I always embarrass myself. Sometimes immediately. The words leave my mouth and I want to crawl back into my own asshole. I go silent. I try to rewire myself. Pretend nothing happened. Every second I’m killing the last minute’s version of me because I judge myself so fucking fast, so fucking hard. I thought avoiding chaos was freedom.
Kanye said Halloween is the only day you’re not in a costume.
This Halloween I saw Audition at a Japanese film club in Shoreditch. I didn’t know who I should costume as, so I didn’t. But I wanted to spend the night celebrating something, because I’m really into horror films. I wanted to be somewhere dark where people watch terrible things happen and call it entertainment.
The first sex scene. Asami on top of Aoyama. His eyes closed.
That’s not pleasure on his face. That’s surrender to something that will kill him. His dick is inside a body that will destroy him and he knows it and it makes him harder.
His dick knew before his brain knew. Or his brain knew and his dick said yes anyway.
When the needle comes toward the eyeball I hold my breath and I’m waiting. I need to see the needle break through. I need to see the dimple in the eye’s surface, the leak. I need to be penetrated by this image.
The slow motion isn’t mercy. It’s so I can feel myself choosing, frame by frame, to keep watching. So I can’t pretend it happened too fast. I consented to this violation and then I get to say “I was just watching a movie” like I’m innocent.
There’s a wet spot on the couch next to the phone in Asami’s apartment. I know what she was doing all those nights waiting. Fingers inside herself imagining the phone ringing. Coming before it rings. Coming to the fear that it won’t ring.
The waiting is the sex. The call is just the cigarette after.
I do this too. I come hardest to the anxiety. To the not-knowing. The actual thing is always disappointing compared to the terror of maybe.
When I vomited after the movie I smelled my own rot. Not tonight’s dinner. Me.
I’ve been rotting from inside and covering it with lash extensions, full makeup, a Junya Watanabe sweater and Rick Owens skirt, trying to be the kind of person who doesn’t embarrass herself.
But I am embarrassing. I am cringe. I say the wrong thing and then I want to die and then I say another wrong thing because I’m trying to fix the first wrong thing and it’s like watching myself drown in real time.
The needle going into the eye………..I saw my own eye from inside. The needle coming through the jelly, the light leaking out.
This thing I use to see, to understand, to find love and freedom, it’s just a sack of fear-jelly. I’ve been projecting onto it my whole life and calling it reality.
There’s no position where you’re not complicit. No place to stand where you’re not part of the violence of looking, desiring, existing.
And knowing this is almost a relief. If I can’t escape then I can stop trying to escape. I can sink into the warm water. Let it heat up. Smell my own cooking flesh. Not jump out.
Maybe to be cringe is to be free means: stop killing the embarrassing version of yourself from one minute ago. Let her exist. Let all the rotting versions exist at once. Stop trying to rewire.
Just be the meat in the sack, honest about the rot, waiting for someone to cut it open.
Kiri kiri kiri kiri.
I’m so tired of pretending I’m not rotting. I’m so tired of the silence between embarrassments.
What if I just stayed embarrassing. What if I just kept talking. What if freedom is not the absence of cringe but the presence of it, all of it, the whole rotting pile of every stupid thing I’ve ever said, and I’m just standing there in it, on Halloween, when everyone else is wearing masks and I’m wearing my own face which is also a mask but at least it’s the one that’s rotting.
PSYRAW FLUX 