On Sex, Death, and Destruction
vol. 17
***If you don’t want to read or think about my sex life, addictive tendencies, or death, this newsletter is not for you. lol <3***
Well hello there -
As I refresh Grindr on my phone for the tenth time before noon, part of me feels appalled by my endless desire, the other is entirely consumed, incapable of removing itself from what it wants. “I’m just curious,” I tell myself, as to what the local offerings provide. Yes, offerings. Meat on platters. Dull conversation and pixelated photos of bodies half hidden behind phone screens and dirty mirrors litter my phone. It is not love, it is rarely desire or lust. It is mostly carnal, deeply rooted and intimate, yet inescapably distant and removed. To be with a stranger, to share space for sometimes just a few seconds before being enveloped in each other is a strange and often jarring experience. At once, it is the very notion of unfamiliarity, of the impersonal, that makes it so full of need. Yet it is the very lack of intimacy that often makes me incapable of feeling much at all. The inherent danger of anonymous sex too — infections and violence, language barriers and navigating foreign streets late at night — all at once add to the drive and keep my breathing shallow. To be on guard while asking oneself to let go is a bodily contradiction that flickers in front of me like a light I think I can reach out and grab.
When I don’t have sex, I sometimes watch porn. I’m afraid of it, of its addiction, so I justify my veiwing by watching content made by boys l’ve met on dating apps in Los Angeles or stumbled upon on Instagram, the parasocial relationship I feel while watching their chiseled bodies on my cracked phone screen in cold hotel rooms somehow strengthens my desire, building imagined intimacy between me and them. I finish in the sink or in the toilet or in a towel and wash my hands of myself before zipping up my shorts and making my way to the elevator for lobby call. Later during soundcheck, I will find crystalized pieces of myself glued to my torso. Instead of rubbing it off, I leave it, unsure why, a mini act of rebellion, of filth, of laziness perhaps.
So much of our lives today are spent trying to be and stay clean. Sex then, becomes the final frontier of dirtiness. We shower with such frequency we need lotion to hide the cracks in our skin. We bleach our teeth and spray cologne and hide our stench beneath layers of deodorant and detergent soaked clothing. Sex is one of the only times a body is allowed to be one. To expel and breathe and soak in another. To press and pull and grab and nestle within someone else.
When desire is washed out of me, I get tested for STIs and spend a week or so without much need. I delete Grindr and spend my days wondering how I used to be in love, how the fissures inside me are still there, no desire — no matter how sexy and carnal and full of attraction — can fill.
When my boyfriend of almost four years and I broke up, we shared one more hasty kiss in the crazed airport lobby while his parents waited for him in the car, their idling just out of view a reminder to hurry up. “Ok then,” I remember saying with my hands on his chest, wondering why it felt so easy. This moment, the final goodbye, a vision I played relentlessly in my head, was finally happening. Not because I ever wanted it to, but because I knew it eventually would. We made promises in cum soaked sheets in tiny Parisian apartments years before, talking about the home we would build in the South of France and the places we would discover as a couple. I devoured him whole — his scent and his eating habits, the way he twitched in his sleep and how he held me when I tried to roll over in bed. A man I kept only in visions of my deepest fantasies was somehow mine, in the flesh, and I held on for as long as I could.
Now, seven months after watching him disappear behind sliding glass doors, not a single word has been shared between us. I tell myself it’s because we are thousands of miles away, that our lives so quickly transformed without one another, but part of me is shattered, no drunk call, no like on social media, nothing. When we first broke up I felt relief. I was moving to Los Angeles from Colorado and starting a new job that would take me all over the world. I needed to be alone, to feel untethered, free. But after some time, I began to see so many parts of myself I had created alongside him begin to fall off me like browned leaves in winter. Behind the leaves were holes he had left. For a while I tried to fill them — with sex and dates and friends and drinking. With work and reading and spending money. But they’re still there. Some days, I feel full. I am present and joyous and ready to explore. But other days I cannot escape the feeling that I am no longer who I was. I see my ex-boyfriend everywhere. In the clothes he sewed me and the food I still cook, once shared between us from the pot with a single fork. I see him in the music I listen to and in the way I carry myself, he is everywhere.
I now know the holes are here forever. In a way that feels neither beautiful nor dark, I hope they never fill. I am okay, I know I am, but I am changed, warped, different, and I’m learning to invite this new self in. A self who misses the world he created with his lover, but the one eager and ready to learn how to live outside it, too, unafraid.
It is raining in Los Angeles. A profit from the earth, answers to a prayer. The fires have burned so much for too long. The morning the Palisades Fire began, I was surfing at Will Rogers State Park with my housemate. We were laughing at the strong winds, so powerful the spindrift off the waves blew taller and more powerful than the barrels themselves. Afterwards, we found a coffee shop at the edge of the hill when fire trucks – one after another – began to zoom by us with every passing minute. It did not take long for the shop owner to close the store, “My baby is in daycare up there,” he muttered as he leaped toward his car.
