snacksandcandy2

[snacksandcandy2]

2 deer with headlights for eyes.

my teeth broke your skin, i recognized the taste of volcanic eruption contained in the basement of your childhood home. 

i told you i’d never written a poem since i was 6

i told you about the time i found my grandfather’s gun in the linen closet and he chased me, and i tried to climb out a tiny casement window, cut myself up on the rosebush below, blacked out

did i tell you about the time i sat on the lap of a government official and held his own gun to his head, and then stuck it in my mouth? i was blacked out then, too. i know this only because he told me it happened so it might not have happened. he lied a lot. 

and if i told you, i don’t remember it, i think i did… i left you a 20 minute drunk voice memo over text and you didn’t respond for 3 days and then sent me a 45 minute video of soothing harp music with kaleidoscopic stained glass images, and a song of your own you’d recorded. 

eidetic memory and her sneaky loopholes

that time at the bar called “belle reve” down the street from my shrink’s office and the dream house. you were on a spree of creativity. you’d just won that poetry prize or something. i said “spring has really done a number on you, huh,” and you took out your pretentious little notebook and i saw you write “spring had really done a number on him.”

you had a lit cigarette in your other hand under the table and i started to feel a distinct sensation

“i think you’re burning me?” i was thrilled.

i wish i’d known you since we were little. i wish we’d never met. i’d snap your glasses in 2 and grind them under the steel heel of my tap shoe

i’d bake you a cake with a baby tooth inside the batter, and whoever gets the slice with the tooth gets to go first

lay on the table and play autopsy, find what’s hidden in there. what color are the roses? what color was your childhood? mine was violet.

i tracked down pictures of your parents one sad night. never said i wasn’t a creep. i don’t get on with parents, but maybe they’d have liked me. your dad was holding a baseball bat (for sport, not violence, i assume) and had a flinty vintage face that i recognize too well. and your mother with her elegant intelligent sharp eyes and teacherly turtleneck.

when i was in the hospital i sat in the window seat and watched the fireworks because it was the fourth of july. best view in the city, they told us. i wished we’d met for the first time there.

an upskirt shot of the world is what i see. sure it can be a pretty view, but it’s not very nice.

is there a way to escape from it

you know: that it’s their world, and we’re stuck living in it?

i wanted to see you to speak to you to make you understand my exhaustion. god knows why i picked you.

i killed myself to free myself from a life of being the parasite sipping the toxic blood of a larger animal eating the poisoned meat of an even larger animal, ad infinitum, no end in sight.

come back to life and search “is suicide selfish?” (answer: yes) and “how to fall in love with life?” (answer: image of a girl laughing orgasmically into a cup of frozen yogurt)

i asked you what you wanted once 

 “i’m not sure yet but i’ll let you know.”

i should have asked “how would you like me to treat you?” but anyway, here’s what i wanted:

to be 1 of 2 deer with headlights for eyes, teeth sharpened by each other, transcending the fate of prey. disappearing alone together. i miss you terribly.

[snacksandcandy2]

[snacksandcandy2]

2012

In winter my cravings surprise me. Wanting to be fucked by angry muscular men; wanting to eat things that bleed when you poke them with a fork. My skin is bad from the lack of sunshine and I have this terrible haircut that makes me feel like a 12 year old boy with a name like Pete or Philip; a tuba-playing, hot-pocket-eating little brother from 80s movie hell. But people stare straight into my eyes as I pass them on the street. I'm pretty, despite purposeful damage. My value has yet to decline.

It’s winter and I drink constantly in an evenly-paced trickle throughout the day, as if from an IV. I pose naked for art students and my upper back is decorated with self-inflicted scratch marks. I dislike the art students as a whole, though some of them seem all right individually maybe. I always feel like they’re going to say snide remarks about me to each other later. Anyway I stand around naked in front of them in a cold room for hours, several days a week.

One night I end up having a drink with, and then going home with, one of the squarest-seeming art students. I don’t like it and I don’t like him. But we meet three times, and I always want to cry afterwards for inexplicable reasons. He says things like “why do you wear such uncomfortable shoes?" as if my rather sensible flat mary jane shoes are evidence that I've tarted myself up just for him. He rents a room in a Victorian mansion, and his room is pristine and childlike, the focal point being a twee collage made out of differently-sized buttons. He is maybe 3 years younger than me and flippantly handsome. He always wears a catholic medallion, but I never bother to notice which saint is watching over him when he cums on my face.

