rorschach eyes
Hey! I hope you are all doing well. What a life!
Brief content warning for a mention of self harm.
Do you know that feeling when you haven’t touched another person in days and then it just happens? Maybe they’re passing you a pen in class and their hand grazes yours. Maybe they lean on your shoulder while they put their boots on. That feeling of skin on skin. Electricity. It shoots through you like pain, but it’s not pain. It starts on contact and moves like sound throughout your body all the way down to your toes and back up to your scalp. You jerk your body around just to make it stop. Maybe you scratch your nose. Maybe you cock your neck. Whatever it takes to ground the shock. Live wire. It’s amazing, terrifying, that feeling.
If you look at something and then close your eyes and it’s still there, that’s how you know it’s beautiful. Find beauty in all things. Find beauty in terror. There’s something beautiful in decay, destruction, desolation. Let that beauty be what it is. We cannot know things as they are, only as we know them. Luckily, beauty surpasses knowing.
What a load of bullshit, really. I talk about feeling because I want you to feel. I want you here with me.
There’s this Catholic story about St. Bernadette. She was this French peasant girl in the 1840’s who had a series of visions of the Virgin Mary. The story goes that one day she was visiting the grotto when a spirit came to her and gave her a piece of paper. When Bernadette showed the paper to the Pope, he said he would never read it out loud. Some people believe that on that paper was written the date the world will end. Bernadette died at 35 from tuberculosis.
Early humans would spend weeks in caves. The oldest artifacts of human life are cave paintings. Philosophers of religion say that early shamans in the Paleolithic Age would take psychedelic drugs and paint their hallucinations onto the walls of the caves they used as temples. Often, they would paint obscure shapes, squiggles, lines, circles, but sometimes they would paint beasts. Rarely would they paint one another.
Imagine, if you will, you are in a car. The windows are completely covered in snow; you can’t see anything outside. It’s dark, but not black, just dark like your bedroom at night or the classroom with the lights off. The house in the morning. The car isn’t running and it’s completely silent. You’re hiding during a game of hide and seek but there is no seeker. You’re walking down the empty halls after school. You’re outside the party. This is where sick dogs go to die.
Look at the man in the TV. He’s talking to you. If there aren’t voices in your head, you’re crazy. Morphine, you can’t just come back from that. You go to the hospital and they show you God. You go to the church and all they give you is ritual. I need answers. How many bones are in the human body? Let’s count. When you’re truly cold, it feels like your skin is moving. Somewhere between a dream and reality, I’ll find you there. You’re beautiful in a way I’m not supposed to say. I find myself scrolling through old pictures trying to remember what it felt like to be anything at all. Back on the ground.
I recall a roadtrip with my family and my sister’s ex boyfriend. It was maybe eight years ago in central Florida. We had been driving all day and by nightfall were looking for any excuse to stretch our legs. Outside Ocala, we saw distant lights for the first time in hours and pulled over. It was some kind of roadside fair. The ground was wet and the fair was empty but for a few carnival games, rides, and a helicopter in an open field. I don’t know how or why, but somehow I ended up in the helicopter hundreds of feet above the ground. I remember that distance. I’d flown many times before, but never like this. Usually, I was too high up to feel the pull of the Earth, but this time it was present and pulling. Lights below, ants from up there, etc. It’s not that everything felt small, I could see the curve of the Earth from up there. It only takes being ten feet above the ground to lose all sense of place, one deep breath and you’ve lost time.
We all have our vices. Mine is imaginary people. I find myself scrolling through dating apps almost daily. A little heartbreak to spice up the day-to-day. Fall in love with projections. I need to talk to someone at all times or I forget I exist. Existence is interaction, we’ve been over this. Someone told me I am mysterious. I’m in love with her, I’ve decided that once and for all. I don’t think I’m mysterious, just confused and quite bad at interacting. I need to touch someone. I need to be touched. It doesn’t have to be sex. Sex is nice, but I need electricity. I used to hurt myself to get that, but I grew out of that. Now I destroy myself with infinite schematics, theories on total nonexistence, and relationships in constant decay, falling from the sky. I feel like I’ve lied to you, but don’t know what about.
Imagine, if you will, you’re in a car wash, the mechanized kind. The tentacled brushes are pressed against the windows of the car so you can’t see out. All you hear is machine and water. Somewhere, I am there. I’m flying headfirst into something. All I can hope for is impact. I am still, in place.
I’m still writing that play, I promise. It will be something, I am certain of that much. I want to make something good or something better than this. I want to find beauty in the worst of it. If I deprive myself of everything I love, something has got to happen. I don’t know what to do, I’m somewhere between space and time, pen and paper. I’ll meet you where I meet you. See you down the road, etc.
Montreal is cold. The snow piles and piles. Every day it gets colder and I love it. It’s hostile. I am not meant to be here, I am not meant to be anywhere like this. I need a terrarium. I want to be watched. Feed me from a tube, hook me up to monitors. Tell me how fast my heart is beating, I need to make sure it’s working. I love the numbers in the hospital. I love making the nurses laugh. I’m their favorite patient, I have to be. I can’t take care of myself, where do you learn that kind of thing? I asked my mom where she learned to be a mom. She told me she learned from her mom. Where do I learn to be me? What a joke, there is no me, only reaction. I adapt to my surroundings, but not like a chameleon. It’s more like ice, water, etc. When it’s too hot, ice becomes liquid. I’m like that, I think, but I’m somewhere between states of matter, in phase. I’m not becoming and I am certainly not the “universe experiencing itself”. I am a reduction. I hate philosophy, really I do. I participate only insofar as I need to in order to find reality. The TV is too far away, I can’t read the words. What’s going on? What the hell does that even say? When I take my special-fit contacts off my deformed eyes, I see more of everything. Kaleidoscope of confusing forms. I hate speaking like that. It’s all everything all at once. I see your face, your eyes, mouth, I see three of each, four, five, six, countless. I watch a play and I see the whole thing twice. I see you and your reflection. I see you and you again, again, again, slowly losing you as you become everything else. Imagine, if you will, you are doing one of those eye tests at the doctor where they have you stand six feet away from a screen or poster and ask you to read various combinations of letters decreasing in size. You see letters, I see you. Rorschach eyes; you’re in there somewhere, I promise. I squint and you’re gone, but I know now where I am. I’m in the doctor’s office.