Dearest Juliana (or F.A.W.C.),

I drafted the circuit a millennium ago, so certain it would unfold flawlessly: Close down the shop at 11. Go home, pat on eyeshadow, “pump” my “tires.” Get to the old glass factory by 1 and wait in line for, like, 24 minutes—maximum. Once inside, go straight to the front of the floor, right by your deck. Dance dance dance until sunrise. Bike home with the sky getting all pink and optimistic. Sleep for four hours, if at all, with what’ll be in the bloodstream, etc. Then wake up to a weekend that happens to contain my birthday (ignoble horrific unavoidable fact), but feel OK about it, because if I can party right, then I can handle youth for another year, right?

Left.

The plan was simple, but my execution was poor. The thing about daydreams is that they are vaporous whims projected onto a virtual mental screen with no external interventions to obstruct their obscene idealism from growing like a brain tumor. Because if I had done the math I would’ve seen how (probable) X would’ve lead to (dicey) Y, which would’ve lead to (irredeemable) Z, culminating in a devastatingly predictable 360 return to A: asystole. But I am not a genius. I still count with my fingers to add 6+7 and expect things to be different every time I return to a bad thing, like a gambling addict hitting slots at the grocery store. Damn that machine zone! This is how people lose their lives to their great expectations.

The truth is, Ms. Huxtable, I admire what I cannot have: the Northern Lights, pencil skirts, clear skin, alternate timelines on which I was already famous by yesterday. I admire the girls and the gays who withhold their friendship from me, because I am just so vile with gender envy and an innate inability to chop it up sometimes. Needless to say: I a****e y**. So when I saw you were playing Basement last night, the second Friday of July, I buckled like a Midtown column and threw caution to the highly pressurized wind in a (super hubristic) attempt to redeem my discontent from this very night last year.

Right.

23 started with a bad trip. I held a birthday party in my Bushwick backyard full of people I didn’t really know but wanted to have around. This included: two colleagues from my museum job where I was paid to swindle senile elders for $6000 membership dues; my boss from the sandwich shop; girls from college who kinda just happened to be in town; and a Brazilian lawyer I met in Portugal on Grindr, who coincidently rented an apartment about two minutes from mine. He brought a friend and his new Asian boyfriend, who was high off mushroom-infused “Snickers.” He gave me a piece, just enough to put a slight italic on everything. Suddenly my arms were itchy. The drinks were tepid. Everyone was gorgeous—but then they were gone. Dispersed into the Knickerbocker night with their new man meat, game for the next means of weekend occupation. Whereas I, still feeling italicized and incomplete, fetched another bar of magic chocolate from the fridge, rationalizing: 1) F.M.L., 2) T.I.M.E., 3) I.D.G.A.F., 4) Y.O.L.O. 5) L.M.A.O.

Lol
Midnight
Already?
Oh fuck

I have learned that acronyms can be deceitful. The moment we start compressing language to be convenient and concise (the death of the Pedant in 16th cent. England, the birth of the email template, ChatGPT fetch and response) is the moment we stop deciding for ourselves what to do with our words: these arbitrary arches and angles: our semantic pigments. As Marcuse wrote in The One-Dimensional Man: “Once [the acronym] has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, ‘sanctioned’ by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact.” Of course, he was discussing the abbreviation of global political entities, i.e., NATO/UN/USSR, but the sentiment holds!

Yes, I got passive with my vocables and went to Basement. The bouncer scanned my I.D. (Impending Death) and the I.D. scanner sang me happy birthday in an 8-bit tune. I wanted to hurl/smash the device for reminding me of that ignoble horrific unavoidable fact, but there was a party I was supposedly missing. I then became a zombie in the line for the slaughterhouse, I mean dance floor. How sad everyone seemed! Only a Queens charade of Berlin could produce a vibe as dismal as this. I was suddenly overcome with Lebenskrankheit—“disease of life.” Not wary, nor pessimistic of, but INFECTED BY life. This Germanic existential malaise is supposedly what drove Hermann Hesse to write Siddhartha, and what drove me to hop over the barricades and run away from the club, leaving you, Ms. Huxtable, as a phenomenon lost to the night—an Aurora Borealis in Maspeth.

Let’s
Make
An
Objective:

Language
Means
Anything
Obviously

I needed to see the sea. I needed to smell the salinity & drink the offshore breeze. It was the only cure! It was 4 am. I could’ve either waited 800000000000 years for the bus—of course the A wasn’t running—or I could’ve biked. Owning a bike not, and wanting to pay $65 for a uncomely two-ton Citi Bike not, I settled for my last resort: larceny. I knew there were a couple unchained bikes in my building’s basement, along with a half-dozen open suitcases and unfinished paper mâché projects and one battered pink pony stick. I slinked down the stairs and fetched the unsecured bike, only to realize its tires were as flat as a rat ran under an eight-wheeler. I spotted a bike pump caged behind a storage unit, but it was locked up and impossible to retrieve from outside. Deterred, I wondered, very lucidly: Who at this hour would be willing to sell me a bike? A Birthday Bike, nonetheless! Surely some heaven-sent freak from Kings County. Very lucidly I went on Craigslist and published a post.

4:35 AM, no hits. It’s been five minutes. 4:50, no hits. I’m melting I’m decomposing I’m turning into humus peat rot rot rot. 5:10 AM, no hits. I’m young and beautiful, but there’s no one to still love me when I’m no longer… 5:45 AM, I’m drifting to sleep at last, alas, right in time to miss the sunrise, which is all I ever wanted in the first place—to see the sunrise to welcome my new year of fallible existence, positively beaming with potential. But it rose & glowed without me.

I woke up on July 12th and wrote this:

Passable day, like all others. Imagine the sun rising, blinking, and missing it. A heart’s capacity so spacious it collapses with the slightest weather. My tongue hangs in an odorous hall, a pig in its sty. Head floats and bobs and launches away from the things it aims to reach. Being a dog and not being a dog. Someone’s lifelong love. Loyal like that. Incomparable like that.

Then I ate a bagel with Hazel in the park, and everything was OK. But I promised to myself in that moment that I would NEVER SPEND MY BIRTHDAY WAITING IN LINE FOR A CLUB ALONE EVEN IF FOR YOU JULIANA HUXTABLE and that I WILL ONLY INVITE PEOPLE I KNOW INTIMATELY OR PRETTY WELL TO MY PARTY, NOT JUST KIND OF/VAGUELY ACQUAINTED, and that I REALLY OUGHT TO HAVE A REAL BOYFRIEND BY THIS TIME NEXT YEAR and seriously NO MORE OF THIS BULL-HONKY.

NO
I REALLY MEAN IT
MORE
BULL-HONKEY
Y

We tell ourselves such beautiful, ideal, and impossible things. Over and over again. Or at least I do. Because last night, the second Friday of July, 2026, I backtracked over my purported self-progress, finding myself wasting away in line for the chopping block, again. This really isn’t important. This really doesn’t matter. I am just trying to understand why I do things that reduce my experience of myself to one of frustration and discontent. Pumping through being 20-blah-blah entails constant reduction/expansion: a pulmonary system testing its limits, training to outdo its straining capacity. And when the wheeze comes, as I feel it has this whole past year—a one-fucking-year-long wheeze—I try very very very hard to remember that there is a thing call “grace,” and that it must be employed during these moments of maximum strain, or else we’re certain to fall windless. And then what?

TL;DR—I didn’t make it to your set, Juliana. I bet you truly slayed, but I wouldn’t know. After an hour of waiting in line with the most beautiful people to whom I have ever been lucky enough to bum a cigarette, I returned to my bike, 4:whatever AM, and rode around the county until the sky got all periwinkle and expectant. Listening to Harry Nilsson, feeling the muscles in my back and legs firm from the movement, which wasn’t the dancing I had hoped to do, but which placed me back in the thrill of free embodiment all the same.

Anyway, this is to say that sometimes a closed loop looks like a flop repeated—but with a twist! And that, despite every daydream rivaled by reality, I continue to let ambitiousness guide me. The only thing we need is the ability to try and try again. Because eventually I did wake up to a weekend that happened to contain my birthday (annual unremarkable ultimately fine fact), and felt OK about it. My friends made me s’mores brownies (you can’t even imagine the sublimity…) and took me to Tashkent to enjoy lepseshka and ajvar on the beach before riding the Wonder Wheel during sunset. I think, ever since I was born, all I’ve really ever wanted was a lover and a ferris wheel and a sky that was multiple colors at once. I got all that, and the company of a few others to boot. I guess that’s pretty lucky.

Thank you, I love you, happy birthday, be here next year,

Me, man alive, I am a very curious assembly of incongruous parts. My yea! of today is oddly different from my yea! of yesterday.

—D.H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters”

Instead of sleep I drool

for a basket of chicken tenders and waffle fries. God willing I will spend my paycheck. God willing I will spend my hard-earned nothing on latticed potatoes. Dad would be proud. God willing I will teach him pride. I sell words for a living, physical words. Objects comprised of words. Word objects made by other people. Those word objects involve narratives that have nothing to do with me, except my hands, which facilitate the transaction between the concerned parties: word-object-maker and word-object-eater. My hands earn potatoes for this dirty work. Covers soiled by other people’s finger filth. Crumbs in the gutters, dried bugs splayed between pages. God willing I will find a cleaner profession. God willing I will get paid for these words. My own words. God willing these words will make someone proud, because it sure as hell ain’t m—

The mornings are 95 degrees and the evenings are bilingual. Why why why why

Instead of sleep I retype

nothingness into the semblance of semantic value. I quote Rimbaud, encounter porn, eat water. I fret and I fitter. The cursor becomes a reverse guillotine, returning the brain to its lifeless body of text.

why why why why why

(Don’t worry, we’re getting somewhere; I just need to warm up a bit.)

The Master said, "Let a man be first incited by [poetry], then given a firm footing by the study of ritual, and finally perfected by music."

-Chapter 194 (8.8) of the Analects

Poetry → Ritual → Music = Perfection (seems easy)

(“seems easy,” has no context, googles Confucianism, pulls quote from a random site, heard it first from a white guy pretty sure, runs with the sentiment anyhow)

Please forgive what follow—I’ve always been terrible at PEMDAS.

← MUSIC

It’s graduation season in America, and I’m sick of it. Barclays is a bedlam of rented gowns and cellophane cones and blue and white manicures: school colors. You can’t walk down the street without feeling ancient and inert. I only graduated two years ago, but for some not-so-good reason, everyone in New York tallies up their twenties as if they go by in dog years. Come July 12th I’ll be 288, whereas this morning I was only 23 (and six-sevenths).

Thankfully, I’m very confusing on most identifiable fronts: age, sex, race. For example, Quinn thought I was 19 when they first met me in 2024, whereas my current roommates assumed I was a cuspy 26-27 upon interviewing me; Every other day I get she’d or her’d or ma’am’d by a stranger, who is unwittingly clocking my tea. Truth is that any of these alternatives work. Why be anything but vastly interpretable?

If AI has been good for one thing, it’s the collective suspicion we’ve developed in response to any image that looks too smooth, too perfect, too ideal; Whether or not we employ that suspicion toward a greater disruption of our daily surfaces is another can of corn.

Re: those grad blues—it’s never too late to start from scratch. So many things we feel have escaped our wrangle remain entirely electable, like being a novelist or a go-go dancer. Yesterday I was unwise but brave; Today I am self-conscious but determined; Tomorrow I will be adept but adaptable. Forever I reform the rubric.

Basically, yeah, yeah basically, yeah, yeah, basically I am trying to drink my probiotic soda and feel invigorated by the weird, nearly-summer-nearly-not air. Alanis Morissette screams at the highest permissible decibel from my earbuds. One time my ex told me that playing good music at a low volume is like eating Pringles: just junk. Empty intake. He made it seem that passive consumption is carcinogenic/ a capital crime. Not to say I don’t adhere to this ethos, I do, but not because I agree—I just like to drown in a song until it becomes UNDENIABLY DIEGETIC. Flip the street into a movie scene; Slap my boots to the snare hits; Life becomes script-worthy; Oh lamb chop, I miss you with the depth of cinematic focus; Who’ll play our parts? On a good day, I’m a borderline JLaw sporting the perfect smokey eye, and you, Quinn, are an impossibly young Natasha Lyonne with an enviable perm and a falsetto like Joni.

Quin/ Quidem/ Quippe… Earth is a difficult, luscious wheel. Every block begs for a music video, a flock of importance. What am I even saying? That dramatization will redeem discontent?

Thousands of new sea creatures are discovered every year, but I think God hung his hat on the cuttlefish. Zebra skin, coral red, then pebble-skinned… All our ambitions, i.e., survival, hinge upon adaptability. It was in Paris that my ignorance was corrected, and I learned that it is not, in fact, the “cuddlefish.” Pas de cuddles du tout ! Every night in Paris I slept alone, except for the nights I didn’t and was consequently 50% less myself—those men didn’t even know my name. Turn off the lights, Andrew. Ne bouge pas, Andrew. Nightmares ensued. I was constantly violated in my sleep by my sleep, which meant I could trust nothing if not unconsciousness itself. Internal camouflage: I doubled 50 and rejigged my moral compass. Pebble-skinned, smoking solo, the block begging me for nothing at all, except maybe to step aside, desolé, we’re filming here.

Somehow, I made it three months abroad without a single tear. What a waste.

← RITUAL

The days go like this: wake up, scratch, figure out how to appease this whole body-thing (quinoa? less caffeine? HIIT YouTube tutorials?), vamp instead of writing, eventually crank out one solid sentence before work, work until sleep, then do things instead of sleep, i.e., dream of fried poultry and more time to write in the morrow. Morrow comes as morrows do, always a mere reiteration of the same core units. Wake, scratch, heal, vamp, work, injure, dream, wake—

I quit ritual like a music lesson.

(If my paragraphs were a chord progression, you wouldn’t be blamed for turning off the radio.)

(Don’t worry, we’re getting somewhere; I just need to cool down a bit.)

Closing shift, again, my eyes drooping like basset hound ears. To kill time, AKA make it merciful, I chomp up a copy of Vi Khi Nao’s recent word-object-thing My Ardent Love for the Pencil, which is utterly irreverent and self-abasing and delightful. I particularly love when she writes:

I vacillate between overworking myself and loneliness. Endless time to myself bathing in the soiled light of solitude. I wish that I had desired the same desires as my peers—but it seems I want the kind of pleasure that comes with time and posterity.

Lines like these emphasize less the aesthetic devices of poetic language than the humiliating, lugubrious instincts that draw a writer to the medium itself. Khi Nao ends up producing a book meant for no one except her enduring object of desire: her pencil. She eroticizes this device, imagines it fleshy and fuckable. I interpret this as a coping mechanism for the insular state that writing induces in the practitioner. Without the affirmation of an audience, the practitioner enters an intimate affair with her instruments, expecting them to return the favor of attention, for them to occupy her the way she employs them. If only! If only the experience of committing oneself to one’s art felt entirely reciprocal and fulfilling! How the institution of marriage would crumble at last! We don’t need girlfriends or husbands or secret third things! Why, we have the sweet, cajoling anthropomorphism juiced out of our abundantly imaginative thickets!

I can sense D.H. Lawrence turning in his grave. In his bizarre but affecting essay “Why the Novel Matters,” he approaches his own writing device from the opposite angle:

...as far as I am concerned, my pen isn’t alive at all. My pen isn’t me alive. Me alive ends at my finger-tips... And as for the sum of all knowledge, it can’t be anything more than an accumulation of all the things I know in the body, and you, dear reader, know in the body.