The drive back to West Hollywood was an uneasy one. As clouds filled the rearview mirror, we drove past a city bus that had hit a fire extinguisher, gallons upon gallons of water rushing into the street at a monstrous pace, the resource firefighters would soon be begging for wasted on asphalt. I finished packing my bags and made my way to the airport, a symbolic rejection of my reality, a running from it, whether forced or not. I was gone, leaving for Australia. Outside the darkened window of my cramped airplane seat, the hills began to glow orange and red in the distance. As fear tightened my brain and panic itched at my stomach, I shut the window and closed my eyes after losing cellphone service, hoping its removal from my vision would remove it from within me too.
As the fires greedily ravaged the place I just began to call home, I knew there was potential for all my things to be gone, the small duffle bag tucked beneath the seat in front of me my sole remains. I asked my housemate to grab a stack of journals I kept on my desk before she evacuated. My words, written in silence and in fear, in questioning and in joy, felt like the only things worth wanting.
Luckily, after three weeks I came home to an apartment. Many I know and thousands more I do not never felt that luxury, never had that relief or gratitude or peace. No. They still live in panic, in uncertainty, in questioning. Couch hopping, praying, cursing. Tragedy puts life in a new light. It reminds you of its fragility, of our dependence on systems built incapable of withstanding the world humans have created. The reliance on neighbors and the internet and government organizations too bureaucratic to move at any real pace, on people who share very little, if anything, with those running for their lives, makes it all feel like a sick joke. And tragedy, even as it so often returns, continues to be the thing we try and replace as quickly as possible. We run from it like disease, we imagine it is not there, that it has vanished into the past, a memorium to gaze at but not to touch. LA functions like normal, with tens of thousands newly unhoused. We drink wine and eat overpriced chicken and buy new clothes and skip the headlines because they have been the same for too long. “The fires, I know, horrible,” we say, as we search for something new and shiny to discuss – a shooting, a death, a plane’s collision. Fresh, hot blood.
Since the last edition, I have been to seventeen states across the US. I went to Mexico and spent three weeks across Australia and two in Canada. My job has taken me everywhere. Late nights and even earlier mornings waking up in foreign places dehydrated and without sleep make me feel so incredibly raw and, more beautifully, human. After crawling out of my bunk or stretching my legs after a flight, I often smile to myself, knowing I am lucky. My job is hard, it is seldom glamorous, but it rivals perfection.
I walk on stage in empty arenas in the middle of the day and revel in their size and scale. Hours later I wander through crowds of people in euphoria – dancing, laughing, crying, relishing in music and spectacle. Later, I will fold clothes and wheel suitcases to a bus that takes us to the next city. I climb back into a bunk that is at once comforting and horrifying and vanish into a dreamless sleep for a few hours too short. Stretching again the next day, between aches in my shoulders and hunger in my stomach, I cannot keep myself from smiling, still.
I was sober in January. It was hard. Not only because the work I do is surrounded by so much substance, but because in times of stress and chaos, I feel the dreams I have yet to accomplish bubble to the surface. The life and place and perspective I hold begins to slip between my fingers, a slipping that reminds me I may be worth nothing at all. I have sympathy for the self who was full of ambition and drive, empathy for the brain held between my shoulders that worked hard to better understand the world. In these times, I crave the things that help dull the edges of my fear, but in January, I was left to their control.
So I distracted myself by masturbating and reading books about great changemakers. I spent hours on the internet and texted boys who never responded. I pinched the small parts of my belly and wondered, really, what it would feel like to take a pair of scissors and cut off the parts I can fold over my fingers like paper. I listened to melancholic piano music and took sleeping pills before bed because I didn’t want to remember my dreams. I popped pimples on my face long before they were ready and spent too long looking at myself in the mirror wondering what I would do differently if it were malleable like clay.
As I wandered the streets of LA, I was often reminded of the Oscars or the Grammys or whatever other award show was taking up screen time, and I began to feel sick. I was sick because the people winning were younger than me, sick because it felt like the world was more interested in who took home a golden statue than in what was happening to the families without a house just down the street from the ceremony.
I thought I used to drink and smoke to feel something, but being sober for a month has proven the opposite to be true. I smoke and drink and take edibles because what is inside, what I feel and see and envision and wish for is all too much. So when it is, I normally pour a glass of wine and light a fag and go back to worrying about staying skinny and writing. But now, without anything to take my mind away, I stare out the rain-soaked windows and wonder where I would be if all I owned burned to the ground. Back at my parents’ house, or maybe I’d be dead. Unable to let go of the frivolous things like vintage rugs and gold necklaces that I’d rather burn alongside the asbestos-filled walls instead of trying to swallow the pill that is to start over.
