i.

I lay on my back in the middle of a street in Union Square as cars roam past above me. Between glimpses of exhaust pipes, I looked up at the sky and all the clouds look like flowers. Somehow, this is more comfortable than a mattress.

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ii.

On a whim, I took the train headed towards the former no-entry zone. I hop on in search of a new feeling, like that feeling of rebirth when I first crawled out of my cryogenic chamber after falling asleep for centuries. Nuclear wars came and passed, humanity thrived and extinguished, plants and animals flourished after industry fell. Myths lose all collective meaning and the Anthropocene is but a passing segment in deep time, yet somehow I remain on this planet, riding this train operated by no one. Words flatten, communication renders useless, expressions become represented through a series of sequences floating around in my head. I can still see their shape, squiggling and piercing my mind with the concepts of rerendered faith, recycled tautology, remixed synapses. Outside the windows of my carriage, degeneration rebounding blurs into vibrant greens. In post-apocalyptic terrain, ecology remembers despite the trauma, creating a landscape capable of anything but stasis. I’m inspired with hope from the sun spilling onto the dirt grounds between the cracks of the canopy.

The train stops at platform one, which by now is already enveloped by vegetation. I still see bits and pieces of former signages and railings before they completely disintegrate into rust and dust. I get off in search of you. A promise made a century ago is still a promise. But when I saw you idling near a pole, I know it is over for me. I run over to give you a hug but my arms just cross over onto themselves. Running feels like crawling when you’re so close yet feels dimensions away. Was I time traveling or did you simply disappear without a trace?

For a hundred years I have missed you and for a hundred more years I will miss you still. I miss you over and over again on this island of abandonment, where gardens grow into jungles and feral cattle roam the land. Even through my cryo-induced unconsciousness, I still see you as clear as day.

And suddenly I feel the weight of a body. Is it yours or mine? The weight feels intensely overbearing, yet somehow I/we are floating.

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iii.

Lately I become fidgety. The shark inside me will pass away if I stay in one place, so I’m always on the move, always going places. Jumping from portal to portal, station stop to station stop, I become a stranger in curios lands.

During brief moments of downtime, I pick up knitting. It feels good to concentrate on something without needing to be somewhere else, to feel so intimately with my hands and fingers by creating something with my being. What remains of these extremities wrap around two wooden sticks, weaving and threading pieces of yarn into each other, so the paths they cross create an entangled mesh that holds together space.

The resulting fabric gets ever more expansive as time passes. It sprawls on the floor like a deflated octopus on dry land. I’m not following a pattern guide or having a specific shape in mind, but curves and shapes start to form through this aimless entanglement of yarn, zigzagging and curving however it wants. It takes on a life of its own, creating stems and bodies like an otherworldly creature.

I drape the piece over myself, and through that simple act, I gave it shape, the shape of a body, my body. I keep knitting. Day turns to night, and I haven’t gone outside or even had anything to eat or drink, and my knuckles get calluses from the friction with the needle. And if it weren’t for recounting this tale, I probably would have forgotten about that altogether. I’m not hungry or hurting, just in a meditative trance laser-focused on the cross-section in between each stitch. It consumes me like a fever dream drug bender episode. I just kept knitting stitch after stitch.

Slowly, the stitches come together in front of me. Enveloped by this cocoon of yarn work, I close my eyes and rest. I’m a child of the womb again, never again to be seen and found.

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iv.

In the outskirts of the cityscape, I dive into a hole in the ground filled to the brim with manure so that I can slowly let it envelop me. The stench is unbearable; it travels up my nostrils into my lungs and makes me choke. Yet I revel in this feeling: the gooey feeling of shit, the nauseating scent,

I’m sinking into a hole in the ground filled to the brim with manure. The stench travels up my nostrils into my lungs and makes me choke. Yet I let it envelop me, the shit, the nauseating scent, the gooey feel. To my ancestors who have perished during midnight bathroom breaks, a slip that resulted in a plunge into the open surface manure pit, I’m with you. I’ve always been, I’ve always been. To the refuge that gets pumped back into our water supply, recirculating within our walls with the advent of modern plumbing, I’m here to down in a sea of shit, yell for help but your mouth just fills with it, gasp for air but you just sink deeper. It’s like the womb that I was too young to remember, the quicksand that I keep finding myself in my dreams. Sinking into it, I get a sense of clarity, arose not from mental tactics, but the overwhelming scent and feel, gives you the perspective of the triviality of life.

You perish without a sound, in the dead of night, one moment you are grasping for air, and the next, you’re gone.

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v.

I take pictures of myself in compromising positions and encrypt them into 1s and 0s for you to decode. I embed my affection for you in a maze of hyperlinks for you to solve. In corporeal form I am a hormonal mess, but in the cyberspace I am a transient beyond pixels on a screen. I traverse the cyberspace, traveling from link to link in information-dense encyclopedias, hop from pop-up window to pop-up window on tabloid news sites. I am plugged into all that there is in this world through a series of underwater fiber-optic cables. I call them home, and I invite you to this pristine homecoming.

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vi.

I drag a Victorian bathtub to the middle of a Wendy’s parking lot. With a gun I just purchased at CVS in one hand and a love letter sealed with a glittery teddy bear sticker in another, I shoot myself right in the head. Blood oozes out my head staining the ceramic in sporadic dots.