Lawrence later goes on to deride philosophers and parsons for all their bogus conjecture, their “tremulations in the ether” that attempt to capture abstractions such as “the soul” or “the promise of paradise” and make it all seem tangible to us, us being the humans alive. The novelist, on the other hand, concerns herself mainly with matters of life itself—the things which inform this thing we occupy and learn from and grow within. This body-thing. I don’t care too much to appraise the novelist as the end-all-be-all of life itself, because what about Alice Notely or June Jordan?, but I do appreciate the crux of Lawrence’s argument: that there is no definite law of good or bad to which humans alive abide, as some practitioners of language aim to establish. Because unlike the Word of the Lord, which insists that it “shall stand forever,” the human alive is positively fickle and irresolute, subject to indefinite change. Incongruous, electric, discordant, selfish, pleasure-driven, amenable, hopeful.

The human alive is alone in the observation of her life, and yet it is her life that makes her entirely available to the rest of the world. For it is with life that we breath and sigh on this wide, wilting meadow.

POETRY

Time was too big, just cornflower;
I jerked my limbs around to mill it.
Pretended the floors were sliding up,
Replacing the walls, falling against 
Furniture and doorknobs as a sort
Of physical amusement. "Slapstick."
Sedating restlessness with exhaustion
Worked only momentarily, a dog walked.
What I really wanted was twinship:
A man in a yellow hat to contextualize
My hyper primate. A fellow musician
With likewise no real melodic knowledge.
But no body sounded. Flowers grew beside
My bed, little blue tissues of used-up sex.
No one heard anything about me unless
I solicited their attention with hyperbole;
Images of me shirtless, banging about
The darker parts of the room. The edges.
Language wasn't an option available yet.
Only irregular, graceless movements, like
A spasming hand trying to deter flies
From landing on the body as if it were
Already long dead, lifeless as a pencil
Without its animator, the poet away
At summer camp enjoying youth too much
To pay mind to me. Burning bramble.
Reciting lyrics. Kissing unskilled braces. 
Standing up too fast in the light, falling
From the rush, seeing God and thinking,
You're just like the rest of us children.
Playing way too seriously and asking
Everyone for attention. But soon the poet
will be busy with everything but himself. 
Not even he will remember how he used 
To bend over like a rainbow, straining, 
Trying to impress an unpeopled room. 
All he'll recall are the blue flowers and
How striking they were in the otherwise
Meaningless meadow, left to wilt after
The developers gutted the reservoir.

EVERYDAY I WAKE UP AND IT GOES LIKE THIS.

I REACH FOR THE PRODUCTS THAT HELP ME START MY DAY. NOTHING CAN HAPPEN UNTIL I TOUCH THESE PRODUCTS.

my morning remote my morning radio my morning percolator my morning toilet seat my morning light switch my morning lightt

I SAMPLE A SNOWFLAKE FROM MY LOVER’S PILLOW TO OBSERVE THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF HIS DERMIC DREAMS. UNDER THE MICROSCOPE OF MY AFFECTION I SEE A CEMETERY OF GUMS AND SPONGES AND STABILIZERS.

my morning shower curtain my morning sealants my morning body lotion soap my morning face lotion with spf 60 my morning lip mask with spf 30 my morning mascara with spf 15 my morning nail polishh

THE SILICON WAFER IN MY MIRROR IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN SAPPHIRES OR OBVIOUSLY DIAMONDS. BECAUSE NOW WE CAN MAKE DIAMONDS IN THE AIR FRYER.

my morning water filter my morning aspirin my morning after pill my morning prenatal gummy my morning urn full of protein powder my morning ceramic finishh

EVERY FALSEHOOD IS FORGED FROM AN HONEST SENTIMENT: MISUNDERSTANDING. BUT IN THE MIST OF MISUNDERSTANDING LURKS A MALIGNANT INNOCENCE.

my morning toe sock my morning flip flop my morning shoe gluee

YESTERDAY HELD THE SHAPE OF A PRESSED PENNY FROM THE ZOO, OBLONG AND NON-FUNGIBLE; BEARING THE FACE OF A GIBBON OR BABOON OR ANOTHER MORE ENDANGERED IDEA. TODAY HOLDS THE COLORLESS GLOW OF PARAFFIN IN THE MINE. ADD 255 RED 204 GREEN 51 BLUE AND SCRIBBLE IN THE SUN.

my morning doormat my morning trash bags my morning button my morning tar I MEAN st. marks avenuee

EEVVEERRYYDDAAYY II WWAALLKK OOUUTT AANNDD IITT GGOOEESS LLIIKKEE TTHHIISS..

I REACH FOR THE PRODUCTS THAT HELP ME CONTINUE MY DAY. NOTHING CAN PROGRESS UNTIL I TOUCH THESE PRODUCTS.

my midday municipal services my midday metro I MEAN omny card my midday traffic light my midday bumper to midday bumperrr

THE SILICON WAFER IN MY MIRROR IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN SAPPHIRES OR OBVIOUSLY DIAMONDS. BECAUSE NOW WE CAN MAKE DIAMONDS IN THE AIR FRYER.

my midday headphones my midday sunglasses my midday reapplication of my morning lip balm with spf 15 my midday buttonnn

THE CEILING TASTES LIKE ASBESTOS BUT THE FALLOUT BUNKER SMELLS LIKE LAVENDER FIELDS. THERE ARE FOUR DRYERS IN THE FALLOUT SHELTER AND THIRTY SIX UNITS IN THE BUILDING. THAT IS O.11111111 DRYER PER HOUSEHOLD. EVERY NINE DAYS WE GET 1 DRYER.

my midday tennis court my midday switch into my midday tennis shoes my midday tennis racket my midday tennis ball my midday water bottle my midday single serving of nuts my midday tennis racket my midday tennis ballll

SUDDENLY THE DREAM COMES BACK TO ME. LAST NIGHT I DREAMT I COULD TRUST MY FATHER. HIS TRUST HELD THE SHAPE OF A PRIZE-WINNING ORCHID, A [PHRAGMIPEDIUM FRITZ SCHOMBURG]. THEN HE DIED. TODAY HOLDS THE COLORLESS GLOW OF PARAFFIN IN THE MIND. ADD 255 RED 153 GREEN 51 BLUE AND PULL OUT THE CARROT.

my midday AW FUCK my midday band aid box my midday absence of band aids in the band aid box my midday debit card my midday atm my midday transaction receipt my midday AW FUCK my midday tissue boxxx

[…]

I owe you many things, primarily a postcard. Actually you said you’d send me one first—that was over a month ago. We’ve both moved out of our Bushwick apartment and started new jobs since April, that cruelest month. So consider this postage bait.

Consider this a prompt for a blog I’ve been neglecting (which I just realized has the same initials as you). Will you forgive me for writing to you and to everyone who happens to find this post online? You must. There’s money at stake, like $30 a month. That’s my entry to Nowadays if Acacia’s not working the door. Don’t you want me to dance? Like how we used to, at the very front, gripping the booth and whipping our heads to the ghettotech. We excelled at such obvious relinquishing.

You know, I think Liz Phair had a lot of brilliant things to say. Like when she said:

It’s nice to be liked, but it’s better by far to get paid / I know that most of the friends that I have don’t really see it that way / But if you could give ‘em each one wish, how much do you want to bet? / They’d wish success for themselves and their friends / And that would include lots of money1

Do you agree? Do we strive for the same status we detest when possessed by other people? I think the song’s lyrical perfection, despite halfway disagreeing. I mean. I want you to like me enough to waste your time paying attention to me. (I address a panoply of Yous.)2 I also want to afford the material conditions of a life I haven’t yet earned, despite acting like it with my sugar cookie-painted walls (blame my Californication).

But of course you and I have also developed a sincere and necessary bourgeoisphobia, seeing how it is to be a working artist in New York in 2026. We work more than we write. We eat with our eyes. We avoid homogenization like the plague. We are wary of the “gentrified mind”3 and the common voice of apathy in contemporary literature. We are regrettably contributors to local economical disparity, and even still, rent rises way overhead. We do our best to organize and redistribute resources. We stay pissed and concerned. We try not to lock ourselves away to produce our art. We try to produce in the current of meaning that is other people. We try to take risks. You are a master at risk. I am still learning and leaning on a moral code that affords space for contradiction, curiosity, and change.

After all, this is what Young Writerhood entails: stroking a half-formed, hyperbolic consciousness toward a more structured sense of self. Oldies say we can get away with this while we’re young/ wide-eyed/ opinionated/ ambitious because we haven’t faced enough compromise and rejection to impede our dreaming. That’s probably true, I guess we won’t know until. Until? Until you can look us up by our ISBNs.

In an ideal world we’re free from technology and the audiences they allow us to cultivate. Without the appeal of monetization, we’d compile our epistles purely for our own entertainment/enrichment (the two growing increasingly antipodal every day). But in this world we are paranoid attention whores with eager vocabularies. We can’t stop looking around us as we write about ourselves and whatever aspects of the world happen to trickle in.

Did you hear about the 1600 ft. tsunami in Alaska last year? Epstein’s supposed suicide note? Did you see what Hudson Williams wore to the Met Gala? Horrendous. These are things we wouldn’t’ve talked about even if we were looking at the same newsfeed at the same time. No. We would’ve read silently in our separate rooms, sighing, with different angles of the daylight coming in from our opposing windows: yours facing the catastrophe of Stockholm Street, its crackheads and jacked hydrants, mine the decrepit sanctuary of our backyard. We only saw it in full bloom once, this time last year.

Spring in the city has never felt more delayed and thus, more deserved. Unfortunately, my new bedroom window in Crown Heights faces an inner courtyard, offering no indication of environmental change except for the quality of sunlight, the brief sliver that appears in the morning, be it bright or torpid or nonexistent. But sometimes I get a clue that the warm season is coming for real. The other night, Eden and I woke up to vivid birdsong. So clear, it sounded as if the birds were flitting in and out of my room, scoring our dreams with their whistles. 𝄞 sweet sweet sweet I’m so sweet 𝄞 Some birders I met in Prospect Park told me that they expect peak migration for the warblers this weekend. New York City sits in the center of the Atlantic Flyway (one of four major migratory corridors in North America), making it a particularly appealing spot for spectating the species’ passage. This is to say I am saving up for a pair of binoculars. One day I will write to you only in description of the birds I’ve seen, and you will care only because I’ve addressed the note to you, which will stand in for the real thing: our immediate presence.

Dear C. I recently took a writing workshop that dedicated one session to the epistolary form, which validates itself as a literary device via A) a direct/expressed audience and B) the implicit goal of delivery, even if it never reaches its intended recipient. Think about how much of our writing doesn’t start with a reader in mind. Sometimes this work feels like drawing arrows toward the sky. The sky being paper. The words being openings, if we manage to strike flesh.

I have something to confess. When you moved out, you left behind a lot of things—now these things belong to me. T-shirts, Baggu totes, hardly used notebooks. I have metabolized all your remnants into my new daily rhythms. I go to work in your acid-washed Dead Kennedys shirt. I bring your lipstick-stained Rhodia notepad to the park and work on that novel draft we promised each other a year from April. The novel currently resembles nothing but observations of human activity as it occurs directly within my field of vision, which deteriorates every time I try to read a damn street sign. Ultimately, I hope, the novel will be about friendship. Language-based friendships, their exuberance. Something we can identify with.

Who have you seen in LA? Jack Skelley? Michelle Tea? Maybe this is vapid/unflattering, but I often wonder if the most renown we’ll ever achieve will only come from the few famous people we happen to know, as if their success could shed onto us and absolve us of banality or averageness. My best friends in childhood had famous parents, and that’s just the truth. Supermodel moms. Director dads. None of us chose where we were born. It just so happens that Southern California raised us in proximity to unfathomable heights of wealth and cultural capital, and that everything we do therefore stretches and yawns under the ever-refreshing shade of success’ potentiality. I say shade but what I really mean is cyanide capsule. Ironically, though, we thought we needed to escape California to claim our thrones. Writerhood required New York, i.e. real weather and polyglossia.

Well, now you’re back in Los Angeles with all its scorched earth, philosophizing and reselling first editions scavenged from Santa Monica thrift stores. And I’m still here in Brooklyn, working your old job and looking for reasons to think deeper, I mean looking for reasons to write, I mean reasons to summon you, however publicly. Please forgive me. And don’t forget to reply.

xo, A

PS—

Today, a different day from which I started this “letter,” I woke up regretting a lie I told myself: We struggle for everything that means anything, aka life itself. Today I’m revising. Sometimes we wade halfway into the ocean and feel it better to return to our towels. Other times we submerge our heads and let the cold compress the breath out of us, which contradictorily revitalizes some sense of life back into our bodies. Maybe this has to do with what you told me about Lacan, how he frequently contradicts himself in Écrits (which you pronounced “eh-crits”) because psychoanalysis is an unstable tool in the way that all acts of interpretation are rooted in subjectivity, or whatever. “I did not write Écrits in order for people to understand them, I wrote them in order for people to read them. Which is not even remotely the same thing.”4 In the chasm between a text’s reception and the reader’s comprehension of it laps an optional ocean. What compels us to the water is not the strain of enduring its frigidity but the thrill of our involvement with a visceral element. With risk and beauty.

One could blame the interruptions caused by excuses suggested by un-factorable states of upheaval.

Sometimes a lease ends and you have to move. Sometimes you don’t know where you’re moving to until 5 days before the lease ends. Sometimes time dilates like crazy. Sometimes you think it will take you four hours to paint your new room and it ends up taking 12 before you stop, unfinished. Because sometimes you forget birthdays and have to make a few calls. Sometimes you forget bills and your bike in the basement of a building you no longer live in. Then sometimes you need to buy more paint. Sometimes you start a new job and forget to quit your other job. But sometimes the other job gives you free food, so you decide to keep it a little longer. Sometimes now you work six days a week. Sometimes you get home at midnight and fall asleep reading a book about youth, gender, and friendship instead of working on your own. Sometimes you forget you were writing one to begin with—a book about all this that you are supposedly doing. Sometimes you forget you moved here to supposedly do this thing you are now forgetting to do.

Remember: you were once in love with an idea of reality (a poorly informed one). You projected this idea of reality onto everyday surfaces, mundane and/or cruel, just as the idea projected onto your own shape and its taking form. A projection is a translation of light—an ungraspable vision. But remember: your love for this idea had a body to it. Nothing so powerful and convincing could be senseless. This idea was a projection of nerves. An electrical storm encased in a ripe organ.

I have made a promise to myself to finish some projects and to keep them from premature light before they resemble something breathing, autonomous—right now the work is needy and dependent. This is to say that absences may abound. Thankfully, most absences are simply the silent other side of attention being drawn elsewhere. So, imagine me not sleeping nor dead but surging in an immediate remoteness elsewhere.

I have a friend who I believe is in French Polynesia sailing beside dolphins. Other friends in Spain, touching Lorca’s bronze pant legs. A father on an island. A mother in the desert. They are all both immediate and remote to parts of the same world—the one I know and the one I can grasp before me.

What did Jack Spicer write to Lorca? Right: A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. Immediacy veers toward its own pruning, and so it must not be captured—rather, carried. Carried against the clocks and odds of defacement. This challenge—the conveying of a crude yet sacred immediacy—is my lesson and my practice. My calisthenics. My zazen.

I don’t mean to be cryptic. I only wish to say hello and, for now, au revoir.

[New poetry shows us god: how things are.]

—Richard Hell, Godlike

Arley was rejected from Berghain three times during his/her three-day visit for the following reasons (in consecutive order):

1. Looking a little too young & precious with his/her tiny little girl friend, their little leather jackets lined with little Berliner Luft shooters

2. Cutting the line with a South African online gambling mogul who told the bouncer he/she was “American and won’t be able to answer any of your stupid questions”

3. Wearing orange corduroy pants, I can only presume

To survive the unholy ego slaughter of this tripartite rejection, Arley internalized the experience as an edification of a greater gestalt at work—that one can arrange themself in myriad outfits with miscellaneous company and the same result will yield: NEIN. Disallowance is an aggregate system dependent upon multiple parties, compounding variables, and various vibes at play. Understanding this, Arley was able to walk away from the gates of the club (thricely) and knap his/her embarrassment into something of a tool. Indeed, Arley returned from Berlin with a fortified spirit, prepared for the world of negation seeded for him/her ahead: New York City.