He makes repetitive statements about how much I love his cock. It is a struggle to keep from pulling back mid-gag and telling him that nothing about it is special; that I’m just kind of a slut. Worse than a slut: lonely. He says most girls don’t like sucking him off because it’s just too big. If I liked him as a person, this might be an okay thing to say, but I feel a swelling, disproportionate hatred towards him. He refuses to hit me when I ask. Like all the young men I've known, he doesn’t seem to have any fantasies that he is able to verbalize. I try to self-immolate on his cock and his ego, glistening and wholesome and not yet bruised by the world, so basically useless to me. Then I go home and drink some more.

I am as bad as all of them, I think. Complicit. Terrible. Worse. I’ll stop soon.

I imagine myself as an old woman living alone, inviting strangers into my sad little home just to show them pictures of what I look like at 24. "I was beautiful," I'll insist, as they try to back away like they're in the witch's cottage from hansel and gretel.

A married man who works for the government pays me for my company. We have the kind of bantering camaraderie that exists in sitcoms about polar opposite types of people. The dynamic is poisonous in this case, but I don't hate it, even though we once had an argument about rape that resulted in me crying and him saying “You could really use a class in rhetoric”.

I consider him my friend. He is definitely my enemy, though, and probably yours. I like it when he calls me his mistress. He encourages me to do slutty things with other people in between our visits. He sends me surprise gifts of lingerie and sex toys that I don't use. Asks me to pick out anything from a website called discount-stripper dot com and I send him agent provocateur links instead. He takes me to the same depressing strip club on numerous occasions, where I once discussed Seasonal Affective Disorder with one of the strippers for a really long time and then she asked me where I bought my stockings.

This man’s wife is regularly away for long intervals and I visit him.

I wander around the house wearing my leopard coat inside-out, feeling the fake fur against my skin. I'm otherwise naked except for thigh high socks and a pendant on a chain: two clamshells plated in silver, hinged together to form a locket, full of pills. The man has stocked his refrigerator with diet coke and those “girly” vodka drinks that frat boys force each other to drink as a humiliating hazing ritual. He has supplied various weird foods that adhere to my dietary eccentricities, and I think about how nice he can be, kind of… He’s told me that he is a better person because of me. That he is more respectful of women now, and more hesitant to make racist jokes. Well gosh, I am a regular ambassador of social justice, I think.

One time I tell him that I am ready to die, that I tried and failed before but I'm always ready and will likely try again, when the time feels right. He pets my head and tells me he's here for me. But later when I'm handcuffed and he's inside me, he snarls in my ear that he wants to break my spine, he wants to hunt me like a deer and dismember me in the basement.

He leaves me alone in his large house full of wedding pictures and loaded weapons. There's a bear skin rug that he shot himself. Last night, he fucked me on it while I wore an electric dog collar. He zapped me harder every time I whimpered. Eventually I began to cry, and I told him to keep going, but he stopped and removed the collar and I cried myself to sleep. I woke up alone on the fur rug, like a baby bear curled against its mother. Now I have little burn marks on my neck.

So my cravings surprise me. Empty and full feel almost the same, and they both hurt. As above so below. It gets dark early and I get drunk early. I take a painkiller from inside my necklace and I look at their photo albums. What if the wife walked in and found me? She could shoot me with the rifle over the fireplace and I wouldn't care.

Darkness falls like a blanket over a birdcage. I wonder if this whole time period will be easy to forget later, in the spring, when my hair is longer and life happens in the daylight.

[snacksandcandy2]

fake fiction

When I’m sad or worried or we’ve run out of pills too fast, or for whatever reason I simply can’t bear my shrieking brain and the sight of my own bruised legs propped up on the couch for one second longer, I ask Ana to tell me something distracting. I say, "dazzle me please." And nine times out of ten she’ll talk about something that happens in the ocean. The comings and goings of deep sea creatures, their teeth and appetites and sex habits. The eels that travel in a flock to the Sargasso Sea to spawn after they’ve fucked eel-style (I imagine them all entwined and zapping each other lovingly). Or the vampire squid, who doesn’t squirt regular ink, but thick pearlescent goo into the darkest parts of the ocean. The coral reefs like a vast dollhouse, opulent mansions built out of wet jewelry, but desolate with erosion now.

