IV) numbness

“It's true, that people, I've been sad (People, I've been sad) It's true, that people, I've been gone (People, I've been gone) It’s true, that people, I've been missing out (I've been missing out) And missing out for way too long (People, I've been gone) It's just that me, myself and I (Me, myself and I) Been missing out for way too long (Out for way too long) Been taking calls I should have missing out (I've been missing out) Forsaking things for way too long (Didn't take for long) If you disappear Then I'm disappearing too.” 29

29 Christine and the Queens, People I’ve Been Sad (Paris: BEC Music, 2020)

Today is the day. So close and so far away. My body knows it before I even wake. In my sleep nothingness I feel an anticipation brewing in my gut. "Maybe the body remembers what the mind wants to forget.” 30

Regardless of my physicality, time moves with or without me. I must go to work and my boss doesn’t care about my symptoms. I should be in Berlin right now fueling my depersonalizing drug lead fantasies. I run away this time each year. I begrudge the disease for closing borders31 and not letting me eject myself from my reality. Being somewhere without her mark is the only way I can truly escape. I am aware of how this sounds.

The tube is empty on my commute to and fro. The occasional construction or health worker enters and sits as far away from me as possible. I am not an essential worker, everybody knows it. Customer service is not essential work. New York never felt as dangerous as it does here. I say dangerous lightly because I no longer feel fear. I pass through the turnstiles as two men rush me in an attempt to steal my wallet or my fare, who cares which. A police man watches. Don’t get me started on them 32. I almost give them whatever it is that they want. I remember the exact moment I stopped caring.

“here we go…”

An echo in my sister’s pitch enters my frontal.

I lay on an uncovered mattress on her unfinished plywood floor, hands across my chest, begging existence to swallow me whole. I feel her on the other mattress doing the same. I was the last to know. Why is the baby always the last to know? Tumors don’t grow overnight. She reaches for my hand through the blackness; the end of our lives as we knew them.33

30 Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 164.

31 Smack dab in the center of Coronavirus 2020.

32 “No cops, no priests, no criminals”- Helen Coppola

33 Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 199.

mine. Similarly to Riley, Zambreno notes that here is always a definitive moment where life turns. This was

The same boss that does not give a damn about my symptoms fires me on Her Birthday because of my so called ‘aggravated attitude’. I did mention that I have been fired from every menial job I’ve ever had. I do not feel bad about my inability to maintain a smile. If they wanted perfect nothingness they should have hired a robot. L’appel Du Vide 34, call of the void, I finally have a phrase for it. English doesn’t quite cut it here. In present blackness I sit and let the blue light from my laptop reflect.

There aren’t many women existential nihilists. If there are, I cannot find them. Aforementioned, men dominate literature and Philosophy may be the haughtiest of them all. Solanas, often cited as the lady Nietzsche35, seems to think it’s because the human condition that we all know and love is actually the male condition.36

“The ultimate male insight is that life is absurd” 37

DeBeauvoir could also be considered, but many reference her husband Sartre instead. Solanas vehemently hates DeBeauvoir due to her middle class upbringing. I wonder how class eff38 ects grieving. One is considered to have written the Bible for first wave feminism, and the other is only known for shooting Warhol.

34 Tiffany Watt Smith, The Book of Human Emotion (London, Wellcome Collection 2015).

35 Do I need to point out the sexist irony here?

36 Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 3.

37

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 53. Like reverse racism, reverse sexism does not and cannot exist. Women are not in a socially higher position than men, therefore cannot oppress the oppressor.

Solanas calls DeBeauvoir “an overrated windbag” on page 6 of SCUM Manifesto.

38

I’m only interested in philosophy when I’m stoned, which is what I actually wanted to write about. The smoke fills my room as I scribe. Eighteen year old me would be disappointed. There is no direct correlation between bereavement and risk behavior, but I know it exists.

I was gifted a copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild 39 for Christmas a few years before She passed, suspiciously in the same way the author’s mom did. I was such a square that I thought if this ever happened to me (it wouldn’t) that I would turn into a motivational speaker or something (I didn’t).

Drug addiction, let’s call it more like misuse, seemed so far from possible. I had seen it too much, the matriarch was so against it. I honestly don’t remember when I started this habit. It materialized out of thin air post death, I swear. All I remember is feeling baseline, a severely stark contrast to my new norm. “The place where there was no pain, where it was unfortunate but essentially ok that my mother was dead…”40 Cheryl Strayed was talking about heroin, but I prefer the psychedelics.

The drug and dark tourism started instantly. Concentration camps, Chernobyl, I only wanted to be places I could remain in my somberness appropriately. Amsterdam was my first. My best friend Joyce and I made a pact that we would die using heroin, our final drug frontier, on our sixty-ninth birthday. For now, I am basically living like I’ll never get there. “In my youth and sorrow, I was ready to self destruct.”41

Cheryl Strayed, 39 Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, (New York, Vintage Books, 2012) 21.

Strayed, 40 Wild, 21.

41 Strayed, Wild, 52.

Poppy calls me on the phone, she’s been cornered at the local Sainsbury’s. There’s a person demanding money from her, but she has none. The employees watch, I grab my jacket, I bring a bottle of hairspray and my best paper shears. As weapons, of course, I’m from New York… “Help me, give me money, help me put a needle in my arm.”

I wonder what her grief is.