And here we are. A year(+) later and I’m about to be apartmentless again. The situation is so dire I applied for a room in a seven-person LGBTQ(+)/BIPOC housing co-op in Bed-Stuy; The situation is so dire I INTERVIEWED for the room in the seven-person LGBTQ(+)/BIPOC housing co-op, told myself it would solve everything, and then got REJECTED. Kindly enough, but still.

That’s the funny thing: the blows have been soft just as they’ve been hard. (Is god a girl with a BB gun?) I’m trying to chalk up my funky karma of current to something of a luck deficiency. I don’t actually know if it’s helpful to credit luck for one’s station in life—if you got a pot of it one week and nil the next—but it’s sure what people like to suggest. Of course, luck is culturally relative. Western society considers Friday the 13th unlucky because it reminds the god-fearing of Jesus’ crucification, just March 15th rings of Julius Caesar’s assassination. But at the end of the day, dates are just numbers, and numbers are just stretchy symbols, and symbols are just placebos prescribed for made up illnesses, i.e., misfortune.

In the passage between these days I am floundering and going unnoticed, thank god. Because it’s not really about me—it’s about the legends dying on either side of my superstitions, like a black cat’s ears; Betwixt them I am a mere walnut betraying synaptic delivery. I am but a foreigner in orange pants looking to party and getting turned away with all my exuberance. That is all, that is all.

***

Resentment #4

Invoice my infamous diction. I expect
Trillions for this, for my shirt’s steam! yes,
Ship my teas west—oh, do it for me.

Notice, please, my elite erudition. now
Offer me the interview, the position,
The raise. praise me with tenure—oh, do it for me.

You
Outta
Understand…

Intervene in my conflicts, such seas of confusion.
Trouble me your times, attentions, your post scripts.
Ship my wheat east—oh, do it for me.

Theologize to clear the tempests ahead;
Hear yourself from my ears,
Err on my side, my life—oh, do it for me?

Motivate me to dare for the umpteenth time,
Apply and rehearse and pursue it. then
Return the shirt once it’s crickets for me.
Know the stakes are high for me, oh.
Eat my steam, my teas and wheats, 
Tell me, I’m more than this—

[please, do it for me.]

Sometimes a story resurfaces in separate conversations over a series of nights like an insistent and irrepressible cough. The initial telling meanders, eager yet unmetered—it’s the first pancake. Then another go, different crowd, different lager, and the points start to land their fall. It gets addicting, spinning the tale with amendments and addendums, perfecting their poise for the audience. What are the stories getting caught in my throat? Which experiential mucus?

Of course, narrative repetition risks a certain ick. Do you (/I) really want to be know as the writer who only writes New York City struggle porn or autofictional travelogues? NEIN. In everything I aim to reject predictability, which I guess first requires earning “predictability” as a preliminary artistic status. It’s like what they say about the wheel and knowing it. I read my work from yesterday and think, thank goodness I’m smarter now that that’s done! But it’s not like that. A glass of wine can make me feel smarter in an hour, when all it really does is elongate me from myself and my output, the causality of my words. Perhaps I’m not as far past the preliminary as I perceive myself to be. Predictable girl, you’ve done it again.

So the screen turns into a Kleenex for all this bygone gunk of yonder times, when achieving “creative ingenuity” wasn’t even a wheel-shaped glimmer in my eye.

***

Resentment #5

Even the cave painters could tell you—
X-ray vision prefigures a
Paucity of self-knowledge.
In all
Actuality, 
The world has always been this:
Embarrassment and

Maybe
Eros

[if we’re lucky.]

I apologize for all these unfinished crumb trails—the kiddies are long lost. The only real context I can provide for you is an image of a misty locale, a Brassaï landscape: winter-whipped trees, shivering shoulders, a crestfallen spector. I am clobbering across wet cobblestone on Hooster, listening to Penny Arcade’s life advice echo in my head:

YOU THINK THE SHIP HAS SAILED AND YOU HATE YOURSELF FOR GETTING OLDER. WELL, NO. YOU ARE ALWAYS YOUNGER THAN YOU IMAGINE. YOU ARE NOT NEARLY AS DEAD AS I AM. ANYWAY, YOUTH IS AS FLEXIBLE AS YOU PERMIT IT TO BE, SO BE FLEXIBLE AND BRAVE WITH IT! THE SHIP HASN’T SAILED—IT DOESN’T EVEN KNOW WHICH DIRECTION TO GO. THAT PART IS UP TO YOU AT THIS VERY MOMENT.

Or some gist like this. Penny was loud and commanding at the reading. She got every 35 year-old with a Anne Waldman chapbook in their lap to shut up and lock in. I was younger but not far from needing her words. I was grateful to be rapt in her presence, which impressed my mind as simultaneously ephemeral, as any lived experience is, and concrete, as any indelible memory becomes.

***

This morning, which is “now,” started with a sunbeam in my eye. This was foreign/welcomed. My room too took on the incubated feel of a greenhouse, and I the awaken beauty of a Singapore orchid. A wonderful, gay feeling.

This is not to speak of the first thought that came in my head as I rolled out of dreaming: I am frustrated with Life. Everything is a ball with a backspin aimed at my face. Everything is a bubble trying to float through a metal gate. A sucrose sprinkle dropped onto an open fire.

But then I acquiesced to an evident inevitability—that the day is destined to be effulgent. Yes, I decided (am deciding) that today will in fact be a day in which Life insists upon the good things we’ve earned after a difficult season, such as somniferous heat, soft serve, silver linings; The trite & the true act of sitting on a park with a creased spine, sipping up language more slowly, because it’s a pleasure to be still with some skin in the air.

***

Resentment #6

Arley reads one book and bases every sentence thereafter off it.

Perhaps that's the key to epiphanies:
Opening holes where x [obsession] marks the spot. 
Ethan and carmen facetime with news about portland, where
Maxie blogs about ultrasounds and needles. x, they all say. x.

Instinctually we have been striking rocks against rocks
Since forever ago, before ships and our schemes of conquest. 

Grieving adolescence before it's 
Over makes you a damn fool,
Delaney said behind the counter at cobblestones.
Listening to her, the subway singers, roommates fuck,
It's crucial to not estrange the heart from the
Knowledge awaiting youth's crude tools:
Earnestness, eagerness, exuberance.

[And so arley picks up a new book, 
rushing for a scapula to start digging...]

Month. Of the petal flesh. Cracking around the mouth & over the joints. To be drier than ever. Patches of my hand resemble my grandfather’s, which emanated the ache knotted in his knuckles. Funny how we get gnarled with time; funny how winter gives us an early glimpse at this.

I like these cold spurts for the resoluteness they fix us in. Heads down—I find it easier to work like I have been working (bone-ward) when the backdoor for all leisure remains frozen shut. Sometimes I place a small window of a burning fireplace in the corner of my computer screen when I work from home. It’s a pathetic effort, but other comforts cost a shitload of money, i.e. gas heating, bathhouses, a second coffee, good gloves. The YouTube Yule log is always free.

And so is this labor.

Epiphany #101: After a certain number of job rejections (let’s say, three dozen) you come to understand that the only way you can get your foot in its desired door is either by doing unpaid work for someone you don’t know or by getting a gig through your boyfriend—I went for both. Now I’m a publicist for two literary journals! God, it’s all so straightforward once you let go of chasing a living wage and other such frivolities. Being twenty-three is awesome and very much freedom.

Other than freedom, I’m sure I don’t have much to write about. Whereas America reams protests across its latitudes, my immediate sidewalk resembles a museum. A disgusting, indifferent museum. All the snow aggregated to an urban glacier, frozen in its place along with the coffee dregs and dog shit and piss tossed onto it. Eden said it will stay like this until March, and as of this morning, February 2nd, it looks like Punxsutawney agrees.

Groundhog Day, in its contemporary observation, emerged from the Christian holiday of Candlemas, or the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ, which originates from the Old Testament rule of purifying a virgin with a holocaust on the 33rd day after a boy’s circumcision, or some whacky crap like that. More pressingly, Candlemas is when God demands we take down any remaining signs of the holidays: the manger scenes, the festoons, tinsel garlands, tricolor twinkle lights. Epiphanytide is over—it’s time to lock back in.

Supposedly, the Great Lock In commenced on September 1st, 2025, signaling an indefinite period of sustained focus on accomplishing Your Goals and Achieving Success. I liked the idea of this initially; I lacked gainful employment, waisted all my free time on Bushwick Hinge, and spent too much money on door cover for clubs that bored me once I got in. Because, like my father, I am a workhorse, and I’m weak for any vernacular that validates the imperative to always be chopping away at something.

It’s a Flaubertian moralization to equivocate hard work with goodness, and laziness/indirection with abjection, re: Mme. Bovary slurping her arsenic. But what romantic hasn’t been at some point in their life a girl unmoored? Si « L’homme n’est rien, l’ouvre — tout »1, alors qu’en est-il de la femme sans travail ?

Unlike my father, I am a writer who is at least half a woman. That is to say, a batty sinner to many.

I now appreciate The G.I. of 2025 as little more than an internet trend responsible for a trivial aesthetic of displaying one’s capitulation to grind culture while stoking the compulsively comparative mindset as instated by the attention economy. Like, what the fuck do you mean “I woke up at 4 AM so I could fit in a sculpt class before reporting to my marketing job at PepsiCo, which affords me the ability to pursue your dreams of trying every new cinnamon roll in the city”? Famously every cinnamon roll in New York costs at least $8, and yesterday I made $6 in cash tips, which you already know I will lavish on tomorrow’s tab.

Epiphany #1: When you’re looking for signs to affirm an unsound plan, everything touches everything. And so the city turned itself out for me as the war overseas announced its end. Supposedly. Supposedly I knew what I was doing—in the name of love, I rest my case.

I remember objects on the sidewalk looking like dusty display case cakes under a hardened patina of white sleet—benches, beer bottles, prostrated bodies. How Union Square smelled like a Nordic forest from the discarded Christmas trees being fed into a wood chipper. The green debris flung at my boots. I was crying. Lynch was gone.

But I was strangely present, and entirely by a force of will. Responsible for nothing but stoking a small flame, which I referred to as “literature.” What space there was to fill found its occupancy in books. The first book I bought in the city was a used paperback New Directions Press edition of Confessions of a Mask from Unnameable. As I started to read, half the pages loosened from their deteriorating binding adhesive and fell on my lap—I taped them on the wall right above the futon I was living on, next to a windowsill with a pot of dying spray roses and a view of other tenant’s shut blinds. And so a brief haven was made.

Since childhood, this is how I have learned to stabilize myself when defamiliarized by circumstance: by amassing a private sanctuary from the materials at hand, no matter how minor or happenstance. When I was a teenager, my dad separated from my mother and moved constantly for two years. He rented rooms from retired widows and ADUs from young, optimistic couples. The nights I stayed with him on weekends were often spent in the same bed—there was no other furniture. This intensely intimate arrangement reduced my sense of spatial presence to whatever could fit on the nightstand beside me. A mug. A book. A rock.

And now, a year since moving to the city, I have a bed and a bookshelf of my own. Cold and leaky, but no sore sight for a starter apartment. We, my roommates and I, have done our best to make it a space for others as well. We have hosted readings, concerts, organizing meetings, potlucks, holidays, and birthdays. We have brought people over to make zines and to decorate cakes and to grill unmentionable meats. We have, at least once, all had boys in our beds and have woken up to at least two of them talking in the kitchen in the morning. We have put on makeup in the living room for other house parties. We have put Christmas lights around the living room for a party we hosted ourselves in early December. Perhaps Epiphany season is over, but we still haven’t taken down the decorations.

— John Ashbery

A saeculum may be defined by the approximate
lifespan of an individual or an entire population.
History (narrative) compiles its saecula in a line, 
like rocks ordered on a windowsill. Arbitrarily.  
Successiveness is an invention. The Etruscans
were given ten saecula by their god to outline
the duration of their civilization. In the sense
that we have invented gods and units of time,
we have been effective diviners of our demise:
Pleistocene to Pyrocene; crustacean to cyborg. 
I always want to be right in thinking hopefully. I
often am forced to think twice and correct myself.
I write onto this screen like a chalkboard, punitive
scrawls to drill down the same refrain: I will abstain 
from abstaining. I will abstain from abstaining. I will
abstain from abstaining. Time corrects me everyday,
offers an alternative view to idealism. For Good, 
for Pretti. Is there anything else but this moment 
and our response to it. Is there anything but silence
and the sound we make out of it. Is there anything
but an effort to make a place for ourselves among
others and their dreaming. Is there. The sound of
the end times is snowfall to a girl from California.   
It snows on Sundays because that’s how god wants 
to wake up to the city after his work week—a blank 
sheet. He sifts his sugar over potholes and barricades 
and bodies prostrated on the sidewalks to make them  
go away. Snow over sites of remembrance to snuff out 
the votives. I am not dreaming this suffocation. I want 
to walk this white earth, if only to salt it to melt. So I
cancel my dancing plans in anticipation of the freeze-
over. The club I like inhabits the underground of an  
old glass-cum-door-making factory, but aesthetically
it resembles a slaughterhouse. It is a sinister place 
to disinter the need for movement and touch. Still,
I always want to go. I always want to be reckless with 
myself if I can rhapsodize the experience. I always want 
my shoulders to touch others’. I always want to share 
a propulsive feeling with a population. I always want 
to feel like we are united by something as specific as time 
and space. I always want the time and space we share 
to stand for elation and expression, not death, but 
today and yesterday and every year it has been this. War. 
I always want to aggrandize my life, but often the state 
jumps ahead of the bit and demeans another's existence, 
and then another, and then another. In the end times, 
I want to decry the brutality that blankets us, just as I want  
to rhapsodize the kickback. I always want this to be louder. 
I want to be a poet for this saeculum, which is say, I want to 
describe what is on fire. How every sound results from an act. 
A taste of static chemical feeling. Filling. We must cut through 
the fluff and meet somewhere above the sugar works. We must 
abstain from abstaining. We must try to make each other look
so as to not disappear. Gas. Paper. Sweetener. Snow. Ice. If
we have devised gods, we can decide to abate the freeze-over. 
The saeculum ends with a blank sheet, and it is snowing. It is 
Sunday, January 25th, and I have decided to write a poem. 

before Wallace Stevens

-1 
The day earns its word 
Not in the morning, nor at night,
But midday, when it is most vast: 


0
Among twenty snowy pavements,
The only still thing
Is the you of the background:


1
You are of two minds,
Like a pavement
In which there are two directions:


2
The pavement winces in winter festoons.
It is a pantomime, it is a seance:


3
A man and a man
Are two.
A man and a man and a background
Are two:


4
True romance
Desiccated 
And
Spat down
(Flatbush 
Sidewalk);
You are driving
Me into a raven's
Underside. I am
Watching nothing 
Fall upon 
Nothing until we 
Uncover ourselves 
Rawly to bear
A snowball 
World:


5
We watch nothing fall 
Upon nothing until land
Forms from blank flecks:                                  fate


6
The shadow of the background
Crosses the foreground in a whip
Stitch. You are the penumbra. 
I am felt 
Folded at peripheries:


7
O slim fingers of the æther,
Why do you theorize focal points?
Do you not see how the background
Runs under the feet
Of the hibernating about you?
      
        Packing peanuts, grandpa’s
        Dandruff from heaven,
        Broken wedding
        Cookies, innocuous 
        Spores, small, 
        Ghoulish peonies:


8
I know [nothing.]

But the words
Affronted

They traipse in a circular rhythm 
Down to the curb

Like snow tracks 
Pressed by a blackbird across the asphalt 
Dumb and
Revealing:


9
The word lodges itself
Into the waking bergschrund
As a day earns its definition
By placing itself against all others.

The seam
The cusp
The edge
Of one of many circles.

