Electrical Lasso

when i was 19 my mother sent me to her british psychic. he told me that i would finally have real partnership at the age of 23. i waited for it, my secret onus, patiently, impatiently, burning through casual liaisons that would pall upon my emotional health. that birthday finally crept up on me, you crept up on me. true-blue, singing, blooming right under my nose, hidden beneath our clever cabal; hitting, hair pulling, ignoring, 1, 2, 3, 4 hours into the train ride, until sunset, when you stopped being mean and we grew into a charmed circle of arms, the cold night folding over and forcing felicity upon us.

in the months, weeks, days and hours leading up to our train’s departure, my personal life was at its most deleterious. atrophy set in, i became a glittering, auxiliary version of myself led along a leash of illusory highs. we stayed in contact by text, a courtship that should have taken months, was a landscape technology had us bulldoze through. in an feverish attempt to slow down our correspondence, i mailed a package to your apartment on magnolia street. i filled a caboodle with hair, sprinkles, a scented letter, autographed photo of Madonna, religious porcelain statuette, x-rated photos, 1997 recording of my mother and i singing ave maria, and 200 dollars cash marked “jess’s trip fund” in pink felt tip marker. (the package, which you never received, is currently in an unknown location somewhere between brooklyn and jersey). i turned to dancing and gambling, carbohydrates, alone or with fair-weather friends, keeping your sweet language near me always with an electrical lasso,

Ruin me.
5:12am 11/04/2007

there was something so dark and something so childlike in my minor pleasures, anointing my flesh with lavender oil in ceremonial vanity, fake eyelashes and chunky earrings, my sweet tours, restaurant bills for twelve biscuits, 6 macaroons, and 3 shirley temples. using candy to seize control of my dwindling serotonin, forgetting over and over how each new tragedy originated in myself, in denial of each pain, each burgeoning sequela. the wild array of men i meanwhile courted, hunted; finally mature, my heart brittle. fantasy was my bulwark in the bloody war i pledged to fight like a boy. on my last night in bulimia, my private food paradise, half of me vanished, a drunken, blue-eyed naïf tumbled out of the men’s bathroom in my place, a french hipster and a lusty virus clinging to her like sickly appendages.

i might have, like so many disreputable girls, re-steered, re-entered ‘the paths of respectability,’ taken a pew in a parish church, prolonging my life by several years, so that i might die in an odor of sanctity; but notwithstanding my mutinous core, my very nature revolted at such self-exile. i fashioned a safety valve: a distorted, sexy violence of a memory, established what was dark as present and real. french hsv2 became my purple heart.

we took jobs in carlisle and santa rosa, alternating between our parent’s households, between our of quadrangle names. my mother’s, my father’s, your mother’s, your father’s, letting the household odors meddle and mix, seep back into our skins where they once settled. my father’s new house with his girlfriend smelled like laundry detergent, my mother’s like organic flowers and silk; the key to each’s door still fit into the other’s lock.

as little as i called you by it, the residua of your real name never relinquished, it staid, ruled over you in each locale like an invisible axis; gav and jess, ben and jess, gavin and katie, katie and ben; my mind darted back and forth through each gateway, lying, leaking out a purer substance if not from what i called you by my lips then by that which i called you in my heart.

because she is the most colossal endangerment she demands from a man his most, and if he has it in him she will receive it.

i cried at regular intervals, the veneer of composure i acted our effortlessly for the company of everyone dissolved around you. these tremors, violent slippages of my quicksilver temper, the horror of their transference unto you elucidated like never before the true dimensions of my routine stumbles, when chocolate mochas, puddings and cakes tumbled me down dark and swollen interior cavities, conscious of my collapse, my higher self observing quietly but helpless to saccharin’s suasive hold. you’d brush my hair softly, whisper, greet me with your eyes when i managed to peak out from behind the veil of my weeping. i had seen this disease in my relatives, in yours, this disease of satiety and dependence. this knowing engendered a soliloquy for one of my possible future selves: she was a shriveled snake of a woman, gaudily dressed, impish and lonely, using a meter to measure blood sugar, effacing herself by the substance that bestowed her first and last pleasure.

when we could, we stole more than names: nylons, medicine, razors, film, diet soda, underwear, batteries, shaving cream, tea, pop tarts. pious living could never deliver the hazard we craved for. you calculated the duration of time we took back for living relative to the cost of each item and our working wage. 1 box of pop tarts equaled .36 hour roller-skating. 1 package of Polaroid film equaled 2 hours drinking stolen champagne huddled under the bridge. we cared less about temporal freedom than breaching that cloak of fear that entraps and limits, that sizzling cattle rod we observed guide venal, tired bodies along the strip in Las Vegas, herd them neatly from one bright light to the next, the brightest, loudest bell, the best, in perpetual spending.

there is an invisible fee we pay to keep civilization hungry & profitable; all the while a moral violence is acted out upon us. like an opiate, conformity and obedience bear forged pleasure, convince us fear is safety and meanwhile, conceal what is a much greater theft.