My bathroom shares a wall with the apartment next door. Our toilets sit back-to-back, joined together by a “Y” pipe. The wall between them is thin. So thin that, every once in a while, I can hear my neighbor puke into her toilet.

She blares some techno. Then for about 2 minutes: a sequence of repetitive gagging sounds with short intervals of silence between them. Finally, a flush.

Shared Exorcisms

In the third grade, there was a spot at the far end of the playground where I’d sink fingers down my throat until yellow bile shot out.

Sometimes it only took the stomach acid hitting my tongue to make me feel better. But if I kept going, forcing my guts to squeeze together as tight as possible, I could experience a kind of blankness… and for a short while, my body became like a cloud and the world didn’t feel so rotten.

My nervous system is often infested by an excess (some unbearable “too-muchness” with no clear name or substance). It presses up against me from everywhere at once, forcing my outside and inside to fold into each other. My thoughts lose their shape, sounds melt into lights and textures; a uniform of pure intensity. Vomiting can make it stop.

Moving On

I don’t know when it all started. My mother once confessed to my psychiatrist that, starting at the age of six, she took notice of my little habit. Though I have no memory of her ever intervening.

It’s an ugly mechanism… especially in the long run. But it’s hard to care when I’m just trying to survive through the next hour.

My current lifestyle keeps me away from the worst triggers. That opens the door for milder (and safer) substitutes.

Still, when the world gets too heavy, no other ritual can soothe me so completely. When I hear my neighbor cut through that thin wall, I instantly think about the cloud feeling. And a small part of me is tempted. I don’t know; life is messy.

I am an orifice trying to swallow itself whole.

My striving resembles a continuous field, as echoed in the displacement of linearity… like velocity, straight and uninterrupted in its own order… curving from the locality of acceleration, which remains in turn linear to itself.

I can’t see the ground beneath my feet without first stepping elsewhere, cannot know of myself except through layers of otherness: a reflection in a window, an expression flickering across another’s face, a stranger’s judgment about me in a comment section.

Who am I to accuse you of missing the “real me” when no unmediated form is accessible? How can I trash your opinions about me when my own introspections are mere distortions, when the me who observes is alienated from the me I observe?

We’re like two warped mirrors facing each other, each asking from the other a faultless image, a final answer to the question “who am I?”

Each attempt to arrive at the solution traces a curve of this ambient body: our commons, a continuity that seeks its own ineffability as a discrete object of analysis, displacing failure to ever-higher orders where I am always either too much or too little, one step ahead yet always one step behind, just as my “present moment” appears one moment too late.

Alas, my perfect arrival is only accessed at a distance. An amorphic mirage only visible from a site of incompleteness. The pursuit of wholeness is asymptotic. You can look but can’t touch.

Tik-tok

Inside the gap, a screen receives my projections: phantasmic fruits dangling just beyond my fingertips and a kaleidoscopia of phobic monsters salivating at my throat.

A metamorphosis driven by lost futures and re-constructed pasts… who I could be is held hostage by who I could have been. I try to escape but am crushed by the gravity of my own worldline.

The heaviness of aging pins me against the deep end, where catalogued humiliations and missed opportunities counter-balance my cries for a better tomorrow. I’m nailed to a ticking clock; “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” And this paralysis just makes me crazier… dreaming bigger, wider, more impossible.

My failure to close the gap feels meant to be. A birthmark. As if without this tension, without the lag between myself and my own otherness, the subjective field collapses.

Nonetheless, within this limited locality, only degrees of certainty are certain. My hopes and fears are all I possess.

So I keep trying. To fill up every hole. Cut off every defect. To reach a singularity that would paradoxically negate the screen, the gravity, the projections, annihilating the only room where I am granted access to my own becoming. 

Damned if I do / damned if I don’t.

E-Hugs

My stubborn demand that the lag should be fixable: It tightens around my neck. Obsessing, fussing, spiraling.

Perverse daydreams about a righteous emancipation from acidic parental objects burning my windpipe. (these tears can’t wash off mama’s BPD). My childhood should be banned in all countries.

I blink and wake up ten years flabbier, haunted by the present absence of an idyllic innocence now out of reach: heat radiates from my fallacious rememberings of the unmediated love once injected through an umbilical cord.

Stick me inside your surrogate womb. Cake me with one layer of post-digital makeup after another. Let me farm your adoration through the worship of our algorithmic membrane.

Pulses of sincerity in vertical H. 264 can rip open and fist every definitional scope. But I don’t just want stretchmarks. Make words collapse under their own weight. Astroturf me like you mean it. Because my broken heart wants more; it doesn’t even know what it wants.

You will learn how AR spongebob can enhance your stupid life in ways we never thought possible. God loves late-stager glitchcore and humiliation porn, because today I am tasked to contort my selfishness into something easily digestable just for you, the gigantic disembodied eye hovering in the sky. I don’t know who you are but I can smell your breath. It augments the resolution of my pores only to uncover ever more delicate artifacts and imperfections… and my hideousness infinitely expands into a holographic field of uncanny repetitions.

I want you to love me… but a smear gets in the way. An npc keeps bouncing off the edge of the map and doesn’t know it; I do. Very sad. Crying is a notification that you’re still alive. A thought bubble appears above my head: what is lost to both my future and my past is never possessed in the first place. 

One should make better life choices. ☹, the heart wants what she can’t have. Spit out by the algorithm, I crawl back into the crowd on my hands and knees, begging nepo demagogues with discord podcasts to sprinkle me with promises that gesture towards a beyond – a realm too cool (but not too cool) for perfect justice, total freedom, romantic pluralism, puritanical traditionalism… a stream-of-consciouness that numbs the sting of my impotence.

Caressing their axioms, I try to see better with my eyes closed. Frequency of God 963 Hz on auto-play. A blissful ignorance soon interrupted. For in time, my hallucinatory Eden fractures under the weight of new scandals, cancellations, and “Video paused. Continue watching?”: wounds that incubate the next generation of promises. The asymmetry displaces “upward;” my societal crisis never ends. It simply finds a grander uprising.

Them two pupils in my mirror violate me with a variable that refuses to fit the socio-technological equation. And so I beg for a way to compartmentalize my yearning for a something more, something that neither synthetic gloss nor analytics can equalize.

Starfish

Eye-rolling your eye-roll is just another eye-roll. An infinite regress of eye-rolls receding like the horizon. I want to kick and scream. I want to scorn my failure to arrive at finality by spiting the absurdity of existence. If I cannot close the gap by force, then what?

I am a starfish. A period of apathy where I relinquish all striving. I am finally “letting go,” free-floating in a mist of subliminal beliefs about un-thinking: a mind scheming an escape out of itself.

For a moment, I experience a semblance of liberation. A “mood.” I feel the active passivity (or passive aggression) of my spiritual awakening superglue this disembodied ‘I’ back onto my ‘self.’ I can almost breathe the prelapsarian air of revelation dancing in the vacuous margins of my subjective field. Could this blissful state be erupting from a primordial essence, or is this no more than juvenile enjoyment in the taboos of inner-transgression?

Soon enough, the euphoric haze of begins to lift as my self-narrative complexifies through its own momentum. I come to find that my transcendental gibberish makes me feel something precisely because it scribbles inside the lines, safe from any actual danger. Never straying far from the environs of identity, I play pretend like a child who confidently wanders near the edge of an unknown all while knowing that mother’s watchful eye is hovering, that her voice will eventually call out their name.

And I hear my name. My fruits, my womb, my completeness… all of it woven from the very knot that enlightenment promises to untangle.

The ambient body remains intact. My horizon continues to recede.