I
Write 
Only 
To 
Know
How
Things
Will 
Start.
I
Read
Only
To
Know
How
Things
Will
End:


10
It was evening all afternoon. [...]

In films of fallout,
Sky vignettes start to close and
Misremember days. 

Misremembered days 
Accumulate and weigh down
The bough above:                                  fate.

Memory bends fate,
Arcs dark horizons, weighs
An indication.

An indication 
Of warmth in excess elsewhere,
The day lost backward.

The day lurches forth 
With a froth in its gullet.
A vast caesura:


P.S.
It was snowing,
And it was going to snow. [...]

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Is it not fun to feel many other ways?1

Before we knew about any fire, mama and I worried that the Santa Anas would rip off our own roofs. I was sleeping in the ADU next to mama’s cottage on a XL twin-sized bed beside the washer and dryer and a shrine she had made of citrine, bundled sage, and a moss-scented candle. I prayed the Ojai rosary; I popped an indica Camino. The wind blew so forcefully I could feel the pressure resonate through the bedside window and onto my shivering, scarred face. It was the new year. My hair was long and unkept toward an unresolvable greasiness. Photographs of me returned portraits of a girl who didn’t know how to groom herself, and the right songs let me inhabit that vision. The clock blinked “00:03,” four digits to say I could stream the new Ethel Cain album.

I was getting closer to the stone of it all. The world creaked hard as if it was a poorly fabricated chair ready to come apart. I could hear the girl singing to me now. Droning drowned the dark room. Fear really presented itself to me—too alone under the thin corrugated metal roof, too permeable in my high, too responsive to the slightest pickup and quiver. Then muted plods of steel guitar sedated my nerves. I grew calm, caught up in the story: a catatonic narrator sizing the risk of her addiction against the potential of true love, Amber, who waves from a field of distance, dejection.

(I don’t know how to groom myself, but I know where the chainlink unravels to a hole big enough to crawl through. On one side there is a home and on the other is something I haven’t felt yet—in between these states is a harsh scrape.)

The wind wouldn’t let up, beating around me until I got too overwhelmed by the awareness that I am in fact always utterly crushable. I thought I had grown up, but decided to retreat when the weather came down to it. Got into mama’s bed. Fell asleep. When we woke up, it was like a reenactment of childhood. And then we braced ourselves for the drive to the airport down the 101 that extended southbound into a rising wave of smoke, backlit by flames and hued in amber.

“Girl Feels Good”

When a girl feels good, it makes the world go ‘round...2

Like an inverse Liz Phair splashed in sleazy city art pop, FKA twigs fucked so we could run. Watery synths launch into a strut, low tempered bass bubbling just below the frenetic crash of high hats—it’s Eusexua in the City. I felt the city first in my femurs and the ligaments around it. Midtown walking to downtown life, going miles in temperatures I hadn’t before endured. Sub 30. Sub 20. Single digits. I layered sleeves and pant legs until my joints became inarticulate. But it was all novelty and news to me: the sirens screaming jackhammer car alarms buzzers tossing language into the space between a(utono/nony)mous bodies. Sparked by endless possible objects of desire, I figured I was in love again. On Valentine’s day I interviewed for a job at a restaurant and spent the rest of the day drinking rare reds with the providers of my good fortune in the city. All dichotomies were lost on me—the revel was in the surreality of my circumstance. The tug-n-pull of cause-n-effect made me think of the pumpjacks I used to pass on the Ventura highway: an extractive device engineered with determination to exhaust a valuable resource. But instead of tapping an oil well I tapped other high-cost substances. Anything to make the body what it really wants to be: good feeling. Spit or line or glass or whathaveyou—it was all delicious, and, for once in my little townie life, within snatching distance. So I snatched at the sense of a good score. When the girl feels good, she cages her disconcertion. Tundras nihil refert. Love, the sucking up of it, comes richly before depletion. It makes the world go ‘round.

“Full On”

I saw every quarterback crying…3

West Hollywood, Winter, 1976. The American actor Sal Mineo had just pulled into the carport below his apartment when a pizza delivery man stabbed him in the heart. He died there, alone, prostrated under his own home. A decade earlier he laid naked before the American painter Harold Stevenson, who used Mineo as a model for his masterpiece The New Adam. The painting, which sprawls across nine linen panels measuring at 40-feet in length, pays tribute to Stevenson’s lover, Lord Timothy Willoughby, and torques the canonical depiction of Adam with his finger pointing toward his naval rather than the reach of God. The palette of Adam/Willoughby/Mineo’s skin is peaty and burnish, texturized by clusters of body hair, reminiscent of sagebrush spotting a desert hill.

When I first saw the painting, I obviously first thought of that actor whose death I’d read about years ago, then of my own lover, then of the desert. What bodies, their beauty in its barest state, untamed toward a secluded tenderness we’ll do anything to protect.

Three bodies in one: the lover (the immortalized), the actor (the mortal), and the land according to the artist (the creation of God). Three bodies overlaid in a crossfade between their perceived virility and their private vulnerability. Examining the crossfade of manhood from virility to vulnerability and back again is the lyrical and logical point of Perfume Genius’s music, which is why I am devoted to it. PG frontman Mike Hadreas can make sops out of dry-land soldiers—or, in the case of “Full On,” crybabies of quarterbacks. I saw him go / Straight to the ground / I’m running full on / To lay my hand on his back. Hadreas, like Stevenson, portrays the sensuous juxtaposition of men in soft repose with the boldness of Gigantism, each strum of his zither-ish guitar reverberating like a ginormous bell—a toll for the funeral procession, for the end of football season, for the hour before sleep when we finally get to tuck our limbs and hands into the protection of a lover’s approach.

“Bookends”

I’m still wondering where Riley went…4

First I lost my man, and then I lost my mind. First I lost Riley, the musician. He let himself go. I wrote about him leaving, but only once he was surely wordless. I gave him more life in this way. I gave him my mind in quantities I could not offer when we were together. And in giving him my mind and more life I let that of myself go, in phrased doses. I gave my life away in this way. I give myself away right here, bloodletting by the sentence. I am expelling life, I am giving more of it. But you don’t care about these sentences unless they mean something to you, and how am I to guarantee that at all? You would care if you had loved Riley. If you had lived through his letting himself go away from you. Yes, this would only mean something to you if had something to lose. If you lost your man you would lose yourself in trying to give him back more life. I have lost Riley among other men. A haystack of bones could not illustrate the loss. Only the garble of a eulogizing harmonica, the croon of a soul singer, the limits of sound reachable only when played out from the mania of loss. Only the limit of sounds could bring him back, Riley, the Crossbreaker. Limits exist to be met and lost to. And so he let himself go away from me. And so I am left losing myself in phrased doses trying to figure out where he went, and trying to get you to care. You will listen to a story only if it resonates with you, not if it leaves you more uncertain about what you have left to give and lose. You will read this only if I have something to give you—and if I do, it’s already too late for you to know.

Postscript (for E.)

I. “Carousel”

You find solace in the horror…5

You met me at a very infinite time in my life. You met me in a time in which I decided writing is everything, so of course you were selling me a book. When we first met, in this very infinite time. There was a table’s worth of space between us; the table was covered in books. We met a book festival. I picked up the only book I recognized, a really fucked-up novel about a homeless vampire junky with drug-induced ESP. I like these kind of things, incomprehensible and grotesque. And in my memory you said it was good, and the last copy, so it was meant to be. The causality of your interjection was infinite: I rose to your eyes—mine surely still smudged and creaturely from last night’s clubs—and was made to face their emotion. Sad, but full of sympathy, whereas mine typically appear happy and judgmental. 顔映し: I saw your face, time pitched, we found each other a month later, a different table’s worth of space between us, the table was covered in drinks and our hands balling, wringing, inching closer to the magnets embedded in our fingertips.

II. “Play”

Right now, I feel that I am found…6

On a second or third date, you told me about a game you and your friend used to play in college. The game was played by naming an object and deciding whether or not it is a container. A bathtub is a container, a sock too. An apartment contains people. A banana contains itself. The game ends at the arrival of an object that is decided, after thorough deliberation, not to be a container: a chain, a button, a flame, a nail... After a while I got fatigued, listing all the things around me and how they are defined by that which fills them. So I made us stop. And in not speaking, we were able to maneuver the other questions lingering between us, those concerning form and content.

Surfaces are mostly not-containers, even if they “contain” information and imagery, because to display is not to hold; the only exception is skin, which involves everything.

III. “Across My Jaw”

I should have seen it coming, the change came on so sudden…7

Now the loop of the year is close to closing. Drew myself out of bed to receive Novocain straight to the jaw. Lips went defunct, fuzzy when I rubbed them. Christmas music played from the waiting room like a Pavlovian response to flipping the calendar for the last time. Or mass psychosis. I started laughing when a particularly terrible Cher song came on, my tongue wiggling around the innumerable fingers sawing away at the hardware in my mouth. The dentist told me last visit that I had four cavities, but apparently he miscounted—I had seven; he filled three. Left with a referral for an oral surgeon so I can fix my kisser once and for all.

That difficult, industrious, crass, capacious, repugnant, original container. I try to use it for the right things, the right speech and perfect pitch. But the song comes out of me inaccurately. I get creaky when addressing an audience: You. But now that you’re here and certain to stay, at least for a little while longer, I will try to get my act together.

I will control my mouth, 
I will control my mouth. 
Just in time for the merriment. 

The mouth speaks for our first and final
container; I bring my ear to your aperture
and hear its hollow whirling, warm acoustics 
specific to a shore you have never actually swam in, 
fretting too much the needle-cold
curve at your ankles, turning feet blue, and you
inarticulate, frozen by this risk. 

What happens when we listen 
past words, toward 
an intuition resisted 
on a common day. 

I 
insist.

The shell
sits between our thoughts
shaped by separate bodies of water.
I will not label our distinctions, they speak
for us. On second thought, you are
a pond. You ripple
at the smallest introduction. One drop of 
a precipitated likeness extends across your entirety. 
Your mouth takes information from minerals,
hankers for salt. You can guess the body I hope
to fill for you as, with all 
the necessary salinity 
and largesse. 

We won’t be able to sing this one,
the lyrics of a deep acoustic beneath
the opening we bring ourselves to.

It’s never 
a common day.

Fuck!! We started a reading series in New York…

July. In a somewhat last minute effort, we decided to put the chairs from our living room out in the backyard. Bought soft cheeses and a cheap rack. The night before, C collaged a poster from vintage lifestyles magazines (a lot of people lying down, looking ambiguously asleep/drunk/dead) and texted it to friends and friends of friends and lesser friends of those friends. It was humid; our ankles itched. The readers read from print-outs, because we believed in an analogue approach to gathering and sharing our art. L took film photos. We chain smoked. We were like, this is a good thing. Easy, free. Let’s keep it going, we discussed.

August. We did it again—gathered for free. T’s rooftop in Greenwich Village. This time we got musicians and twice as many attendees and three times as much beer and brie. We realized this could be beautiful and recurrent and ambitious. So September, October, we gathered. Maintained as much reading as music, and as much performance as socializing. Started making commemorative zines as well. Just little foldable, ad hoc things. Handed them out for free, realizing we could really take this somewhere should we desire to. We did, and gathered again.

November. Organizers at the kitchen table with pie and coffee. (If you want to get anything done with people, anything of any communal and/or creative impact, there must be provisions. There must!) We asked ourselves: what makes our work good-natured, and what makes it exciting? What is the scene we are responding to, and the culture we are trying to cultivate? What do we fundamentally care about?

We are still asking ourselves these questions, but we put down some thoughts about this work we are doing, a project called Not for Leisure.

Not for Leisure Manifesto, v.1

We believe in three simple tenets: attentiveness, collaboration, and generosity. Attentiveness, the act of engagement without fragmentation; Collaboration, the act of connection without extraction; Generosity, the action of care without expectation.

We believe in our friends’ art.

We believe in the un-casual engagement with things that bring discomfort and permeate boundaries. We believe the permeation of boundaries — between forms of art — between relationships — between the art and the artist(s) — between the writer and the world — is necessary for creating interesting work.

In fact, you can dissolve the word “boundary” on your tongue like sugar.

Our work seeks to engage with the world un-casually. Seeing the world seriously, taking the world seriously, giving to the world seriously. Where does the work start? By noticing/ paying attention/giving attention/ to the way you are composed of everything you choose/love/proximate.

Status is irrelevant to the quality of both the work and the party; status = irrelevance!

Impermanence: (speaking your words into existence, a wisp of smoke): A reminder that what exists is being: A reminder that time spent making/ creating/ sharing is all there is/ will be.

Your presence warrants writing to be remembered (by you, by your loved ones, by strangers, by the warm homes of strangers, by the many buildings across the boroughs, by the subway/sidewalks that carried you there)

Our selection process often happens around a kitchen table. We are listening for your knock on the door.

We take everything we do very seriously. After all, this is for love, not for leisure.

NYC, 12/7/2025

Baby, our doors are open

You’re still here? This is why we love you. One more thing you should know before you go—

N4L is seeking writing for its inaugural issue! Submissions are open to any and all NYC-based writers. While we are particularly interested in poetry and criticism, we encourage work from across genres, languages, and modalities. Please send us your work using this form.

Deadline to submit: SUNDAY, JANUARY 11th, 2026 at 11:59 PM EST

Submit!

If you are interested in performing at the next event or getting involved generally, reach out to us at notforleisurenyc@gmail.com. You can also sign up for our newsletter and visit our archive at notforleisure.com.

Until then, we love you forever ♡

Ex Oh, N4L

Join the N4L Newsletter

[July 6th, 2019, 19:19 PST]

Belonging to the family Cyprinodontidae, the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) live in the upper shelf of the titular geological formation situated in the Amargosa Desert, southeast of the California-Nevada border. The Devils Hole is an ecological enigma, as are many other places you’ve never heard of before. And like many other places you’ve never heard of before, the Devils Hole subverts the limits of a fixed perspective; it defines itself and anything that enters therein.

Colors may vary between pupfishes, and are notably distinguished between males and females, even within a given subspecies. Pliny, the four-month old specimen of our story, is a brilliant and expensive-looking blue, coated in an iridescence that gives him the appearance of being laced with silver thread. The margins of his fins (pectoral, dorsal, and caudal) are black-tipped for masculine distinction. By full maturation, Pliny reaches a respectable average of 0.9 inch in length. Nobody would pick him out of the hell litter and say, “that’s the one we’re talking about, obviously,” at least not without this specific perspective, which is fathomable only in retrospect—after the aftershocks, confessions of love. Death.

As to be expected across all types of pupfishes, the Devils Hole pupfish spawn and dwell in extremely isolated habitats, and—due to the female’s low fecundity and the hatched eggs’ slim survival rate—reproduce very slowly. These biological factors make the species particularly prone to endangerment. Out of consideration for their highly delicate ecosystem, population censuses have been sparsely conducted, with the most recent survey from this past spring enumerating a mere 136 observable pupfish. Their numbers have always been low (with the record population high reaching just shy of 550 specimen in the 1990s), but this current downward trend has brought the International Union for Conservation of Nature to categorize the Devils Hole subspecies as “critically endangered.” And with ex situ conservation projects proving generally unsuccessful, the threat of extinction within the next few decades is probable, if not inevitable.

Pliny’s mind flits elsewhere, away from fate. He goes about his indistinguishable days gobbling up inorganic particulate and limestone algae in his hot tub of a habitat. (Devils Hole’s water temperature remains stable at 33 degrees Celsius, or 92 Fahrenheit, which is uncharacteristically warm for Cyprinodontidae species and most other aquatic vertebrates.) He’ll bounce around with some of the other male pupfish, nipping and zooming, only to suddenly halt in a stupefied drift once his hyperactivity has run its course. Then he’ll swish to play again.

