway, one shoe on the bench, a turn of the head. Against the low bed, the early evening in late summer, a certain angle of the light on a bottle-green eye. A stray comment that could be interpreted, charitably, in my favor; only years later, sleeping with our hands and feet pressed together, do I realize it was never intended for me. Now, if the mood is right, I can depersonalize this same inclination for easy infatuation and bring it, instead, to the linked and varied charms of the world. I walk home, feeling a cherry-red hand lingering on my back. I take a breath. Its fingers trace a wobbly heart over my shirt.

I get older. It’s a truism, but pay attention. Every day that passes, I get older. I refuse to think of this as anything other than a privilege. I’m a woman, not a nymph. I am determined to resist any call to fetishize my own youth, which was emaciated then and is rotten now. You know that I am not nostalgic. My adolescence was documented in unsmiling photos, pained videos, and here, in tragic diary entries. When I relive it in dream, we, my heart and I, understand that it was nothing to celebrate. I’m a woman, not a calyx. I’m a woman, not a chalice. I will happily age, but I won’t be devoured by time. It’s a futile complaint, but make no mistake. I’m not a mother; it’s hard enough to be a daughter, a wife. Of blood plasma, of the skin of the dauphine, of green meconium fluid, I know nothing. I have ten good years left, and then, once those years are gone, once the petals have all wilted, I’ll have the rest of my life, which will be fully mine. Good riddance.

I grasp at the reeds. I rip them out. Handfuls of straw-like, saffron-colored light. I don’t respect nature. What? I don’t. I trample over it with the all the peachy, preachy eagerness of ignorance. But I can’t discard the influences that made me so easily. Cheek against the cold dirt, lying in the dew-wet grass, yellowing already, I am close enough to the signs to finally read them. They are dug into the ground. They are carved into every brick of my body. I can’t scratch them out without risking the foundation. Can I live with all these emblems of vice, virtue and sacrifice? Can I bear them without resorting to terror, to prayer? The rest of my life. Oh. Oh, no. What if something bad happens? What if something bad happens? What if something bad happens? What I would give to be free of this specific, shining pain. I’ve been waiting nearly a decade for the knife to drop. When it does, I imagine I’ll feel relief, then grief, then relief, again. The blade will lie uselessly on the floor. But then again, let’s be honest. Take my face into your hands. It’s more likely, isn’t it, that the hurt will be grander and fiercer than I can even imagine today. It will pierce me in a way that I cannot picture. If that’s the case, then what could be the point of all this waiting-in-preparation?

The light sighs, then chokes. Red, orange and pink run across my view, long, faint, flecked, like spittle. The temperature of the air, the rumbling of the train below, the twisted color of the sky, the flushed luster on everything. For a second, the stiches open. The door yawns wide enough for me to latch tightly onto a specific feeling. What I feel, then, is the power and the brevity of my life. I feel its madness, its divinity, its profound stupidity. I feel it tumble over me, like a playful wave. I feel its scarred simplicity. Then, as though struck, the feeling snaps away, and, lacking the instinct to fight for it, I lose it immediately. The wind takes it over the railing, the tracks, the bridge, into the distance.

When did I start writing this like a manifesto? Will the pretensions of my ego, many-winged, never cease? Finally, fall.

Plague in the city upon a hill

America’s greatest living writer is a forty-nine year-old management consultant with a shattered moral compass and a cardboard box of unfinished manuscripts in the trunk of his silver Miata. He spends one-third of his waking time on conference calls, smiling grimly at the unblinking eye of the camera. America’s greatest living writer will never publish a single word. He dies three days before his fiftieth birthday and is survived by no one.

The final plague begins as his body flies through the windshield, the night air purpling with autumn. America never gets another chance at a great writer. In the broken headlights, his shadow is briefly ten feet tall. The master arrives as his thoughts are still cartwheeling on the grassy field between life and death. The shredded flesh of his brain doesn’t fully grasp that it’s all over. His heart, pulp on the road, cries out: Could I grow past this breaking point, like a rose through the rot? Could I plead for mercy? Could I make it out? Is there time left? Is there time left?