Ana dyes her hair black with intricately labeled squid ink dye from an herb shop in chinatown. It turns out looking really good, better than a drugstore box kit or a salon treatment. She has a black tattoo of an octopus with its body located a few inches above her heart and its curled tentacles framing her pale tits.

On Saturday afternoons we both get up before noon and put on black bikini tops and tiny shorts that look like something a trapeze artist would wear, velveteen fringe. We clatter out on the subway to Brighton beach, where we sit on someones front stoop and usually split a vitamin water that’s mostly vodka, a Xanax bar, and a chocolate covered banana before our weekly date with Vlad. He comes from Craigslist. Vlad the inhaler, a quiet asthmatic with a fetish for being buried up to his faceholes in sand on Saturday afternoons. He pays us each $300 to do this weekly, and the money notwithstanding, it’s something I’ve grown rather fond of.

Sometimes I administer the inhaler to him when he is plastered down in the wet sand, and i feel like a nurse. There are little mites biting him too, under there, I think. Ana and I kneel on either side of this stoic gentleman in his 60s. We’re carrying on our own conversation as if this task is something like frosting a cake or spackling a wall. As we perform the burial, I vent my troubles to Ana about the geology student I’ve been performing love spells on, rituals involving menstrual blood and sugar cubes under the moon:

“I am sick with desire for him but he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be miserable, he doesn’t get it at all. Nothing bad has ever happened to him. Maybe someone called him a nerd once in 6th grade. Can you imagine? I crave an empathy that’s just never there with anyone, but also, it would be really really really great if I could be loved back by someone nice, make it work with someone ‘healthy’”. I pause the sand-patting to do air quotes.

“Is he the one with the mom who sent us a cheesecake?” Ana asks, waving the inhaler over Vlad’s face in case he needs it, but he makes a demurring sound so she nestles it back in her bikini top. “That was cute. Moms who bake.”

“I want to punch myself in the face because I'd change my whole life for him. I don’t care about the mom and her cheesecake. He doesn't know much about me and I'm afraid. I’m so distrustful but I love him so much and his apartment is really cool, he has a bunch of purple plants in terrariums, if he can take care of rare orchids I feel like he could handle me but then I talk to him sometimes and just get these empty stares in return…"

"Tbc," says Ana, cleaning off her gritty palms with a beach towel. To be continued.

Vlad is packed in like a mummy now, wheezing lightly. I push the inhaler into his mouth while she stands over him, prodding and stroking at his bundled form with her bare left foot.

She says:
“You already paid us and we’re busy girls, we got places to be. What if we just leave you here. What if we just let the tide come in and drown you.” She smiles sweetly though, she knows exactly what to say to elicit the correct response. His faded blue eyes flutter backwards. I strangle my laugh. I think about the vampire squid again. Everything is embarrassing.

When we unearth Vlad it’s a lot faster of a process and less methodical, we scoop big clumps of sand and drop them aside, I rub some of the wet grit onto my knees and the soles of my feet to scrape the dead skin off.

“You’re an absolute doll, see you next week” Ana tells him when he stands up, trembling and brushing himself off, the picture of politeness.

“Bye, Vlad,” I say. “Don’t forget this” as I hand over the inhaler. When he’s halfway between us and the boardwalk, Ana calls something out at him in Russian and he waves and she cackles and then throws her arm around me. "Best friends?" "Best friends." We have maybe 2 more sessions with Vlad before it’ll be too cold for the beach. I wonder how badly he pines for it in winter, or if maybe he wants to be buried in snow. I think I'd like to be.

Back in our apartment, I blow smoke out the window and stare at the wall. Ana is trying on different tight velvet outfits in front of the mirror. The light up celestial globe is turned on, rotating constellations all around us. Ana is talking to me about sea mammals this time. The leopard seals of the Arctic who are “playfully predatory,” she says in her lullaby singsong.

“Teeth like knives. Hunters. They tease their food.”

I think of the ladyseals giving birth to their single seal pup on a drifting ice floe. My mind drifts to that silent movie in which Lillian Gish, playing an unwed mother scorned by the good townspeople, floats away downriver on a chunk of ice because she’s been bad and is martyring herself, or maybe it’s an accident, I don’t remember why she is on the ice floe. I don’t remember if she is ever rescued. Perhaps she transforms into a huntress seal with sharp teeth and rescues herself.