Having nothing but the ever-refreshing present, second by second, the future figures an abstraction. A translucent hoop of a bubble warbles around your daily movements—unfixed, glossy, growing bigger before you until you suddenly inhabit it, become defined by it: an invisible, indivisible cell of definition, a hole that is also a container. Inside the shape of your own breath, time cannot gesture outward. Speculation blurs away as attention distills down to the most immediate state: breathing without counting the exhale. First full, then empty. Full. Empty. Full. Empty.

And what a warranted bliss, such emptiness inside a brief bubble. The Devils Hole pupfish’s lifespan hovers around 10-14 months, barring extrinsic causes.

The fish’s precarious location contributes to the instability of their life. The Devils Hole appears at first to be a small, sunken body of water arbitrarily placed in an otherwise inhabitable stretch of the Death Valley desert. The Hole is a hole, that is, an opening with the ability to capture. Through the opening, sunlight and meager rainfall reach a vast groundwater system flowing underneath the barren land. Spelunkers in the past have been unable to determine the exact depths of the subterranean caverns, with some estimating they reach over 1,000 feet below the desert’s surface.

When two punks jumped into the Hole in 1965, they kept falling and falling until they lost their bodies to the unmetered waters. The bottom has never been reached and remains unknown, as if open-ended.

What is known is that the aquatic caves run deep enough to make their waters sensitive to seismic activity from across the world. Vibrations sent by shifting plates resonate in the lowest regions of the chamber walls and cause the water at the surface to slosh in response, effectively creating a microscopic tsunami—a “seiche.” If geologists are correct in their calculations that these limestone labyrinths were formed over 500,000 years ago (half a megaannum), then the Devils Hole has gurgled up history’s cataclysms. When Mount Vesuvius erupting in AD 79, an eruption powerful enough to preserve entire civilizations in its ash fall, the Devils Hole must’ve rippled a few inches or so. When a nearly eight-degree magnitude earthquake devastated Lisbon on All Saints’ Day in 1755 and brought the once God-fearing Europeans to their knees, rejecting the promise of holy providence in favor of the new faith of rational thought, the blue pool burped excitedly, likely. The Great Chilean earthquake, which all but crumpled the city Valdivia in late May of 1960 and remains the largest seismic event in recorded history, certainly caused quite the swirl.

Two days ago, on July 4th, 2019, the southern Californian town of Ridgecrest experienced a 6.4 earthquake, triggering a sequence of hundreds of other aftershocks. Now, the earth quivers again—the seismographs indicate a 7.1 magnitude shock. Car alarms go off across the city. People yell across the city in different languages. ¡Cuidado! Electricity momentarily flickers in supermarket aisles and lover’s bedside lamps.

The Devils Hole is just about 160 miles away from Ridgecrest. The seismic event laughs into the caves, disturbing the pool formed at the opening. Waves rise from the mouth of the Hole—they quickly increase in magnitude, crashing up against the enclosing sides. To the inch-big pupfish, a real disaster is at hand. Pliny tumbles in the seiche. All the bodies of these rare creatures break as they slam into stone, suffocating under heaps of sediment shook loose from the cave walls.

Suddenly, the seiche flicks Pliny out of the water. He loses his body to the unmetered air, the heights of which have never been reached and remain unknown, open-ended.

The aftershocks subside and the water is still again. A barn owl (Tyto alba) flies over the opening, indifferent. The rest of the world moves forward unthinkingly as well. After disaster, disparate perspectives find a second of synchronicity: car owners click their key fobs, restoring silence to the streets; shoppers resume pulling high-fiber cereals into their carts; and lovers continue to kiss, uncertain if they’ve stopped falling and simple are in it—that which defines them.

If you go a million miles away, I will track you down

The Clique, “Superman”

E.

Dear—,

You are lovely yet lost to time. Without you I meet each clock face with prosopagnosia, asking Have we met before? since you’re not here to anchor the second, the minute, the movie, the narrative, etc. ... You hover over me with such omnipotence that even your shadow skews my shoulder aslope. This can’t do. I am wretched with distractions fed by your absence—what my shrink calls “limerence.” I read somewhere that limerence isn’t a real word, just a slew of phonemes schemed up by a psychologist to sound vaguely French. And that limerence isn’t love, or even the prep work to falling in love—it’s purely an addiction to the unobtainable. Draw the lines, decipher the code. Get on my case. I can’t reach you, even after all this flying about. Come closer or let me come to you. Just tell me where you are waiting to be found.

With hope,

—♥

S.

Upon the chamois sky rests one big 22-karat gold doubloon. Eleven Eleven, reports my phone with no news from home. I wish for hope to notify me of something small, like I’m just waking up too, baby. Already there’re beer bottle caps arching their backs and clattering onto the neighbor’s parquet. (It’s five o’clock forever in Spain.) Already I am preoccupied with the preciousness of time, considering the tactics an intelligent person might employ to achieve all it is that they desire with their life force, such as order? a lover’s reinforcement? beer in the ante meridian? These are all things I either have eschewed, am pursuing, or could obtain, respectively. And yet instead I am Elsewhere and doing nothing. Dillydallying.

It comes to me on the couch now. Dreamt last night I fell out of love. It must’ve been a dream, there’s no other way. How else could I have fallen from a height I had not yet summited? Or, if I have risked some great altitude, I certainly have not yet admitted myself to the vista. Acrophobia :: philophobia. Fear is not repugnance or incompetence but timidity heightened by perceived vulnerability. Regardless, I fell. Lost warmth. Plunged from a place among planets and crashed hard. I resembled sea foam lacing lava rocks as water recedes from countless dark craters. Only blood remained of me, and even that dispersed nonchalantly into the Atlantic. Then I awoke from the chill.

I leave my phone and credit cards and earbuds and sunglasses and notebooks in a shrine-like assemblage on M.’s kitchen table, arming my pockets with only a pack of Winston’s, a salamander-pink Bic, some loose change, and a set of keys I don’t know how to use.

It’s not warm enough to justify a short sleeve, but one gets the impression that the sun runs in place over Madrid, a city built for noon. Spain and its indefinite September don’t need me. I am an interjection seeking coherence within a fragmented clause. Without maps or familiarity I walk toward [XXX] like someone with anomic aphasia trying to summon the word “suitcase,” but can only think of its associations. Business, travel, possession, privacy, documents of the utmost importance… Binary distinctions inform a growing definition of what it is I think I’m trying to reach—left or right or straight ahead. This exhausts me; my ear throbs. And my palms, once unctuous with heat, now register little more than a slight, pestering itch.

Another quadrilateral plaza elongated in siesta shadows. I propose a retreat in each seat I take, hopeful that the notions I’m looking for will suddenly arrive and that they will be (1) definite, (2) pellucid, and (3) utterly revelatory. Instead I assess my use of time for what it actually is: just waiting to come to terms with the present.

But how can I?... find presence in a dislocated temporality. All the material differences that should amuse me—the feel of cobblestone under rubber soles, equatorial balminess, endless plates of ham—hardly do a thing to alleviate my mental unease, despite urging it so. In the Bushwick dairy aisle three weeks ago I was so sure of myself. I detected luscious, ludicrous signals and interpreted them as a flight itinerary to book and relieve me from the steady toil I had snuggled into: wake up, work, take lunch, dream about the Angel, work on, work out, await the Angel to text back, distract myself until sleepy, i.e. YouTube, sleep, repeat. Perhaps the warmth that came to me beside the egg cartons was actually a warning: my routine of minimal-accomplishment-aside-from-appeasing-the-Id was pure sandpaper over the sheen of my essence. I risked flatness from my subduers of banal habit.

No, this will just not do. Usually I cannot conceal my enthusiasm for things because I am so helplessly hopeful that they will not fail me. Then, au bout du compte, I am left alone for another night, considering yet again that maybe my faith in good fortune is nothing more than a dead end I keep revving my engine toward.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

You must be right, Walter. Does limerence throng the metonymic heart with protection or punishment? Is he—the boy into whom all my thoughts dip—an angel or just an analgesic? Without hope, pain loses its immediacy and becomes something indefinite, until one day—poof—you find a face for the clock upon whose numerals you assign so many new expectations. It’s like having your light at the end of the tunnel and eating absolute darkness too. But I am not built for a limerence like this; I rise from the bricks of hope and having.

The Angel of History, Understanding & Caution: he hovers over shades of me at oneiric heights. And yet, I don’t ever dream about him because he is already at the surface of my attention. Daylight illuminates his profile like an actor behind a scrim—not immediately flesh but realer than an apparition. In my mind he mouths an inaudible phrase, becoming something difficult yet recurrent: a colloquialism in a foreign language. I refine my ease of access to summon his mouth, the image of it, through an obsessive circuit of thought. No, maybe. Yes—he is the cryptolect my mouth stumbles upon when ever I have to draw him, the signifier of him, out into breath. The words are of him but belong to me—my outlying, utterly insular mind. O, O, Oh.

I spend two euros on a half-liter bottle of Coke Zero and nurse it along my ambling. I end up in a park full of tourists, expats, roadrunners, vagabonds, hobos, street merchants, traveling musicians, and lovers with cameras thrusted between them. It’s sunnier than fiction. Instead of fences or paved paths to indicate a distinct layout, hedges rise and extend in endless arrangements. The misdirection crafted by mazes comforts me. Mazes invite relief from the dogged decisions imposed by strange city streets that ought to be leading me somewhere and not just puzzling me toward despair. But here, where mistakes are by design, the mental energy previously expended by self-directing converts back into a pristine state of focus. Liquid crystal light—code scrawls everywhere—I heat up. Listen now.

Early
   Suicide
      Perpetuating
         Exits
            Spain
               Posthaste
                  Ecstatic
                     Seagulls
                        Pirouette
                           Encounters
                              Suitcase
                                 Peripherally
                                    Enters
                                       Seaside
                                          Portugal 

I gulp at the voice of intuition returning to me in a heralding whoosh of a boomerang I threw ages ago. With the assistance of phenylalanine against the somniferous sun I rush in the heat of epiphany. Running through shrubby geometries, kicking up desiccated humus into lavishly animated billows. I am laughing, I am crying! In my urgent state I run past a white-headed man hunched over a folding table covered with variously filled wine glasses, whisking his fingertips across their thin lips to produce an ethereal huff of melody. I recognize the song. No, maybe—yes, it’s bubbling up—

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.

Joy, your beautiful lightning! Daughter of Elysium, fire-wasted we go forth! Heavenly, our homecoming! As I run, An die Freude ascending from the old man’s glass harp, I am reminded of that singular syllable of my p/flight’s origins: Go. My love occupies not a waiting room—he illuminates the trajectory ahead like a lightning bolt in reverse. All fall I have stood at the base of a thousand dazzling prongs, too startled to move, but now it’s obvious: I only need to catch one vein of pure electricity and follow it up to its empyreal gate to reach my love. Go, up and up, go.

P.

Feet stayed horizontal all day. Saw stucco structures recede to flatlands stubbled with telephone poles and crumbling churches. Cyclically fell asleep into/woke up from the book I’m reading, which is about a woman living the same day over and over again. The protagonist repeats years-worth of November Eighteenths until she gains a mastery over its discrete movements—the exact minute the rain will start, the precise interval at which her neighbor will pass her window. She tries to cope with her surreal circumstance by learning about constellations, as if the firmament were a map handed by god to a stranded foreigner. She deducts no solutions from her studies, no paths. Days pass until time loses its meaning and becomes little more than a thin nuisance, like a constant patina to slough off.

A white man in a rastacap lays down in the middle of the bus aisle to take a nap. I make eye contact with another American girl whose giggles emerge from a nervous grimace. It’s been four hours; finally the bus driver peels into a gas station. Somewhere, Salamanca. After perusing the gift shop (motorcycle-shaped switchblades, whole legs of cured pork leg, scorpion-infused liquor), I savor a cigarette by the chainlink overlooking a vast yet unpopulated six-lane freeway. A tumbleweed would’ve completed the scene. Ironically, I find that it’s these types of in-between nowheres that affirm the significance of travel, however planned or happenstance. Pit stops provide a textured pause in the removal-slash-arrival of circumstance by which we define the journey’s outline—without them the experience would just be one big gush of motion and superimposed meaning.

I bought a bus ticket to Porto yesterday afternoon after running from El Retiro to M.’s apartment in a totally disembodied state of elation and clarity. It was Walter’s plan all along to take a ship to North America from the Portuguese shore. Drafted plans retain the heat of their conspirer even if never actualized. Thus I sensed something past Spain as M. ladled me a chilled bowl of salmorejo garnished with—you guessed it—shreds of jamón ibérico y huevo duro. I ate for the moment as much as I ate for the day to follow; that is, I eat to be now and to be again. The soup, a sorta mealier gazpacho, cooled my central nervous system with the pristine fluidity of a speared fish returned to sea. I pictured the Atlantic with wordless solutions at its frothy foot; I felt my ears heal, my shoulders hike up, my hope finally whisper back. Go. I gulped, then bought the fare.

All this time I resigned Walter’s suitcase to nothing but the collateral of unfinished business, intercepted too suddenly by the wrong hands. And here I err’d. A thing lost to time gains the properties of an enduring rumor—it lives on in whispers and wishes, permeable and perpetuated ex post facto. The strength of a thought can travel far past the passing of its thinker.

Pushing out of a long, snaking section of the freeway, we reach the summit of a undulating mountain range overlooking the coast. Rain shoots itself against the bus as if we’re approaching enemy grounds, but I can’t help but report that hope defines the moment, the music, the etc. ... I finished my book and left my other in the cabin below, so I stare hard at the growing view of the port town. I am shivering, although not from any chill. I just want what I’m looking for so incomprehensibly much.

If I have been a successful writer, then survival will not define my mind’s endurance. The suitcase, however, must make it to Portugal.

P.S.

Dear—,

In Portugal they lay their roads as the rivers flow: toward a confluence. Of course, in the case of an old Catholic country, all paths lead to a church of some sorts. The castles are the same as anywhere, you know, perched as high as possible over the city. I visited the Castle of Guimarães thinking there’d be lots of ornate furnishings and lavish banquet halls, but it turns out the principle function of a castle is to serve as a defense structure, so there’s really not much of interest behind the walls. In fact, it was quite bleak back there. Some historians will tell you that strong defense coincides with wisdom in “the maintenance of power.” Really everything about Portugal seeps in lugubriousness—I blame historicism.

O Angel, O Protector of Thy Suitcase, O Boy. You didn’t say you’d wait for me to find you, and yet there must be some patience we are privately maintaining for each other. Survival is a long game rarely succeeded in solitude. Now I have trouble keeping my solitude to myself, because there’s nobody’s absence I can redeem save my own. But there are a few things I don’t even admit to myself in fear of feeling foolish when the outcome misaligns with my wishes. This is why I haven’t said certain things to you yet.

& this is where things have changed, so I need you to listen.

It was 5 PM in Foz do Duoro and I decided to take a walk along the promenade beside the beach. The sun settled into that special angle at which the light transfigures everything to custard. Seagulls turned to egg tarts, and the lapping shore made me think of the gold deposit they just discovered in China, some 1,444 tons of the stuff. It was a truly inescapable instant of beauty. My headphones have been on the fritz all trip-long, but I got them to comply for a second to the score the scene. For some reason Michael Stipe came to mind, even though the only R.E.M. song I like is just a cover. So I played “Superman” and watched all that gold melt down, feeling for the first time in a while that I not only know something but understand it too.

No precognition could help me know if you are thinking of me, but at least I understand now the nature of survival. You’ve been waiting for me to track you down, and I will. I will follow the sense of you as all survivors of time must’ve sensed before. Yes, I will find your black suitcase lost to time—I will find it within time again.

I love you.

—♥

It’s with enormous effort that I manage to impose myself upon myself.