For a while, all I wanted to do was smoke. I got headaches, I was irritable, and I searched for cigarettes in my bags and drawers knowing I had thrown them all away. I salivated at their smell on the street and could think of nothing but smoking for days at a time. But the saving grace was the fact that I too was not drinking. We all know this, the beautifully harmonious hell-bent relationship between alcohol and cigarettes. Maybe it is a product of my time living in France, or at my liberal arts college in Connecticut, but when wine or tequila, or frankly anything hits my lips, rest assured I am making my way to the porch for a smoke.
Without substance, all I did was consume other things, and each time I did, I took it with me. David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives follows the AIDS epidemic in New York City, and each page I read added another stone to my pocket. Each podcast I listened to about our fascist president eating away at the facade of democracy in the United States added more sand to my shoes. Every dream I had where my ex-boyfriend held me, or a stranger raped me, or fear froze me, added more layers to my clothing and more rain to my already-soaked boots.
I sometimes felt so fucking heavy I could barely lift my heart to stand. I felt so fucking frustrated and afraid my breath never filled my lungs and my heart never stopped pounding between my head. So I took more Propranolol and asked to up my dosage of Lexapro only to realize I was at the limit already, my nails gnawed too short and my attempt to distract myself too high. So I stared at my phone and covered the dried blood with drugstore nail polish. I kissed boys I did not find handsome and worked without resting because what else was there for me to do other than lie in bed waiting for something bigger to come? So I didn’t. I pushed away and I wallowed deep and refused to hold eye contact. I cried during movies and smiled too big at my boss and didn’t let myself feel sad until I was in the shower at four in the morning wiping off remnants of another man all while wishing my ex-boyfriend would have cared enough to see if my life was swallowed in flames or if I was still alive.
I broke my sobriety a day early, out for dinner with friends. I did not allow myself to feel guilty, or that I had failed. That wasn’t the point. I knew I was going to drink again. The next night I took a drag off a friend’s cigarette and the rush sent chills throughout my body. I soared. But before realizing it, I had ashed the cigarette onto my finger, a hot ember burrowing itself into my skin. I yelped, shook it away, and now, evidence of my love for a cigarette, in the form of a blister, reminds me of smoking – its rush, its delinquency, its danger. The stupidity of it, its sensuality and mystique, and most importantly, maybe, how silly it all feels, being alive and actively killing yourself while feeling fucking amazing.
February was spent without social media. Instead of scrolling, I listened to podcasts, read more books, colored, and wrote on my typewriter. I baked bread and spent more money shopping, but I explored more. I texted friends I would have otherwise ignored, spent more time in front of my piano, and when nothing, absolutely nothing, sounded worthy of filling my time, I went for walks or sat on the couch to look up at the blank ceiling. Sometimes I took a nap or showered or drank some water. It was foreign, full of contradiction and challenge and confusion, and it felt like I was seven years old again, wandering my house on the weekends, looking for a brother or a toy or a flick of inspiration to call out to me, to fill a boredom that felt like loneliness
I’ve been listening to Democracy Now and reading Letters from an American as much as my stomach can stand. I’ve been drinking dirty vodka martinis with three olives and sneaking drags of cigarettes on my porch when I’m home alone. On the road, I’ve been taking Armra Colostrum and feel like it’s the reason I am not getting sick. Zinc pills and throat coat tea with Manuka honey help too, I think. I’ve been wearing a bright green Wales Bonner turtle neck with a grey cashmere sweater, my black Savas boots with every pair of pants I own, and letting my hair get fucked up in the car with the windows down or by the fingers of a boy, because who fucking cares.
I smell like spinach kale pasta (thank you Annie) or Karst from Aesop. Less jewelry for me, save my three earrings and permanent bracelet. More protein, and creatine, the monohydrate kind, and more gay books. The self-published Australian novel The Lodger, That Summer by Levi Huxton was bad, but I read it in a day. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, The Dinner by Herman Koch, God of the Woods by Liz Moore, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, and The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst are a few of my recent favorites.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Phoebe Go, Thrilliam Angels, Mk.gee, and keshi. I’ve been chewing a lot of Airwaves gum and putting blush on my face even though I’m always flushed. Cinnamon in my coffee, french butter with salt crystals on my toast, and vegetable chips with cottage cheese have been staples of my diet. I’ve been burning Coastal Forest incense by the Japanese Oddly Specific right when I wake up, when my laundry dries, or during my shower. It’s in my clothes and in my nose, and I love it.
That is all for now.
Until soon,
C
xx
