Fxcefxcked
Abysses annihilate leg day.
I don’t believe in curses. That is, I don’t believe that anyone can jus sit down and will an accursed state upon someone. A good thing, too. Because my disbelief has done nothing to quell the desire to lay a curse. I find myself entertaining the thought regularly. I run through all the methods, as though I have the patience for elaborate ritual. I will leave the baking to others in my own life but in my fantasy world I have all the capability of mastering a retaliatory incantation. I’ll think of outcomes, and forcibly match them to people like red flag-laden Feeld profiles. And yeah, I’ll make a mental list and regularly revise it, more than any one piece of writing. Wouldn’t you like to know who makes the cut? Then I will think about my gloriously grotesque undoing. Because cursing is like all good things: something I would never know or care how to stop on my own.
The ‘80s movie hero took his ‘80s movie crush to the bowling alley. Over hamburgers, the ‘80s movie hero, being rootless and new in town, told his crush how he found comfort in how all bowling alleys looked the same no matter what state he lived in.
There is in every American this ‘80s movie hero, who gets to punch out his womanizing rival, who gets to grow when admonished by his gym teacher for poor attendance, and who gets the nice, rich girl in the end. But the American has tradeoffs the hero does not. The American doesn’t get the hero’s naïvety, the arrogance even, of static and timeless comforts, living as he does in a context where bowling alleys are fewer in number, and ugly in a way that only appeals to even fewer people.
But the American will always have the obstinate VHS tracking distortion on his digital transfer; because no one remembers what the movie is called or what the hero’s name even is throughout its runtime.
The last thing I remember her telling me was how she couldn’t remember what I looked like or, for that matter, what I sounded like. Okay, I thought to myself, if the details of my face make no difference to you, why shouldn’t I be able to just take it off?
People tell my I have no spirit of adventure. Well fuck them. Because one had just presented itself, where I may contour my utterly forgettable features to suit what I presume is my inner-essence, my truest self. Not that I am any closer to narrowing down to just one. The Francis Bacon triptych, the Creepypasta abomination, the ostracized clown are equally adequate in their own ways.
I suppose I could’ve just unlocked my Instagram that, for whatever reason, it never occurred to me to show her. But the search must go on. It’s also weird that that conversation happened over the phone.
Getting even. Keeping receipts. Taking the low road. Not just holding a grudge until, or even beyond, one of our deaths, but letting it grow in fat and skin tags. I’ve been brought up to resist this impulse. But as with most things I’ve been brought up to resist, there eventually seems little standing in the way of letting it absorb me. Once you do that you see that the high road is neither a road nor is it very difficult to scale. It’s just overwhelming in its soundless austerity. Maturity is living in a Corbusier apartment complex. Maybe that appeals to some people, but it doesn’t appear to me that the structure holds for very long. I used to be mortified when someone suddenly lost their dignity for the crime of feeling a little too much. Crashing out is like genuflecting in a Gothic cathedral, and invites a kind of religious devotion. A shrine you can return to and honor at your heart’s content. Crashing out shares this with literature.
I wanted my reading to go well, but I hadn’t expected it to be a rousing success. The Memoirist, who earlier in the night was exalting Pessoa, was now exalting me and this little thing I read over the roar of air conditioning in a Manhattan high-rise. I felt like a Kool-Aid Man of literature, bursting through the walls unexpectedly but welcomed for the joy and refreshment I brought in with me. The Memoirist, above anyone, was most ecstatic. The word “love” being deployed more times than I usually feel comfortable saying myself, ever. I bequeathed my reading copy, then-destined for a Penn Station garbage can, onto them, transforming it into a treasure. The Memoirist returned the favor by regaining their composure before long and seeing the error in judgment, leaving me alone with the memory, very stubborn and somewhere below a treasure.
My experience of flattery has always been akin to assault: happening by surprise, out of sight, and leaving me disturbed and confused—just switch out sudden terror for sudden ecstasy. You can go on endlessly decoding its motivation. Am I being signaled to do something proactive with my skills? Are writers like everyone else, just saying things that sound nice without thinking? Or does my work carry a resin of shame, like nü metal when I was in high school? My bias leans on the third option, bestowing me with a glamorous ugliness and implying the possibility of a revival for a generation less afraid to be itself, and, one hopes, to my eventual material advantage.
Anyway, I have neither done a reading nor touched my copy of The Book of Disquiet since.
While out walking one afternoon on an encircled street, a man came by me in the opposite direction wearing a “Macho Man” Randy Savage t-shirt. He held out his iPhone, no earbuds attached, playing Frank Sinatra at full volume. We passed each other twice. Both times I waved. He grinned and nodded on the second. I was tempted to adjust my route to follow him. I was moved by the impression of steady serenity he gave off, like a ship slicing through a dyspeptic ocean toward a destination with certain iceberg qualities. Instead I went on my own way, thrilled by the trust I placed in my idealization.
Not someone to grow with. Someone to rot with. Someone to be comfortably and unconsciously at your worst with. And they at their worst with you. Sounds nice, right? You could make the effort for that. All the invective against dating culture as it now appears melts into sludge as one abyss with legs leaps hopelessly and longingly into another. And now you cannot banish from your mind the image of abysses annihilating leg day, then going to fuck.
A story in which every word but these were cut …
“What did you learn from your last relationship?”
“I learned that your teeth can grow back after you’ve pulled all of them out.”