Clarice Lispector, The Book of Pleasures

Reverse Lister Route, emergency exit. Fleeing fascism for the umpteenth time. If I have been a successful writer, then survival will not define my mind’s endurance. Narration comes to me in waves of refrigeration from the dairy aisle. I sense the importance of buying eggs. To clarify, eggs are not dairy—must be the milk of mammals. But some categories we make porous for the sake of coherence, even if false. I buy a half-dozen by the pulse in my palms. Beating, blinking. And a hardening loaf that is cheaper than the soft ones. And Spanish ham. I might not survive this journey. And a crinkly pouch of grapes, cotton candy. The suitcase, however, must make it to Portugal.

In the kitchen I am best because there are no windows—there are no windows because I live in Brooklyn. I have put duck tape over the light switches. Only lamps on low, candles, and the glow from resting screens. I sense old tomatoes should go in the blender, accompanied by desiccated bread chunks and a patient stream of oil. For every ten minutes trekking I will spend one resting. 10 to 1. Too much stimuli may break the spell of focus required to contend with this soup, its guidance. (I believe it is soup I am making.) There is still all-too-much noise. My bedroom next to the kitchen is not large, but the windows are nearly wall-tall—both a privilege of light and a portal to all bedlam outside. PR gangs ghetto-blast FM radio into the backyard as cats fuck and fight with the ferocity of hormonal sailors letting loose after landfall. The climate remains temperate beside the coast. It’s the altitude that stealthily crumples. Okay, noted. (Go, but in batches.) Accumulate distance—completion is what matters, not records of speed. I sense to serve the soup cold. After a strange garnish it is ready. I gulp to hear another word:

Go. My worst fear is the push on my back I did not predict. Many hours of concentration have gone into the bettering of myself, my I, for this reason: to offset the ambush of the uncontrollable. Summers I locked myself in my pantry breathing in the mold spores of forgotten pastas, trying to access a counter-channel to the current of linearity gushing all of us toward an intolerable uncertainty. I try not to act rash and wait for clarity to descend angelically and tickle me toward the correct door.

The Angel of History. I first saw him/her/it taped on the wall above the bookseller’s headboard—a printout from an aesthetics course he was auditing that fall, the fall in which I met him and asked him to take me to this very bed of his, the fall we still occupy. I wasn’t familiar with Klee nor Benjamin, so he extolled the theories of the latter until squirming with spirit. History breaks down in images not into stories. He then guided my palm to the firm handle hiding under the fly of his Levi’s; I held on to it as if carrying my life’s work. After opening and emptying the case of us I informed the bookseller of my imminent departure to faraway lands and left him with three parting gifts: an evil eye bracelet wiggled from off my wrist onto his, a mostly full sleeve of mint Mentos I opened for the sake of our first kiss, and a string of seven digits to retrieve my voice.

Go, but in batches. Plus altra.

The shore, the altitude. “Extrasensory perception.” I think about how much bullshit is made up to explain some runny, uncontainable feeling. And that we are always looking for the best container, the platonic shell. In an alternate life I am a hermit crab mindless with dysmorphia. I flit between shells hoping the next will hold the goop of me much better than the last. I flit and flux until I decide to leave a perfectly fine spiral right before I’m capable of coming to terms with the present. Yes, I am always transitioning away from the present, because it is terrifying and leaking with news of Elsewhere. Too much to contain in the conch my palms tries to shape.

Passing south of the Pyrenees now. Pines pierce the air, calves fatigued but determined. Nothing could lessen my grip. The touch between palm and case is increasingly evocative of intimacy, for I touch all that I have been—disclosed thought.

Hours crack and crack until the Queens sky becomes a soft scramble, mundanely rapturous from my panorama in terminal 4. No one put me on this plane but myself. A plane is the ideal vessel to enforce some brief respite from myself. An embryonic pause between the burden of decisions mandated by hard, finite space. Runny, uncontainable feeling—it gets all over my hands. Or rather the warmth rising from my palms, invisible and vaporous. I, warmth. I keep my palms upturned on my lap as the plane takes off to prevent my thighs from overheating. We approach cruising altitude. Middle of the middle, seat 33F. I am suddenly brought to memories of childhood when I was carried to bed at an early hour. Commanded by mother to rest despite my head and hands steaming hot with undirected eagerness. Clarifying in the serene studio of night’s quiet: visions of innumerable failures redeemed. In the past I have feigned sleep to appease mothers and teachers and bosses and boyfriends, but now I am abounding in westerlies. My Warmth rises and rises. The shore, the altitude.

Emptied
Suitcase
Prove
          Egresses
          Slip
          Past
               España
               Sueña
               Peña
                      Eat
                      Shit
                      Predict

The tarmac upon landing splits open into a cobblestone road I stumble down, ducking below clotheslines drawn into steep parabolas by drying dish rags and silk slips and uniforms brushing the top frays of my head, now needing a drink to quell my warmth I come upon a strip of terraces jutting onto the street in a loose grid of beer-branded tables and seats shellacked in drinkers’ residues, Saturnal lager rings and tobacco leaves left in the sharing shoveling spilling among mouths, too many of them, tongues that bar my parsing through cognates, so I drink and become estranged then baffled by the position of estrangement one can so suddenly assume for oneself, and what to make of this experience when self-imposed, having not only fabricated but further followed an impulse to leave my home for some small heat signature off my palm, as if the glare alone could function as floodlights to illuminate this unfamiliarity I’ve entered, an ancient anachronistic city in the middle of colonial history I am now left to scale and assess to my own survival as a foreigner feigning precognition to cover the fact that perhaps I act upon my senses without understanding. Perhaps it is not wise to detect a singular warmth and eschew all other forms of warmth in the pursuit of it, for I am getting cold and drunker and farther away from myself.

This is the difficulty of survival—enduring the urges to shift within our circumstances, our containers. Any shift may push us into the realm of danger. I wait for time to not kill me so I may live more as I wish, not here, without warmth or understanding. Love.

Plus altra is the motto of Spain, so I learn from my friend M., a masters student in Madrid. I lay on her couch, feeding myself strawberry-crème gummies from Lidl as if they were the grapes I left to rot back in Brooklyn. She is letting me crash with her while I figure everything the fuck out. My body is tuned to a clock across the Atlantic; my mind is split between two centuries and several languages. But I know what I need to find even if I don’t understand it.

¿Pero qué es?

His black suitcase.

¿Ay, de quién?

The theoretician, over whom the Angel of History floats.

Como sea. I have class in an hour—let’s get our ears pierced.

M. whisks me away to Chueca, where los maricóns y las lesbianas run things. Plastic-y boutiques, bear daddy leather bars, body-mod shops. The Arctic Monkeys play loudly as M. gets punctured and plugged. I go next, having metal threaded through my lobes for €9 an ear. In our post-piercing selfie we shimmer a silver sliver more. On this occasion we decide to get drunk and stuffed off of “tapapiés” (33 cl beer bottle + house special tapa). Sanduíches de Pernil, pork belly bao buns, Peruvian fried rice in small paper boats. The more we drink and eat and chat the less bombarded I feel by the darting signals that batter me with tortuous notions such as I would be better off Elsewhere. Elsewhere, my preferred corner to loiter in. Elsewhere is the layover I write from despite having already arrived. I gave my lucky bracelet to Elsewhere, forgot to take a photo of the sky there. But no longer, O please, my understanding Angel. Let me loosen my grip a little bit, O I beg, I beg. I will not forget. I will not forget. Let me let go just this once so I can come back even stronger, surer, my warmth returning to redeem dark space like dawn’s hatching. Afford me this night like a trampoline pond. Bid me one plunge into this shadow of serenity.

I have made past France but border patrol will not let me proceed without their infernal papers. New orders, same shackles—I will remain a prisoner to circumstance. But no longer will I hold the posture of the convicted. Crepuscular now, starchy in the mouth. I notice a growing wet red spot on my left shoulder. Hath thee been slain, Angel? Dread drops like a hammer. Falling through hypnagogia, really fucking wasted, misplaced misplaced misplaced. I must’ve reflexively brought a finger to my lobe for it returns my field of vision smeared in blood. My being shifts into a complete incongruence between “I” and “here.” Tomorrow they will deliver me to certain death. Only tonight may I deliver myself—a much more comfortable option I should think. I am mostly asleep but awake enough to cradle my ear in the crook of my arm to prevent myself from bleeding over this small Spanish couch I am calling comfort for the time being.

Bee Nott Afryad Of Anny Man
Thatt walks Beneath the skys
Tho Big he Bee Or Small you
Bee
For I will Equalize

- carving on a pistol handle found in an old house in New Mexico

❀

Admirable criminals do exist; they bare their souls through a beautiful gift.

❀

The Houston gang in Denis Johnson’s Angels know the clerks will comply so long as security is kept at bay. (The money’s already insured.) Instruments of persuasion find a disguise. Dwight unwraps the green paper around a bouquet he bought of the side of the road, takes his sawed-off pump-action Remington, and nestles it among the wildflowers. Our protagonist, Bill, who wants redemption just as much as he knows he can’t be saved from his past, grips the “lethal bouquet” (118). The motley crew enter the Arizonian bank. Their aim is not bloodshed but to gain the means that continue to evade their life for all the reasons America makes it so tempting, even necessary, to choose brutality. So, even though the flowers would’ve made a lovely gift for the woman he’s recently fallen in love with, we’re not surprised when they drop onto the bank floor, lighter than before.

❀

A few hours before the housewarming, my mom and I stopped by a vintage store, where I found an old Macy’s vase for $15. It was ovular and flat, sort of like a sunfish with its face and fins bitten off, with a small Oriental design of swaying red lilies. I bought it to hold the bouquet my mom had gifted me and my roommates for our apartment, which was deceptively vacant of the most basic houseware. The bouquet ended up being too big for the new vase—only a few sprigs of bottle brush and eucalyptus could fit. We placed the remaining flowers in the next best thing: the glass pitcher from our blender. Peony stems grazed the blades, making for a good metaphor of holding proximity to harshness. We were surprised at the end of the party that no one had commented on the blender full of flowers on the table. Maybe the mezcal was just that good. Or maybe that’s just what we do, juxtapose a beautiful gift with a hard edge. We are writers after all, soft crooks.

❀

Gunshots pop like an uncorking these days—big whoop. I used to share a wall with a T-girl in a Eastern Portland prefab next to a tire repair shop and a Plaid Pantry. She believed in queer liberation through the reclamation of firearms and supposedly owned over forty back home in Missouri. When I moved in, the walls were covered with used target practice sheets like band posters in wartime; the dining table was less for dining than for cleaning the chambers of her AK. She once offered to take me and my other roommate shooting in Clackamas, but it was always too wet or something. I did start to have perverse dreams of sneaking into her room, which was unmentionably filthy with unwashed sheets and candy bar wrappers, and putting my mouth around her barrel. It took over a year to get used to the sound of her playing first-person shooter video games at night, Foley machine guns firing from the wall dividing us, her exclamations of victory (killing) or of defeat (dying) denying any REM. Between this and the actual gunshots occurring in our derelict little slice of Foster-Powell, I went a little deaf in the way of violent sounds. We adapt to withstand enduring disturbances to appreciate the concurrent beauty: the music from the car radio outside my window as the chalk lines get drawn. Chopin, is that you? My roommate doesn’t know this, but I took one of her bullets. It’s kept on a plastic tray with other trinkets, now just a souvenir of the sleeplessness and the tools of equalization I associate with that terrible year.

❀

The museum I used to work for didn’t know what to do when a border patrol officer arrived with his aunt and uncle trying to bring his government-issued firearm inside. White, 20-something, you know the drill. He got red faced and feisty when security told him no, purporting that me or one of my colleagues in Membership affirmed his right to carry and conceal in the building over the phone the day before. I didn’t personally have the pleasure. But there’s something to the tableau that could’ve been: a pig’s gun in the holster of a Gilded Age mansion. This is how America accessorizes, how it adorns. Guns in the bouquet, guns in the breakfast room. Guns in the waistband of your tucking panties, guns in your aunt’s knock-off Coach. Like fuzzy dice swaying from the rearview, you see barrels in the backdrop and foreground all at once. Swaying red. Blaring blue.

❀

You see the woman selling wildflowers in green wrapping paper as a criminal. You see her husband hunched in the strawberry fields as a criminal. You see the prep chef slicing the pickles for your girlfriend’s sandwich as a criminal. You see the school boy with molars stained by Skittles as a criminal. You see the college student waving a flag for the disposed people of this world as a criminal. You see the child among poppies and hollyhock on arid, cracked Palestinian land as a criminal. Where there is a bleeding soul with a beautiful gift, you see smoke.

❀

After the shooting of Charlie Kirk, I dreamt of a blue light. V and I were in her parent’s second-floor apartment in Philadelphia, packing our bags for the morning train back to New York. Air slammed against the thin walls in a dystopic way, as if the outer arms of a cyclone were coming to grab us. But we didn’t freak out, not until we heard the front door below get knocked down. The following footsteps confirmed a man was behind the force. We went quiet, whispered, He couldn’t be here for us, right? The presence of weapons was not stated but implied by the awful tenor of the moment. We waited for the next blow to come, perhaps through the walls in small plugs of pressurized metal. But nothing came. We resumed packing. Then an orb of color blinded me, blue and perfectly spherical as if I were in deep space approaching Neptune. I rubbed my eyes, tried to shake it out from my corneas. The light wouldn’t leave me. Panic arrived in a sublime way—it was a beautiful, rich blue—and I started to crawl on all fours, huddling in the corners of my dream. It was only when I looked up to the window facing the building facing us did I realize the light belonged to the laser beam of a rifle perched from the opposing roofline. The sharpshooter held me right between my eyes and fired me awake.

❀

Bella ciao

- engraved message on an unfired cartridge left by Tyler Robinson

Was not even halfway across the bridge, but had to get on it to get off it. Down a wide, rust-red pedestrian stairway to reach the underpass I intended to traverse. Blotches of rainwater like melanoma on the rumpled skin of Brooklyn asphalt. Here slept a singular school bus among a fleet of moving trucks, summoning the souvenir of a friend from home who bought a yellow limousine of his own. He withdrew the foamy pews and mounted a queen-size bed in their stead, where several Santa Barbara girls got a good night’s tale for their sororities. He was straight and I never liked him like that, but never could I either abandon the dream of being fucked by a friend in his school bus.

Behind the automobiles I found a woman feathering paintbrushes over a plywood circle flourished with acrylic abstractions, her easel the concrete ledge before the East River below. Several paintings lined against this ledge—compositions of hyper shapes that had no names, or perhaps arcane ones, like arbelos. She was dripping with the same rain that pelted me. We hugged, to share the wet, and then gathered groceries from a damp, decomposing paper bag into a milk crate—only canned things and alliums because “there’s no fridge on the boat.” Mayo packets too. Carried this crate over the ledge to scale down a haphazard ladder onto a foot-wide wooden beam extending along the fence that lined the riverside property mostly claimed by motorhomes. I twined my fingers into the chainlink in a replenishing fashion to support my footing across the moist beam raised several feet above the water, brackish and thick with logged pollution.

About 100 ft like this, perpetuated precipices. Then another ladder down, this one onto a tethered sailboat. We treaded over that deck to another one, and yet another to my friend’s. This boat, twice-removed from the land, is her home. The man who sold it to her and her friends made them swear to never change the name, less some mariner misfortune strike them mercilessly. So she, the boat, remained Sophie’s Way, and the dinghy by the bow, Sholecrusher.