She scrolls through her phone. A pebble of plastic is slowly dissolving in the center of her chest and dripping down her organs, like painted tears of dew on a golden pear in a white bowl. She’s sitting at the table, chin in her hands, running through plans in her head. She is not America’s greatest living anything. She is a perfectly ordinary girl with her own small, thorn-studded hopes that fracture, then flower, starve, then devour.

America’s greatest manuscript lies in pieces on the freeway. The printed pages take to the wind. In the darkness, before the police cars crowd the scene, they are the wings of a past life.

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Hypnerotomachia Polia

Inspired by Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

A reader suggested to me that this could be interpreted as a story of sexual violence. I don’t contest the validity of this interpretation, though I intended a reading that more specifically underscores the relationship between body horror, childbirth, and pursuit. I’m putting this under a “read more” to alert any readers that might prefer to avoid any themes referenced in this paragraph.

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Flawed pendulum

I read back my writing and find it uneven, like a mislaid path. Cobblestones, ruddy with rusty moss. But the unevenness doesn’t bother me. In the gaps between sentences, where the rhythm breaks and disperses, where traces of it are cast irregularly over rocky paragraphs, like a varnished wave smeared wetly against the shore, I glimpse something glittering, something close to feeling. That leak of light is a comfort. You must understand that I grew up among extremes of emotion: Perplexing, knotted, treacherous. Every step on the knitted ecru carpet, a tripwire. Now, years later, when I go hunting for feeling in the briars of my being, I can’t make sense of the tracks laid there. The footprints double-back, then crisscross. I can’t follow them to their source. Only in probing my past writing, in examining its tempo—occasional adagio, occasional allegro—am I able to spot, in the underbrush, the large, wet eye, the chipped fang, the blurred expression. Sometimes, if I wait by the foot of the hill, I even see her, half-monster, half-girl, face smeared with dirt, tears, and green phlegm. Howling, she crawls out of the cave, raw and new and filled with a panic that spurts like a fresh wound, weak to the many pains, the various joys, the intermittent horrors—

I travel an hour to a bookstore on the opposite side of the city. It’s nighttime, and I feel Tokyo‘s disregard fall over me like a shroud. Anonymity is this city’s gift. It’s not that I fit in, or don’t. You must understand that I grew up caught between cultures, and now, when I go searching in the brambles of birthright, no branches part to reveal a hidden pool of rippling water, of mossy, rusty relics half-buried in the silt, recovered by my hand, mine by inheritance. Sometimes, I hear someone talk about going home and I see how their blood trickles down their body, through the floor, and back through corrugated stone, to a lightless aquifer where their bones will one day go. I grew up in too many places; I am the product of two already uprooted people. I don’t long for belonging, but I have sometimes felt like I am supposed to. Only in Tokyo does that need seem undesirable, unnecessary. This city does not think of me, and I am therefore free to find untethered relief in its iron-colored rain; its encircling neon glows; its dirty shadows; its million gaudy lights like broken rubies; its clouds of cherry-like sweetness that, in maroon October, can be traced back to the orange-petalled osmanthus tree blossoming in the alleyways.

In the many years I’ve lived in this body, I like to think I’ve never misunderstood myself. I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as self-confident, but I am almost obsessively self-aware. I have a sense of watching myself from a third perspective at all times. I watch myself watching myself. Feet propped up on the sofa, trying to find the words. Squinting at the yolk of the setting sun. Leaping up the stairs at the train station, two at a time. Standing in my blue bathing suit, the rain leaving coin-sized dimples on the water, feeling, under my plastic flip-flops, the forking, copper-colored twigs wince, then split, like wishbones. Counting down the seconds between the seam of light and the answering thunder. Sitting in a scoop of fiberglass, twisting a rope around my hand as a flock of birds dart through the dusky blue. They abruptly dissolve their formation and descend, pointed and bulletlike, towards the lake, pulling up at the last moment—my breath caught in my throat like a lie—to land soundlessly on its surface. When it comes to telluric landings in late summer, an angel might try but could do no better.

Side project

What’s my side project? It’s the avoidance of meaningless pain. It’s the cultivation of meaningful pain. It’s the pursuit of overthinking. It’s like film photography, but I am the photographer, the instrument, the medium, the subject, the foreground, the background, the viewfinder, the viewer. I am the fire exploding in a corner, the frame, the texture of the printed paper. The single nail from which the photograph hangs. The peril of its life. The tenderness in its tilt toward the light.