One can only hope.

[snacksandcandy2]

I actually really loved new york. Both times. In winter 2009, crying in the snow in tomkins square park and listening to Nico’s voice urging me to leave in the fairest of the seasons. I was a terrible waitress. I liked stealing scarab beetle jewelry from that store in soho with all the bones and taxidermy. This was the end of a semi-shut-in phase with my aging hipster boyfriend/employer who never wanted to fuck me or talk to me, and when I tried to fix it, the lies I eventually unspooled from him just really bummed me out. They weren't even interesting lies, just...blandly sad. Like if your secrets are so dull, why bother keeping them.

Then soon after came one who I adored way too much for my own good, a film noir smooth operator 2 years my junior who acrobatically pinned me to the grimy velvet wall of a movie theater to lick my pussy on our first date. The kiss in the rain, broken umbrella. The cafe that only existed when it was raining. The expensive hotel and how it was half failure & half magic. He had a panic attack before we attempted to have sex, so we ate m&ms out of the minibar instead and confessed to each other that we had both been sexually abused as children. He was a popular writer on the internet when long-form essays were still the norm on this platform, and serious writers were getting their start on tumblr. actually a shy nerd who lived in a dorm at Rutgers, and I was a part time waitress who sold used underwear for pocket money, but we were very fancy together. When he met me in the city we looked up at the buildings and imagined our fantastical futures but still we were imagining separate things. He admitted he was just slumming it with me to make his Real Girlfriend jealous. When I visited him at college in Jersey he held my little chewed up paw and said, “when I’m forty and married and whatever else, I’ll remember you and your tiny hands.”

Then later, skip 2 years and some change. New life new battle scars. Drinking on the roof of the Met with my blue hair, blue like a ballpoint pen. wearing my expensive stilettos, feeling like the fanciest newly adopted stray with my new cool boyfriend who cooked for me every day, and loved Leonora Carrington’s art, and was always trying to sell me on this horrible cocktail called a negroni. He looked like disney’s fox Robin Hood if that cartoon fox wore blazers. And uh, he had a huge dick. Immediately I knew I’d marry him. 

But also. My weird, pervasive crush on James the other roommate, aka Holden Catfield (never meant as a dig, never an insult. Mild tease at best. He loved it and blushed and punched me in the arm.) Anyway he didn’t do much other than watch movies about government surveillance and he flipped the scrabble board when I won, and i always win. The perfect, hot, disgusting day at Coney Island. The ill-fated truncated threesome right before autumn started, squirming with whiskey sweat in the alternating hot and cool currents of air drifting from the open window, that's the last I remember. The Arthur Russell record James put on. “i’m A Little Lost”. Me blacking out and then coming to in the bathtub, crying and spitting venom. I don't remember why I was so mad. Maybe because. It could've been nice but I made it awful. Don't remember how one thing led to another that night, but it must have been my idea. Who else in that drunken trifecta would have thought up something like that? They seemed so close before that night, like brothers. Before that night I was rarely without one or both of them, former altar boys flanking their scraggly priestess. Things were awkward after. But I dressed up as James for Halloween, I was Holden Catfield in his tartan coat and dumb earflap hat with cat ears attached. He did not dress up as me. He went to Boston to visit his family of 7 siblings and dying father. 

The all night pharmacy in south slope with the bikini-wearing gremlin doll in the window. I was less of a shut-in this time around, but always ragged, my chameleon-changing hair falling out and breaking off at the scalp, swollen lips and black eyes because I needed to be hit too hard during sex when I was all fucked up and I couldn’t feel the sting through the suffering. How it had to be, then, because of everything that had happened to me before. Not knowing what good was meant to feel like.

On our first date when I met B in savannah I was crying and he said "did I make you cry?" I said, "No, this is from earlier. This is something else."

Moving in with fox Robin Hood was originally meant to be restful, but I couldn’t. Always crying in stairwells at parties, lying down in the snow and begging to be left for dead. As one does. 

