12.30.2023

there is safety in attaching yourself to someone who does not have the capacity to know you. they cannot find ugly what they cannot dig out of you.

i see myself in oysters but only when shut, never a half-shell. in practice and too often, cold and closed and rough. something somehow swallowed but not chewed. to be known is my greatest, dripping and most human fear, the embarrassing kind that is consumptive and ugly.

Friendship Is Forever. Friendship Is Forever. i think of gold half necklaces exchanged. my body is made for forever and never for loss. my delusions are always lined with good intentions, always self protective, the body mending its own wound. the maternal inclination to preserve things in their youth. to keep things in a sealed jar of formaldehyde or a thick agar gel that i can shake from time to time, watch the sediment rise and settle.

i know that i am an animal and animals are always driven by ( ). my parents sewed my fear and my selfishness to my shame and i will never know the difference but i will always know how it feels, mostly in my biggest teeth, back there. i imagine my fear and my selfishness as two big red fists, amorphous in space. to search for something that is exactly the same as This and losing That means that i will still always have This. i look for This because i am an animal. in my moments of lucidity i know that i deserve to have someone break my nose, cleanly. in my head God calls me sasha. right now He is holding me by my shoulders or my cheeks or on either side of my jaw and he is telling me to be fucking for real right now.

everybody wants to talk about a perceived void that sits, presumably, centered in my sternum. the psychic said she could see it, rotating and shifting across the table. the psychic said she already knows i feel it myself, that she is not telling me anything new. the psychic says i have the aura of a dog that has been kicked. i think of my capacity for love as a pearlescent orb that swims somewhere in that black, adhesive pool, maybe in the intercostal space between my ribs. i studied biology because nothing is real if i cannot see it.

in the most basal sense, i do not like wanting. yet: This iterated and iterated over and over. in all our iterations, we are, fundamentally, always exactly the same. when i told you to please not leave, i was, unknowingly, being the most earnest i ever have been.

i know very well but nevertheless.