How is that a side project? Oh. Shall I describe it differently? It’s the bilge pump while I’m taking on water. It’s the flicker of disobedience when I’m taking orders. It’s a survival project. What am I surviving? I’m surviving the decay of the spirit. I’m surviving the luxuries of Eden.

You purse your lips. You don’t approve. It takes a special kind of imprudence to gesture at the spiritual poverty of personal circumstance when living, objectively, in the richest set of rich circumstance. What sort of survival is required in my pink world, this place like a plastic prize inside a candy egg? If Paradise could be circumscribed, I would be the gargoyle in the citadel at its center. If arrogance were a palette of colors, I would be the most saturated shade of camellia red. I would ooze from the tube like possessed blood.

All true accusations. Truer than true.

But still I—a bottom feeder, a spoiled princess, a spoiled nectarine, a drop of goldenrod embedded in the liver of a shattered solar system—insist on the purifying potential of a side project. I say it’s necessary to keep me sane. I say it’s necessary to keep me alive. I say I fear that the corrosive power of my nine-to-five. Do you resent your job, you ask? No, I cherish the safety it provides. But, in searching for my adult identity, I come up against the meager hydra of my career history acting as my personal history, the rusty dagger of my job title as the only definition available and I—I do not wish to live my life as though it could be phrased within these terms.

You scoff. A life is not a thing to be phrased. Here, I relinquish any pretense of politeness. I can’t agree. We are sentences on a page, and some of us may find our ends in the form of a question. Don’t you—don’t you fear that? Isn’t it an ache able to contort your mind into an unrecognizable shape?

A grisly prism above the waters. Life as meaningless pain, then meaningful pain. There’s joy too, you say, but I am not listening. I’m caught in the gaps between the pain. I am angry, though I, eyes aflame, incorrectly perceive that anger as rapture. It feels good to be angry at the world. Set the lake on fire. Chemical reaction, trembling wave. Blue halo, orange wings. Then, quickly, feel the feeling shift again, into terrible terror. The terror heats my face with its approach and numbs my hands when it withdraws. I am not myself with or without it. Is there any kind of life I won’t regret? Is there any kind of side project that could save me or, at minimum, distract me from the state of all these pointed and polyethylene things? This longing is a thorn of juniper. I let it cut me, again and again. Uh-oh. I let it wear me like a crown.

I can hear the snap of the line—tension bursting the fibers of a red thread—from across the combined muscle of several oceans. I pull back the shattered cord and examine the point of breakage, where destiny did not diverge, but instead abdicated its throne entirely. I look at the torn stem and then at the petalled carpel, which smiles graciously, gratefully, not knowing time has made its call. If gardening were my side project, could I postpone the inevitable? Could I graft stem to stem, the ripped body to its withering prophet? Could I reattach head to torso, with needle and thread, my table littered with soil and newsprint? What would be the point?

Welcome to Nurdle Nation, LLC

She doesn’t list her job on her profile, but nine out of ten prospective partners look her up before the first date, and then the cat is out of the bag.

“What’s an ESG manager?” her date asks, sliding clumps of angel hair around a black enameled plate. “And what’s Nurdle Nation?”

She slices neatly into a thumb-sized radish as her date pauses to fork pasta into their mouth. “Actually,” the date asks, sheepishly—”What’s a nurdle?”

She smiles with real satisfaction. The amber light from the hundred spherical lamps in the restaurant briefly dims. In the corner booth, the shadows come out, as though to play. They are dusk at her jugular, on her jaguar-print sheath dress. In the mirrored walls, she angles her face differently, adjusts the folds of the rich fabric, and watches the shadows contort, as though in pain.

“It’s a precursor to consumer product,” she, esteemed Senior ESG Manager at Nurdle Nation, LLC, says genially, graciously, already mentally preparing to wade into her spiel. Have you heard of us before, cries out the dark-green voice of the bog inside her. We were actually invited to the President’s house, last year. And I wrote an op-ed in the Post. Oh, you read it? Yeah, it was called “Fight for the Future of the Angels of the New World,” that’s right. Oh, what was it about? It was about a lot of things. 

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