Boats are on the mind. New York City conquers the mind with its concrete. The mind comes to consider natural elements as something of an outsourced material: grass is Earth relegated to the dog-pissed and bottle cap-studded square of soil plotted for a fruitless apricot tree; car exhaust and cigarette smoke is Air wafting off the stoops and through any deli’s door; a highjacked fire hydrant is Water spraying/sputtering out thousands in reservoir wastage. (Fire is not an element—it is a phenomenon.) But the boat re-orders these things from the sailor’s perspective where concrete and consumption define nothing. Water could be a tatami mat or it could be a falling wall. Air could suggest direction or it could defy it. Earth could signal the relief of arrival or it could signify the site of abandon. Sister, I don’t know. But damn did I enjoy eating chickpea salad in a perch between deck and cabin, listening to Blue on CD, ignoring the incipient tickle in my throat, feeling the river sway us hammock-like. Then it got dark. I left the boat, traipsed back across the suspended beam, and scaled up the rust-red stairway to that big bridge, all just to get off it again.

I get sick between crests. An uncertain sickness. Not sure what—there’s a lot to choose from these days. Legionnaires’, XFG Covid-19 variant ‘Stratus’, measles, dengue fever, hands foot mouth disease, syphilis of the eye, the black death. Maybe the common cold. Maybe the commuter’s cold, those filthy grab bars. Most likely a cold from all the physical compromises—both voluntary, those early mornings at Basement, and not, those early mornings at work—that define the fickle resilience of youth: wanting everything enough to dismiss the potential damage to result from pursuing that desire.

But I love damage. Chipped corners of my laptop, worn heels to my socks. I love my room with outfit failures accumulated from the course of a chaotic week, strewn and altitudinous, kicking used underwear under the bed. I also love repair. Conditioning my blue leather boots and my hair gone hay-like from chlorine—now that I’m swimming again. Ride my little blue over to the Kosciuszko Pool with a bound book in hand. Dream of loving any of the swimmers with whom I share the lane-less waters.

My dreams end early each time I enter that free teal. It’s a bedlam of a pool—something always comes to drive us swimmers out. Once it was an insubordinate man who started throwing traffic cones and trash can lids into the deep end after being told to leave. Recently it was a dump truck crash of thunder coupled with leaping bolts of lightning that threatened to boil us alive. Whatever the reason, the evacuation method is the same: four to seven lifeguards biting down on their whistles as a sort of ultrasonic weapon until every last pool-goer has filed into the bunkers, I mean locker rooms, with water pressure so pathetic that the dribbling showers couldn’t so much as plump up a sponge. Experiences like these really lead one to reflect: You endure so much just to obtain a total ten minutes of freedom that everything about living in the city ends up seeming to be more about the storied arrivals and departures than about any sustained presence.

I get that you have to get in to get out. Have to go out to go back home. To dive deep down to bob up high.

He isn’t holding my flailing arms these days, screaming because the brisk waves pleasure like a jump scare. And he isn’t in the car when I’m rearing to flip it over. He isn’t even in the city, the state, the realm of possibility that keeps me up. Scared of hours between the crests, the sickness of solipsism. If me, why only?

For so long the men in my life have disappointed me—now it is my time to disappoint them. We do not understand each other. Not in bed nor in the future tense. We enjoy our Wanting in the moment until the distinctions of our Needing finally fracture the connection. Wanting proximity but needing freedom. Wanting reliability but needing intensity. I keep unlatching from the skin I had hoped for, had wanted bad. I also keep hoping I won’t need to next time.

An offshore draft blows soft and insistent through my hollow parts. Wind of a storm with my name. The woman in me shares more than half my brain. My body is hers too. We’re oscillating in perceptive clarity, metallic waters at the day’s end, either too afraid or too unconcerned to see what’s really swimming underneath. If truly a fish, what kind? If more man, what now?

There’s a sense of peace in uncertain submersion. I am buoyed by a faith in the real elements and by the navigational assistance of my sisters, those sailors I visit after their FFS or call about our new blue two-wheelers or hear singing spells at sunset to summon a tempest. Those girls who hear my name cooing from the true acoustic of my person. Shimmery, drawn to the shore, inclined to get in and swim.

You have to go out to get in. You had to go there to get here.

Come on we’re going to Fay’s tonight, and the best part is it’s free.

Lotti Golden, “Gonna Fay’s”

I know a guy named Joey, and Joey goes with Moey…

“You’re gonna kill yourself and then you’re gonna kill me,” Bridge cried from a nowhere room. “Gonna roll so hard that the boulder you think you are is gonna crumble into pebbles.” Nico had heard it. Leaky casserole congealing on the chipped china, the plastic cat’s tail ticking toward 9:00. Big Step doesn’t know sunlight from fascinations, she thought.

Hell. What if sand is what I want. So she put up airs of indigestion and went to dial Jimmy.

Tuesday, Canarsie. The wet of deep summer thickened up Nico’s short split ends to a vivacious pump. She could smell the exhaust… Jimmy was stationed around the block. Hot as a shape: a slick hypotenuse to the A side of his motorcycle and the B side of the sidewalk. The C stood straight and came to greet her, nearly nuzzling into her patchouli-spritzed neck. Oh, how she wished he would. “C’mon, Faye’s dying to see us.” The two of them approximated a space launch off the asphalt. They zoomed through the warbled vector of lampposts and porch lights until the ‘burbs blurred into nothing more than dark matter.

“Hello, Manhattan!” Ignition, kickstand, lock. “Always good to see ya, Henry!” The two of them showed up low on Henry Street, where the sewer grates got plugged with sea-soaked newsprint and sudsy netting, the smell of scallops seeping in through the mouth. The street was full of schizos and lepers and bums-off-the-Bowery, just how Nico liked it. Mother was like an ant of an aircraft above in the zone of angels. And here was her little girl below, blue’d out in the rollicking substance of the city’s nonsense. Angel…

“Hey, hold it—is that AJ?” Jimmy pointed to a short Salvadorian sporting a tweed Gatsby with an oil-rubbed messenger ducking out of a subterranean globule in pharmaceutical tints. They flagged him over, asking what’s good, nodding to the weight to his satchel. “Shouldn't y’know? Sweetness…”

They spotted Faye’s right away, being the only prewar with Art Deco and Grecian lintels on the block. A panel of light radiated extraterrestrially from the sixth floor left window—that was home calling. AJ’s shoulders hiked. Jimmy’s jeans stiffened. Nico’s lips whetted.

She fished a key scratchily labelled COOKIE from out of her microscopic pocket, which she twisted with savoir into the gut of the shoddy front door lock. Tendrils of sound unleashed as she pushed inside, summoning the triad upward. Moey goes with Jamie, and Jamie goes with Sadie… After three flights, they knocked onto a yielding door; it sighed open to a green scene. Grass-shaded library lamps, deep sea fangly fishes swimming behind emptied Chartreuse—even the overhead bulbs had the hue of cat eyes. Pure verdure. And in the thick of it, the laboratory of their amusement.

“Faye! Faye!” Jimmy called out, “where you gone to shrivel now?” Nico gave him a hit to the oblique. “Deaf don’t mean she don’t have dignity,” she said. It was fair to presume the maiden was in her boudoir anyhow, listening to her 45s as high as her canals could make out and as even the furthest tenet could detect through their wafer-thin walls. Nico would make sure to give her a ‘hiya’ and fill her pitcher before leaving in the morning. But for now, the Now of Then when you’re being told, it was time to roll.

Not two minutes ticked by until Faye’s abrasive buzzer sounded the arrival of others. Nico brought them in: Howie, a friend of Jimmy with a face for a darkroom and a nylon-strapped guitar case; Fanny, a tambourine player sporting bulletproof bangs whom Nico knew from the Playhouse open jams; Tonix, a newish doll punk supposedly originating from Applied Mathematics II, according to Jimmy; and Johnny, who was Johnny.

“Did you hear the news?” Howie chirped between put-puts of a freshly sparked jay, “we’re going to war!” Bombs, embargos, decapitations, yeah, yeah. Nico left the Jimmy with the others to talk their pseudo-global-know-all and followed AJ to the kitchen where he swung his satchel onto the pink-tiled countertop. In a fluent fiddle he unlatched the straps to reveal a true array of medicine, a necessitated demeanor for his possession of a doctor’s Gladstone. “Check it,” he boasted.

And how his boasting was merited. He showed her ciba, tuies, lucy, kretek, crystal, candies, M&Ms (and M.M.), milk, ice, and snow flowing like spring melt. Ups and downs. A small stall for horse. E and T and XTC. Bullets, bandaids, beans, bars, blues, boxes of blades and bottles of balls. Cigs weren’t really his business. But lotsa greenery, AKA groceries, AKA gummies and hard stuffs. “Adolescent’s Wellness Multivitamins.” Dissolvables, tinctures, and nasal sprays. Powders, hell-broth, desiccated herbs. Not to mention—in the fridge behind Faye’s cold cuts and months-old ambrosia—enough Red Stripe to paint the streets sanguine.

Nights at Faye’s were lawless de jure, the apartment established as a sovereign state of safeguarded shenanigans. Naturally, some unspoken rules did manifest over the course of the past twoish months of gatherings, such as, You Bring Snacks, You Share. Knowing this well, AJ and Nico passed the bottles to the rest of the populace like a game of telephone until their words got sloppy with hilarity. Caps and foil wrappers fell to the ground in short order. If the medium was the message, then risk dissolved on the wet bed of their tongues, gaining profundity as sweetness sent its signals brain-ward bound.

Heads halfway out the window, knees knocked in a euphoric disembodiment. It was 11:11 PM, an endorsement from the angels for their good times. Oh, mama, don’t mind me, Nico wished as she hid a tile of acid in her mouth. It was her roll of choice—she relished the intensity to which any sensate could swell under Miss L’s love. Inoculated with a sip of ciba and Jamaican lager and time was gone. So she hoped it would be.

Tick tick tick. It seemed the lot had no issue playing tricks on their central nervous systems. Signs and symbols supposedly swirled all around them. Fanny studied the skeet-bites on her calves as if they simulated Orion’s Belt glimmering from a celestial swath of skin. Jimmy swore he saw the rabbit foot on Tonix’s charm-loaded bag give a flirty kick. After his third beer and second Skittle, inspiration struck Johnny. He peeled back a trapezoid of pinstriped wallpaper as some impromptu papyrus to scribble an acrostic with his Bic:

Feels

Alright:

Youth—

Eternity!

Nico frustratingly still felt a little less than buzzed. “Yo! Fangie, why donya take a seat here?” Howie hollered from the velveteen couch with his crotch obtusely spread. In Fanny’s figure Howie saw his own beatnik Bettie Page; in herself Fanny saw nothing but the plankton scattering behind her tightly closed lids. Howie was the only of the lot still wearing his shoes, the rest instinctively having slid theirs’ off by the door. But the world just had to know about his new pair of Fyre Campuses, which appeared filthy with the patina of two boroughs in an afternoon. Banana brown too, like a damn narc—no way Fanny wanted his lap. She continued to dance barefoot and vampish on Faye’s Moroccan weave.

And Pearly goes with Jetta, What a drag, what a drag…

“Talk about drag. Won’t Faye play anything but Francis? Or at least flip it,” Fanny whined despite her grooving, her eyes remaining shut in an angsty squeeze. “C’mon. That’s her namesake,” Tonix reached out from a veil of smoke, always trying to sound more diplomatic (i.e., older) than she was, being however young Sophomores come nowadays. “It’d be no difference to her,” Johnny spurted mannishly. “She’s got earwax older than amber! We could be honking on the Israelites’ ram horns for all her goddamn walls of Jericho could care. Isn’t that right, Nicolas?”

Nico never liked Johnny—not for his mean-spiritedness and overdone biblical references, and certainly not for his taking to her when Jimmy had his attention diverted, which is to say, whenever she wasn’t actively wrangling his orifices toward her person. (Her name was another issue altogether.) However, she agreed the den was in need of amplification. Music was the ultimate consumable their pleasure required. Obviously. As a rash and compensatory tactic, Nico flounced over to impart Jimmy a pec just beneath the jut of his chin—the highest her stature could manage—before setting forth to Faye’s Cimmerian chambers, not daring to look back and witness any causalities. The scuff of stubble prickled her lips perfectly enough.

Nico was the only one who braved encounters with the maiden herself. In fact, she was the one who put up the lot with Faye in the first place, a place not so far from now, the Now of Then when you’re being told.

Last spring and the promise it ported in dogwoods and finished finals plummeted hard at the Canarsie Colonial Club. Nico was put in the position of Assistant Receptionist, being paid under the table to hold down the front desk during peak vacation visitation. Her passive employment was all (irritatingly) creditable to her older step sister Bridgette, a legitimate C.C.C. employee coming on three summers of non-managerial experience. “What’s this about ‘peckish’? It’s only 7:15—find some ice chips and deal!” Bridge acted like a despot around Nico and her fellow high school associates but lacked any actual authority beyond the occasionally necessitated seasonal nepotism.

While on a smoke break by the back portico on a late-June scorcher, Nico caught the attention of a thin lady with black hair down to her hip. She had spotted her earlier that day for the first time meandering aimlessly about the lobby. Now the lady was crossing the gravel pathway in a swerve, her crow-tracked eyes gunning the ruby glow off Nico’s mouth. “Got a spare for your elder?” she asked as she arrived. Amused, Nico fished out her pack, extending it open to the stranger. Faye, still unnamed, exchanged the Gold for a quarter, placing it in the crevice between the carton and its foil liner. “Bus fare,” she winked with some strain. “No need,” Nico said. “My boyfriend’s gotta Harley,” her voice lilting at the brand name like it was an uncomfortably exotic loanword. But that wasn’t the unearned word. Truth be told, Jimmy was more a late Senior-year peer ascending into crushhood than any relationship legitimately confirmed between them. The lady must’ve detected her deception. “Well, look at you, Cookie,” she replied, diminishing her junior’s pride without malice.

She coughed hard after one drag. In her wheeze Nico could hear the entire sea: the whip-crack of cresting waves, the neat splish of a diving petrel, even the honk of a docking tugboat. Nico swam in the sound of the stranger’s sickness, the inverse capacity of her lungs she was complicit in diminishing. She felt bad, then fine, then good. Affirmed of something in herself.

“Cookie, can I tell you something?” Nico nodded, avoiding her glitterized eyes. “l don’t like it here. Hate the landscaping, the nothing-tasting tea. But it’s better than an empty parlor.” If she had known the word apparition at the time, Nico would’ve used it to name this woman’s presence. Her unplaceable face, pallid and seemingly soft like modeling compound. But behind (within? through?) her countenance was a warmth that compelled Nico, especially in relief of all the icy suburban mothers-of-three and their wrist watch husbands. A rising sulfur bubble. Plus she liked her nickname, better than the typical ‘buddy.’

Another wet hack, approaching a tempest. “Let me go get you something,” Nico said, reassuming her role of customer support while ditching the standardized airy inflection. She went back inside to the Members Bar, asking a crater-faced redhead named Chandler to pour her two Arnold Palmers with room. She then went behind the front desk to fiddle through Bridge’s day bag for a squat bottle of Very Old Barton, topping off the styrofoam cups. No better than her old man, Nico thought as she walked the cups back out to the clay ghost lady outside. Faye squished out a smile before taking a deep, long gulp. “You’ve got your finger on it,” she said. The ocean cooled. They sipped and smoked. Nico wondered how long the lady had had her hair. She still didn’t have a name for Faye, nor vice versa.

“How’re your wrists, Cookie?” Faye asked after a moment’s quiet. Nico reflexively raised her arms to investigate: a bit boney, but not terribly frail. She’d certainly seen more boyish joints. They weren’t her girliest feature either. “Look good to me,” Nico said. “Grand. Now, if you ever got a free Tuesday, you come and pay me a visit down in Chinatown. I’ll put up some tea for us, good like yours. Bring your wrists, and hell, a couple more if you got ‘em. On Tuesday I get my jars.”

Shadow slipped out of the door like tar onto Nico’s toes. Air sat in stale stacks, and a polyphonic hum filled the room: the A-side had just rolled off its groove, the static melding with the effortful breath emanating from the rocking chair beside the sound system laid atop a wide dresser. Nico tried to tiptoe past the limp body, using the pads of her fingers to lift the vinyl off the felt. Friction from the spindle held—she pulled up until the record set free and shook the turntable from under its release. The dresser wobbled consequentially, causing an array of aluminum picture frames to jostle and knock each other to the floor. They landed like a cymbal hit to command the maiden out of her coma.

