Headless

hm. haven't written in a while. just a stream of something

on the nights i wake up in the unholy hours and can’t go back to sleep, i wish to decapitate myself and throw the body parts out the window. it’s not a violent instinct or anything like that, it’s a soothing process for me, the slow, methodical disassembling of my limbs in order to divorce them from my responsibility. i start from the feet to the ankles to the thighs and hips, up to the torso, the ribcage, then taking a detour to the fingers, the elbows, the shoulders the chest, the neck. then the head. the moment before i chuck my head out the window, i perform a feat of astral projection, traveling my awareness out of its skull-sided prison and watching the orb fly out of the window and land in the soft grass of my neighbors garden.

am i my head?

am i my heart?

i am lying in the grass with my ear pressed against the earth. i see a hydrangea bush, the tines of a rusted rake, a convulsing swarm of gnats thrashing against the sky. blades of overgrown grass tickle the inside of my ear canal. without a heartbeat the inside of my head sounds like a seashell.

but in reality it is 4:30am and it’s too dark to see much. but in nonreality a tiny sliver of the moon hangs suspended inside each of the million dewdrops that decorate the sleeping world.

sometimes i think i can stay very still for a very, very, very long time.

a cat pads over and turns me over with its soft paw, and i can no longer see anything.

beyond the physics of the whole situation (but what do i know about science) maybe i’m just tired of anticipating time. there is nothing like having a body that makes time all too real. having a body makes time, I take away my body so i can exist out of time. it’s a strange thing, trying to journey away from yourself in the middle of night, attempting to split the oppressive straight arrow of time into diluted threads that are weak enough to snap. if i split up my body, each district of flesh separate and observing its own information, maybe it will be enough for the everything to turn into nothing. and then i can sleep, and time will end.

how much time has passed in the world of dreaming? in dreams in dreams in dreams that i don’t remember, maybe i completely physically disappear from the world where laws and rules and history exist. who’s to say. how does anyone know that this infinite tired universe didn’t just appear in the space between the two previous ticks of the clock hand. i think, why not just meet with a friend at a bar and drink copious amounts of alcohol and do many lines of something or the other and let a stranger touch me. this way, inside my head i can enter a pleasing spiral that subsists outside of time, something like re-entering the stained glass color that draws out my forgotten dream into the morning.

the cafe i am writing this substack at has a long wood bar with water stains that look like an alien baby with huge head and crazed, buggy eyes. something about this waterlogged baby reminds me that there will probably never be a time when i feel safe enough to keep a child of my own safe. babies represent a warm fantasy, some kind of attempt at redemption over the failings of my own upbringing. and mold. there was a time not too long ago when i literally thought that mold was ruining my life. honestly, i am not certain i will live long, which maybe is why i cannot imagine a real future where i am a mother, it’s not like a suicidal thing, i’m just not sure that the world will not end within my lifetime and i don’t have enough faith in the durability of my body to rule out the possibility that a terminal illness won’t strike me down before i reach old age. is that morbid or does that make me depressed? actually i generally feel pretty happy these days.

there are also evenings where i read two words next to each other and it’s like a wellspring erupts in my head. or like a hot pin slots into a keyhole in my spine, and i am suddenly overwhelmed by the beautiful fragility of everything. I go to bed breathless from weeping and prepared to die.

then, the next morning, i wake up to a text from a friend asking to go to breakfast. i’m tired from a long night of failed decapitation so i contemplate saying no. but it’s nice, positioning friends to stand in the way of sadness. we eat bacon egg and cheese sandwiches in the belly of empire and look at dogs. later in the day, i graze my cursor over expensive things on the internet that i consider buying, capitalism offering me objects disguised as freedom. like my friend standing in the way of sadness, capitalism stands in the way of empathy. a deep howling rage with no beginning and no end is the world’s living engine. the world is fucked, i am fucked. need to be.

maybe living is riding on one long question, floating through time. except i don’t know what the question is. and the question is not really question but a piece of music.

i realize that life is spending a lot of time and effort on a thing with no point. it’s the endurance aspect that makes it impressive, probably. i am also attracted to people who spend a lot of time and effort on things with no point. is there anything more fruitless than the quest for knowledge? mathematicians and scientists must get off on their work constantly, with all that intellectual edging. i know nothing about cause, only effect, so people who devote their will to research the cause exude a deep eroticism for me. knowledge is created by humans, but all the knowledge in the world already exists. what feels tragic and sexy is the compulsion to throw yourself against the void. human offerings in exchange for pieces of truth.

as i writer i do not deal in truth, but lies. fixating experience to language is already a form of lying.

sometimes i wonder how many different faces i have inside me, and how many more i can hold until i burst. at a company orientation in menlo park, i put on a slutty bikini, arrange the small red triangles strategically over my nipples so the perfect tasteful amount of underboob spills out, while the rest of my cohort participates in a company social. i hold a dogeared book of poetry between my fingers next to the empty pool. it’s actually colder than i expected, and i feel goose flesh crawl over my skin. who am i performing for? at this empty hotel full of rich white people who don’t care if i live or die. i watch a maintenance man wearing a low slung tool belt trim the hedges and suddenly feel unbearably young and evil. i want to take off the three red triangles covering my private parts and run through the hotel and scream like a banshee. maybe this is a way of me dealing with the truth i’ve been avoiding which is that i am also an evil minion, not better than the rest of them.

maybe i’ll just stay face down in the garden.