I read another headline, another post, about the ways in which we are facing disintegration on a mass scale. Mass layoffs. More healthcare restrictions. Children being forcibly starved for the crime of existing as a resistance to the apartheid Israeli state. My friend is asking whether she should kill herself. GoFundMe’s for rent, for medicine, for trying to climb out of a hole with slippery walls that, at one time or another, we all have fallen into. Mass heat waves and storms in my hometown. Saturday nights at the club with 10 customers inside and dancers looking at each other with panicked faces trying to be brave. My bar job lays me off. And my relationship of 4 and a half years ends.
I have an art piece I want to do of a girl looking up, as massive whirls of chaos dive deep into her bleeding eyes. I come home from a late night shift, settle into the deep purple of a quiet Oakland midnight. I realize I’m still following a girl my now-ex was infatuated with when she posts photos of them laughing in Mexico and I can’t comprehend the pain in my chest and I hate the both of them, totally and completely, at that moment.
More houseless encampments being swept. I want to call anyone late at night when my whole body’s shaking trying to make sense of it all and I feel immense shame. Because I can see how many of us are teetering at the edge of despair, financial ruin, or both. Despite everything, there are many circumstances that make me lucky. And then there is the bone-deep fear of picking up, dialing someone I love, and hearing the voice of, “Yeah? Nut up, pussy”. It’s three days after the breakup and I’m at a friend’s engagement party. In the corner of a rose garden my body is shot through with pain and wasps buzz under my skin. So I make my excuses, leave early. Down a couple shots. Hate myself more than I thought I could.
What if it was quiet? What if I could avoid the guilt of inconvenience and walk out somewhere I couldn’t walk back from? What if there was a way to let myself disintegrate into polite little ash flakes. I once told a friend if I did it, I’d do it in a cemetery. Someone will come across your body, but it’s more likely that that’s what they are prepared to see. I am nothing if not considerate. One of the last places I went with her, on one of the rare days towards the end where things were all good, was a graveyard with a giant flock of ravens swirling around us in a sunset sky.
I begin to feel angry. The sharpness I’ve become so good at swallowing over the years is far closer to my lips now. To allow myself the luxury of anger and losing my temper is addicting. I tell a man being condescending to me in the anarchist mutual aid group chat to “suck my fucking dick”. She told me once in a thunderstorm that if I died it would be the second worst thing that happened to her all year. She painted my eye and told me she loved me. I walked in on her rubbing coconut oil on another girl’s back, having forgotten we had a date that night. I swallowed everything. I swallow my friend telling me she almost jumped off her roof. I swallow dead shifts and speculation on the future of all of us who perform for tips from a disappearing class. I swallow my mother not knowing if she will ever retire. I swallow everything and try to digest it into action. Into running events, support groups, smiling at the customer who asks why my coworker is talking and not “making [my] fucking drink”. What if it wasn’t quiet? What if I got to leave the mess on another person’s shoes? What if I just said it, all of it?
I’ve taken a step back from talking to most people. I work. I spend my allotted nights with my girlfriend. I message people to schedule the support group I run. My tarot deck has collected dust in my backpack for months. The altar on my dresser remains unlit. Every tether that has connected me to the world, to proof of an underlying truth, feels severed. The web of connection feels like a wire trap. Makeup tutorials and mass famine. “High value women” and clinics shutting down. Nothing about this makes sense but I’m not going to simplify it for you. I’ve streamlined and swallowed too much. Follow my words or don’t. You don’t even have to understand, I know better than to ask. In fact, forget my words. Here’s a shot, forget everything.
I still try. I go out into the ocean on a July day that feels like February, begin to feel what you can only come close to in water under the sky: that widening of the world and the shrinking of yourself. You are the steel-gray clouds and the seaweed tugging on your bare feet. You are the sun streams over the city in the distance. She tells me she can’t meet to talk about our path forward like we planned; travel issues, storms, a cancelled flight. I look out at the gray waves splashing onto the sand. I shove my phone in the glove compartment, run faster and faster to the end of the shore, and dive underneath the waves again.