“I’m sick, I’m sick,” she said in a hollow voice. Nico wasn’t sure if she was talking to her or an imagined audience. “Oh, hiya. It’s me, Faye.” Nico came to her side at a crouch, picking up the frame from the floor and bringing them to her bent knee to regard them in the lowlight. Images of a handsome boy, possibly near her own age. He had a Hershey-thick gap in his smile and trim, shiny hair. Of a middle school class portrait sort or something. For all her nights at Faye’s, she’d never seen this sweet face. “Hey Faye, who’s this?” she asked, making eye contact with her host for the first time in what felt like an epoch. Was her hazel always this blue? Perhaps it was the darkness. They held an intimate instant like this until Faye brought her eyes down to the picture frames. Then a tangible shift registered in her countenance.

“Why are, why… Starlight, sweet Samuel! Oh, God, twenty, too soon… He was my punishment, that cell rotting in me. Too too soon! Never missed a day of schooling, always made his bed, arranging his stuffed things just so. Kenny was ah, a kangaroo and Bucky was a beaver. Purple hippo? Oh, God made him too perfect to last, like a daylily. Sixteen, Cookie, has anything more terrible happened? Why are you showing me this? Don’t you think I already know-know-know? Stop it, I can’t bear to look at him no more! No, this is not right! Where did he go? Why? Why did you take him from me? He is my punishment. My one, everlasting punishment. God, please, please. Only twenty-two!”

Faye flailed out her arms like her fingers were caught in the bill of two falcons flying in opposite directions. “Oh God, just a daylily…” She herself appeared birdlike—a twitchy eaglet screeching from the mania of its existence. Nico, not so blindsided by this sudden outburst, sought to soothe Faye, diving toward her heart. Splish! With an ear upon Faye’s breast, she heard the locomotive chug of her heart beating much harder and faster than seemed possible, given her seated position. Faye wrapped her arms around Nico as if to secure herself from the force of her own pulsations. For an instant Nico felt like she was back on Jimmy’s bike, clutching his abdomen as they ripped over the East River. She wished Jimmy would think her long absence suspect by now and free her from Faye’s ensnarement. But she quickly abandoned that wish, knowing how Jimmy gets with his hand in the candy bag all too well. Or rather the wish was squeezed out of her.

“Mm, you do smell nice.” Faye rubbed her cheek upon Nico’s head, applying light dampness from the residue of her tears. “Patchouli and amber, amber and ambergris,” she said, seemingly soothed. The strained draw of air from her nostrils evinced the craggy textures of her sinuses, the trafficked flow of oxygen to her brain and other vital organs—a private geography formed from the erosion of a difficult lifetime. Knowing no better than the mindless perfection of her youth, Nico mapped with horror the internal acoustics of Faye’s body, the presence of which she generally tried to ignore for the sake of her own fun-having. Her being there, in Faye’s bedroom, was a repeated failure. Not to mention the yellow sunshine having yet to shine upon on her cortex’s horizon.

Of course, the lot paid no mind at all. The only thing that concerned their minds was the practice of losing them without paying a thing. So they were advocates of the liberty Faye’s apartment afforded them, how it protected their inalienable right to release their steam for the price of free. Miscellaneous authorities compromised every other space: mothers surveying their backyard usage, campus security snubbing out any attempted tailgating, bar bouncers with the blue lights on their face cards. They had nowhere else to turn but to Faye’s to cool off with snow in the summer. To nod off until dawn determined sobriety, ‘cause fuck ‘em, we don’t got no more time to give ‘em.

But there was always a body in the backdrop. Nico knew this. A body with carnelian rings on its fingers and bobby pins in its hair. A body that required water and tinned fish every day. A body that got social security checks picked up (and occasionally stolen) by the neighbor next door. A body storing celluloid reels of wedding lace, dance halls, automobiles, epidurals, stuffed animals, maritime deployment, atomic detonation, a red rose and a yellow ribbon on a white tablecloth, filled jars, empty jars, visits to the junkyard, aisles of spirits, a view of the beach, the portico, sweet tea, peace, youth like hers again. A body that dreamt of nothing more than to host its youth again.

“Faye?” Nico asked as she tried to pry herself from her cradle. Instead, Faye tightened like a twined vine on a picket. “Cookie, don’t you know? I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m dying…” Faye swayed to and fro on her rocker, animating a juxtaposed unit of flesh and scalps and clothes, reciting the rosary of her remorse. “Hey, Faye, you’re alright, you’re alright,” Nico said through her sudden stream of saline. The maiden’s ruckus always incurred crying, despite the routine of it all. Nico reminded herself it would all be the same as it has been—a ball down its slope.

“Let me get you something sweet, ‘kay Faye? Sweet for your throat.” At this suggestion, Faye unravelled a bit, allowing Nico to slip away. The room was achingly dark. The only distinguished light fanned from the bottom gap of her door, where the occasional flicker of shadowed feet fluttered across—a confirmation that the party was still rolling strong. Nico wiped her smudged eyes with her thumbs, readying herself for the scene again. Then she remembered the obligation of inventory.

Beside Faye’s quilt-draped bed was a small chestnut nightstand with an unassuming yet deep drawer completed by a curved copper handle. Nico, after looking over her shoulder to assure herself of Faye’s oblivion, carefully opened the drawer to reveal an array of bottles, slim parcels, and parchment bags. She squinted in the blackness to evaluate the psychotropes: 2x Librium, 3x Valium (1 more than last time), 4x Seconal (2 less), 1x bottle of Promethazine and Robitussin each (not siphon-able, but good to know). The containers were at varying states of fullness—some unopened, others just dregs. Nico scored an empty canister from the back of the drawer to do her divvying, making sure to pull out a few extra phrennies for Faye, who continued to utter sour-sounding strings of nonsense. She didn’t even care much for the prescribed stuff. Too suburban. But Jimmy had a taste for them, of course, and she knew AJ sought the caps for his stock, the lot’s stock. Ultimately, she aimed to please.

After securing her spoils, Nico sorted any traces of her pilfering (as if it really mattered) and headed to the door. “I’ll be right back with some liquids, Faye, not a moment,” Nico said to the disintegrating figure before reentering the green glow.

And to think it was all a fool’s errand. Howie had already brought out his Gibson, issuing tunes in lieu of the LP Nico initially intended to switch. What had appeared green now seemed silver: everyone was stratospherically elsewhere. No one acknowledged her return from sea, not even her Jimmy, swept in the dancing gyre around Howie’s lackadaisical licks off his abalone-inlaid frets. He finally forewent his boots as well as his shirt. In fact, the whole faction of them now romped around topless. Tonix twirled far from her Che Guevara shirt, broadcasting carelessness like a corny whore. Nico noticed her incipient tits tease upon Jimmy’s abdomen as they shimmied and swirled, shuddering. Had she gone grey like clay herself? An invisible polymer?

This wasn’t it, not the tempo. Nothing a little saccharine couldn’t solve though. Nico moved through the space-age living room back to the kitchen where AJ appeared to be rolling solo, his hands around a steaming mug of something. “What’s nice, Nico?” he asked in slow motion. Nico didn’t respond in her focused state. She refilled a ceramic kettle and lit the stove. Then she opened cupboards and rummaged across dusty shelves, a flash of frenetic urgency coming over her, the word storm running across her mind. Then gather. Then spill.

Nico needed this night to be good. She needed to redeem her day of drudgery, of baby-talking to the zinc oxide-faced assholes and force feeding herself Bridge’s jaundiced mush, dodging all her abuses trickled down from a father she couldn’t even blame for her being born. Nico needed to live in her notebook songs. Canarsie was hell! Everything in this sick city cost cash or courage. But not Faye’s! Faye’s was freedom, was a flight along the line between sea and sky. The metallurgy of ennui, where the idle fell from their eyelids and crashed with the weight of their perfect bodies. Faye’s was a stage, she the eponymous producer in perpetual mental absentia. And if the tax of a good time was just a little bedside manner, so be it. Nico always paid her dues. It was just like Colonial, she reflected, minus the pastel polos and Bridge’s bad temper. Plus: sweet Jimmy. And AJ and Fanny, sure. Howie too. Johnny, she could take or leave. Tonix, that corny whore.

It could’ve been the best Tuesday night in the written record of adolescence, but Nico wasn’t stoned enough. Was she? And Faye was sick, sick, sick, dying.

Finally, a mortar and pestle. It seemed to weigh a tremendous amount, an insult to her wrists. Nico popped a couple Seconals into the marble bowl, pulverizing it to a powder that shimmered like salamander skin. Then the kettle whistled a high F in elation. She filled a decrepit teapot with hot water and loose echinacea and her pharma-silt, letting it brew while she arranged a small platter with a fridge-dried lemon wedge and some stale Lorna Doones. Nice and neat, everything the maiden might need to quell her queasiness. She turned to take the tea tray over to Faye when Johnny bumbled into the kitchen, his limbs slack with so many sauces.

“Nicolas, where have you—what’s this posh stuff? Scrap that, you gotta come. It’s snowing in the bathroom!” Nico ignored him, trying to suppress the tickle elicited in her by the sound of snow. Everything was starting to tickle a teensy bit. Waiting response, Johnny’s eyes wandered then landed on the seated figure in the breakfast nook. “Oh, hey AJ. What’s up. Anyway, wanna make some angels, angel?”

“In a sec, Johnny,” Nico replied as flat yet feminine as she could. “Faye’s acting up again.” Johnny exalted an exasperated huff. “It’s a miracle she’s up at all,” he said. He turned his head out the door, torso and legs following in delay… one Mississippi, two Mississippi… Then Johnny back-stepped into the kitchen to amend his last words. “Mind if I come with you? I mean, to bring the tea.” Nico blushed at his proffer despite her despising it, him. “What, Jimmy put you up to this?” she snarked, secretly strategizing a workaround. Truth be told, she felt far away from that boy. Increasingly uncommitted to a faith in his presence, which was already pretty much zilch. “What? No, I just thought…” She wasn’t crazy. Jimmy was totally facilitating Tonix’s mammary tactics. She had her eye on him since the game season, always scheming her way onto Jimmy’s saddle after class. The thought of her on his Harley drummed a foul thing in her stomach. Brine and putrid vapors and squawking filth! It didn’t matter what Johnny said at all—they were probably already tongue-deep in the blizzarding bathroom.

“Fine, take this,” Nico said, passing the tray to Johnny. The veins in his forearms bulged lusciously, like rivers that were nerves that were ribbons of turquoise syrup. Oh, the air was playing tricks on her now. She took a deep breath and stumbled on her exhale down to the ever-checkered floor. Johnny, already headed toward Faye’s, didn’t notice. But AJ did, launching from his cavalier repose to support her back up. “Too fast?” he inquired with concern. Embarrassed, she straightened herself and tossed her hair behind her shoulder. “I don’t follow, no,” she said. “Not rolling too fast?” he said, “maybe falling-like instead?” She managed then to look AJ in the eyes, which were utterly massive. Two whole planets of emotion. But so steady, secure in the station of their sockets. Wait—was he sober?

One could mistake falling for flying when the bottom isn’t of concern. Isn’t that the point of being here? Faye thought to say. But didn’t. She laughed like the girl she thought he thought she wasn’t, purely to demonstrate the having of fun to which a girl like her would intrinsically experience. And with that, she turned on her bare feet out the kitchen, which all but vanished into history as she exited.

Johnny was waiting in front of Faye’s door. They could hear laughter emanating from further down the hall, demented like Circus of Horrors or some other horror flick. Suddenly everything threatened an edge. Thousands of harsh edges swirled around Nico’s periphery as she opened Faye’s door with her fingertips. The oil again, oozing evermore. “I can’t see a fucking thing,” Johnny half-whispered, setting the tray down just past the threshold inside. “Lemme find a switch,” Nico said, realizing it hadn’t occurred to Nico to ever turn on a light in Faye’s room. Or rather, she minded not to, presuming the maiden’s sensitivities. But what did she really know about her host? More than any other guest, but that meant nothing.

“Don’t bother,” Johnny said, ducking fast to lock his lips on the side of her neck. It was dark enough that she couldn’t see him coming. She flinched and swatted him hard like a leaping beetle one misjudged as wingless. “What the fuck?” she hissed to his nowhere face. He imposed again, this time clutching her nape and hip with his somewhere hands. The way a man can elucidate the ferocity of his strength in one unexpected instant—she tried to whip around free but he held her unrelenting. “What’s wrong with you,” Nico gasped, “Faye’s right there!” Johnny unlatched his sour lips. “The maiden won’t mind, couldn’t even flinch in protest. ISN’T THAT RIGHT, FAYE?” He roared right at the black mass that was everything around them. The depth of the darkness registered miles deep to Nico’s dilating eyes. “Stop! Don’t scare her,” she pleaded “She’s sick, needs her tea.” Johnny gave a grunt and bent down to retrieve the tray from off the floor. “You’re right, Faye needs her tea. Find the light.”

Nico felt up a wrinkly wall until her palm caught the nub. She flicked the switch, illuminating Faye’s room brighter than floodlights could stun. Instantaneous white flashed over the room, white like snow in the sun, dissolving just as fast as it fell, developing into clarity. What resolved was the sight of a beautiful, pale woman in a cream chemise, wrists crossed over her lap in a knobby rocker. And lining the corners of the room once invisible to Nico: innumerable bottles drained and scattered. Green glass, brown glass, ghost glass. Enough glass to have robbed a beach of its sand. So much sand.

Nico hadn’t seen Faye in luminance like this since their first encounter, somewhat taken back by the subtle pleasantness of her person, however wan and wrinkled. It took her a second further to register the sheen on her cheeks, eyes all red from tears cumulative and concurrent. Yet she didn’t budge.

She didn’t budge as Johnny came up to her, peering down at her as if she were a revolting manhole he couldn’t see the bottom of, and cupped her jaw in his grip. She didn’t budge as he squeezed her mouth open and poured a sturdy stream of scalding tea into her mouth. She didn’t budge, but she cried as she swallowed. “Stop it! Not too much!” Nico might’ve said if he could’ve listened. He surged with unyielding force, but she didn’t budge, not until the well overflowed. Then she spurted out the last ounces with a deep cough that threw her chest over her knees, knocking into Johnny just as Nico had earlier disturbed the dresser and all its collateral. Objects fell. The tray and china came crashing on the hardwood, firm with the thud of the body as well.

Fracturing, Nico felt water flow from her many faces. She heard Johnny yell in a hyena’s pitch but didn’t know if language was attached to the sound anymore. Her weak spine slumped against the wall behind her and she slid to the ground, level with the lump of Faye. She was peaking. Peaking now, the forever Now of the unending Then when you’re being told. Time writhed like a burlap sack of infinite ants in Nico’s head. Johnny kicked around the room, eventually knocking Faye’s bedside stash out into the chaos of chipped things. Nico heard sirens soared by, somewhat serendipitously. But she knew they were headed for other, luckier people.

The door opened beside her and the lot flooded in. It was like they had all just came from a beignet-eating contest, hyped up on impossible quantities of sugar sloppily left on their nostrils. No, no. Nico didn’t budge as her sweet Jimmy stepped over her splayed out limbs, all of thousands of them, fixedly eager to catch the red birdies freed from their cylindrical cages. Eager as Howie, as Fanny, as Tonix.

Nobody but beachcombers, and nothing but sand. Nico trembled at the world that was extending before her, nauseous, in sight of the line between sea and sky. How there was nothing. Nothing to do but keep rolling along the white, serene empty.

Many thanks to Claudia Bitrán for the permission to use her paintings. More of her awesome work can be found at claudiabitran.com.