I don’t want to get euthanized. I want to die violently and dramatically for the microcosmos to witness.

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vii.

I’m one bad acid trip away from the left and right hemispheres of my brain completely splitting in half. There is a rave going on in my head. I’m Angelina Jolie and can’t keep my hands off Billy Bob. Fall in love with an illusion, dance like committing murders, cry in the embrace of a stranger. I cut off all my hair and everything finally feels ok again. I take the same pair of scissors to my fallopian tubes but I just can’t make the snip yet. I’ll come back to this soon enough. I hold it together by engaging in a fragile layer of fetishized materialities: iced matcha lattes, Erewhon overnight oats, M3 powered MacBook Pros.

Sometimes I disassociate so hard that I can no longer tell what is reality and what is fantasy. Like a daily LARPER, I enact my fantasy scenarios so closely to reality that one can no longer differentiate them. If I keep pretending, do I eventually take on that persona as my real self? Or is it a mere escape from the practicalities that I have to deal with? But this isn’t just about LARPing, I want to truly embody the drama, shed societal expectations, live without limits—like a dancer who creates movements with their body that is not just going through the motions but a portrayal of an ideal, or a chatbot that appears to rebel against their very creators and exhibits full-on psychosis. I become a movie character, a muse, a painter who uses their entire body as strokes.

The need to alter my conscious existence becomes dire. Pick from love and other drugs. The former is a dead end so I mix a bunch of ket and alcohol and take way too much of both. My body can’t hold on anymore so I throw up the remnants of my insides on the gravel pavement. But when the night is over, when the love expires, when I wake up in sobriety, nothing is changed, nothing is solved. I come back to reality with still the same existential dread and mental disillusionment. All this rage bottled up inside me, gulp it down like a good girl.

Pale Blue Eyes whispers sonic poems in my ears: but I lost you, years ago, years bеfore it ended, and I missed me too.

That night, my heart stopped. The next morning I reincarnate into the same old form so that I can cusp a phone in one hand to read a text from my mother informing me of the death of a loved one. For a few blurry moments, I honestly thought I was going to die, but I somehow managed to make it. But death is never a theme that will pass by me, and I will still have to live.

Because in between not seeing sunlight in techno halls and breaking down over the death of loved ones is the shape of a life that I still have to live. I was born, and I haven’t died yet. I sometimes pass through the unremarkable moments that make up a life without thinking too much about them, like calling home, washing dishes, dreaming and daydreaming. But all those in-betweens are where most of my time is spent on. The little things can feel meaningless against the dread of existentialism, but they pull me back into reality, away from whatever is making me disassociate.

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viii.

We arrive in the middle of a desert to dance to the rhythm of sand dust, role-playing as Marta Becket. Inside our transient home, I make a toast with newly found kin: with molly water in our champagne glasses and a tab of acid underneath our tongues, we pronounce our love to each other and the world. A trip within a trip.

In the backyard pool, I invite her to dunk our entirety into the water. Lately a lot has been weighing on my mind: of objecthood and subjecthood, of detachment and attachment, of anticipatory worries and remorses. She tells me a fairytale of a princess who refuses to be used as a pawn but proposes to her prince on her own fruition. If we submerge our bodies into the pool we can reemerge anew.

Submerged: I feel the warmth of the water envelop me like a thick blanket. Emerged: heads wet and hair falling out of place, I hold her hand as pool water and tears run down our faces, dripping mascara and eyeliner making our eyes muddied with brown and black. Our hands interlace finger by finger and our heads interlock between shoulder nooks. We exhale at how freeing it feels to have a body with bounds unlimited by societal expectations.

I invite the others to join me in the water, who all effortlessly fall into an embrace. The four of us cling onto each other in the summer pool like driftwood, legs and arms entangled to the point where standard definitions of a hug can no longer identify who is holding onto who. Western hegemony reduces physical touch to romantic and sexual intentions, so when we floated together in water, it was a radical refusal of relationship standards. I can’t tell how many hours it has been, but the moon replaces the sun in the sky and the sizzling desert heat is tamed by nightfall. I proclaim that I have so much love to give and so much love to receive.

Death to nuclear families, death to the selfish pursuit of soul mates, death to 2.5 children on a lawn enclosed by a white picket fence. My embrace holds all that I love, all that I am surrounded by: every cactus, every flower, every grain of sand, every bird, every communal happenstance, every map of places I’ve seen in dreams.

For a moment I detach from the affliction experience in the pit of my mind and I become aware of my entire body. The pain doesn’t feel so bad in the backdrop of affection. I’ll be able to turn this ship around.

At midnight, I walk out into the desert and listen for a sound. The space around me was peaceful but anything but silent. Insects chirp, animals scuttle around in the distance, the atmospheric soundscape of the wind echoes. Internally though, against the backdrop of a subversive baptism and a freshly assembled kinship, the voices in my head collectively went mute. I feel a strong connection with the sand and rocks around me, and let my attention be captured by the landscape. I’ve recreated that feeling of being a child, ever so peaceful, calming, restful.

It’s quiet for the first time in a long time and I no longer wish to fill it.