Then I left with B for the healing lemonwater light of California. I ran through the hills with flowers i'd bitten off at the stem clenched between my teeth. "This is an act of magic" I'd think every time. I revived my cutting habit and called it bloodletting for magic. I mixed blood into my henna hair dye and swam naked in a lake with other witches.

And now we are leaving again. A new old city where people eat confetti off the street for breakfast and you never have to leave the bar if you don't wanna. Not New York. My best friend sold me on moving to New Orleans, she’ll show me all the best places to sniff poppers and eat hallucinogenic flowers and roll in the warm grass.

The Destroyer song with the lyric “I gave you a flower because foxes travel light”. The little hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Anyway. I want to visit new york again soon though, maybe before we settle into our new-to-us old city. “The Big Easy”, corny as fuck, funny place to go when you are small and difficult.

But back to New York. Central Park is like a highly trafficked airport for birds. So many birds from so many places, just passing through. More types of birds traveling through that hub of migration than anywhere else on earth, someone told me once (an annoying girl at an art installment in Marfa TX). So few birds native to the area. Obvious metaphor. I wonder if the pigeons look around at the other birds and go, "ugh. tourists."

On good days Ive strolled the upper east side in luxe incognito, trying silk dresses on at a sample sale like I belong there. Stolen framed bugs and fossils from that store in soho specializing in framed bugs and fossils. Slammed back shots in some gnarly dive wearing ripped tights and a dumb hat. Fallen out of cabs and said, "leave me here to die". Traced the old symbols carved into the old buildings with my leather gloved hand. Some birds are native to nowhere. Clawing and beaking at some alternate universe, smacking into the glass wall. I build temporary nests that I remember forever. I know all the best places to be sad.

[snacksandcandy2]

snippet3

Hell week I eat everything I have deprived myself of. I acknowledge thoughts I’ve carefully avoided, because if not now, when? I stop trying to contact the ghost of my mother. I stop scratching her diamonds against the bathroom mirror, and I admire myself instead. I think I would like to fuck a stranger but I wont. No one can assure me that I won’t come back. No one can assure me that I won’t come back as someone or something far less beautiful. So I dare myself to acknowledge it.

I think of Anne of Green Gables, the original melodramatic redhead. Before she makes real friends, her best friend is her reflection.

[snacksandcandy2]

You loved Sylvie in small doses. As you walked home from work and approached your apartment building in the dark, you’d see her through the uncurtained picture windows on the first floor. Moving around in the yellow light, watering her prickly plants, playing with her mice. With a certain distance and a pane of glass between you, she looked like a beautiful doll. You would stand in the dark and stare, wishing that you didn’t know her because then you could wonder about her. But she always saw you and grinned, opening the window: “Come in, creep! Hate it when you watch like that.”

She made bitter black coffee and let you smoke your lucky strikes at her kitchen table, kindly lecturing you about your bad habits while rapidly knitting itchy black scarves. You had a collection of these hanging over your bedroom door, identical except for the little holes where she dropped her stitches. She was also fond of puzzles, usually with puppies or unicorns. She microwaved frozen dinners, reminded you of your deadlines, tried to make herself indispensable. She offered you houseplants so you’d have something to care for.

“Miss Moneypenny,” you called her.

Sylvie had curly dark auburn hair, a large mouth, freckles, black eyebrows that were straight dashes over dark eyes. Her body was cartoonishly elongated. She usually displayed her alarming thinness in short dresses that resembled school uniforms, or tight black sweaters and leggings.  She passed for a ballerina except for her bad posture. She claimed to be very self conscious of her body, but you could never figure out if she thought she was too thin or too fat.

“Isn’t this disgusting?” she would ask, lifting her sweater to reveal countable ribs and the lower halves of her small breasts, like pale velvet pears.  She’d gaze sleepily down at you through half closed eyes. You didn’t know what to say. All her clothes seemed so scratchy and uncomfortable, leaving red marks on her skin. You wondered what she’d look like in something soft and light. It occurred to you that you had never been anywhere with her outside of either of your apartments, and you wondered if you’d see her differently if you were to take her out to a movie or a park.

If another spirit had lived in her body, she would have been so beautiful, but the air turned shrill  and prickly around her. There was a feeling of always keeping your distance even as you stroked the tangles in her hair, and she extended her legs across your lap while watching tv. Part of you liked comforting her like this. But you felt closer to her when you were watching through the window.