Category: Life

Is this a good world? The question comes upon me like an unwelcome visitor on a day as clear as unblemished glass. My mood thrashes like a fish in a bucket. Is this a healthy world? To grant myself the opportunity to ponder this question in the fullness it deserves, I pause what I am doing, which is watching an endlessly looping video of a delicate, blue-veined hand with cream-tipped nails spreading green jelly polymer over a broad ceramic tabletop. Is this a good world? Is this is a healthy world? Is this a good—

The shadows of our time speak volubly to the crowds, standing in puddles of light with microphones close enough to kiss. They talk truth; they talk lies. Either way, it doesn’t matter. In the audience, I try to drown out the speech by turning up the chunky dial labeled “white noise” in my mind. I do this more and more, these days. I zone out and find it harder and harder to return.

Is this a good world? Is this the world prior to doomsday? How long can we live here—living too well, at too outrageous a cost—before something reacts? Is this a healthy world? What if it isn’t, and what if we can’t get better? What if we don’t want to? We know there will be no mercy for our behavior in the future. How long can I ignore the signs of the ritual about to take place?

The more I think about current conditions, the more I feel myself come apart. Zoning out feels like wedging my body into a crack in the wall while a storm voids itself above me. Zoning out feels like a safe haven. I struggle, in plain sight, to keep all parts of me connected and, when I fail at that, I retreat into that gap in the wall where I can’t hear the thunder anymore, where I don’t have to negotiate to keep my body together. Looking back now, I realize I have favored this response for far longer than I should have. The zone lives somewhere in me now.

Is this a healthy world? To heal it, I’d crawl into the blood-splattered center of a pentagram. But I’m not the medic. I’m not even the victim. I’m a symptom of the disease.

Because tenderness can be misconstrued as weakness, because weakness means vulnerability, because vulnerability can lead to pain, and because pain reminds us of our mortality, we live in a world that favors pleasure, invulnerability, strength, and ruthlessness over those fragile fragments of the human experience that make this life worth considering in the first place. I have seen how a show of tenderness will make a man an object of scorn, and a woman, a victim of tragedy.

If only you knew how bad things really are. I know when I am in the presence of greatness, not because I have some special ability to discern the wheat from the chaff, but because greatness insists on making itself known. We each, after all, have a receiver attuned to the sudden beauty of a sky acceding gracefully to the hugeness of nighttime. But greatness is an issue of scope, not philosophy. Its bruteness can fall on me like a blow. I walk through the city, for instance, and amid the flickering traffic lights, painted roads, pulsating crowds, I feel the awful greatness of extinction press on me. Nothing about this current life, I feel, can last.

So I entrust my life to art, because it is the only company I know that can soothe me. Art remains the only greatness I can let myself witness without fear or shame. I read books that don’t help me decode any of my present worries, but nonetheless serve to calm them. I watch movies and let myself cry with emotion at their purity—not the purity of their morals, but of their expression. I talk to someone new with as much earnestness as I can muster, because all too often I can let an encounter pass me by without paying homage to the accretion of tenderness in how a stranger extends a hand or moves to let someone else by, and I know we will not get the chance to know ourselves and each other like this forever.

Healing from the past is something more prosaic than it seems. The past is a foreign country and wounds inflicted there don’t fall under any health insurance scheme. I show my bleeding hand to a physician but she can only prescribe topicals that disappear into my skin without providing relief. The pain is dizzying. I try to read her face as she ushers me out of the room, but her expression is flat, illegible, either because she knows better than to deviate from cool professional neutrality, or because I am too out of it to detect the twinges in her eyes that might reveal a reserve of emotion.

Outside, obscenely colorful ornamental hedges line the concrete steps. I briefly panic. I let myself feel the sensation for a moment—horses frothing at the mouth, muscles straining to break into gallop —before crumpling it up in my hand like a gum wrapper and stuffing it into my pocket, to rediscover later. A sparrow vaults into the air and I follow its flight path with my gaze. Jealousy drains me like a syringe.

I know by now that holding a grudge is petty, puerile, and poisonous to everything green and golden in my life. But underneath the bandage, I keep the wound open.

(A successor of sorts to Hypercritical)

A tiger-eye marble rolls slowly down the side of a cream-colored bowl. Orange flecked with gold on white. Anemic phoenix crawling across the snow. The marble comes to a stop at the center of the wide base, where it trembles, tears, and transforms into a teardrop. I flip the bowl over like a top hat in a magic trick and press a finger to my lips. Under the circle of the bowl, the teardrop morphs into something else.

This is what I’m thinking about as I walk the streets of Tokyo, sweat dripping down my back like streaks of paint. My shirt sticks to my skin as securely as if I grew it myself, like a pelt. I can’t bear to look at the sky. White veined with gold on blue. Scars leaking onto the meat of my midsection. Somewhere close by, a better version of me roams. I can feel her presence like a memory of a drive I’ve tried to forget.

The teardrop is a polyester dress. It’s a red ring in the water tank. It’s bad teeth. It’s a pearl glimmering wetly. It’s peach juice dripping down a hairy chin. It’s a carry-on with one busted wheel, dragged around a mirrored floor. It’s the devotion I felt and no longer feel. It’s the devotion that lingers like the flavor of blood. Jasmine in the hot dusk air, and time moves forward like a creature in the water.

“Anxiety” is an ugly word. I think I’d prefer it without the final y. Anxiet sounds like the name of a shield-bearing, green-robed muse from antiquity, someone forceful, proud, and prone to fits of theatricality, but also fair-minded, charismatic, and thus much-loved by many. Rising while it’s still dark, she patrols the cobblestone streets with a pair of swords crossed across her back. In the battle of 3300 B.C., Anxiet leads a legion of one-hundred into a mountain pass, where she dies a hero’s death. Her enemies recover her body and garland it in white lilies before burial.

Drop the x, and the name takes on a sugary, modern twist. Aniet is a cool girl, and she and I do shots, which is something I have to imagine because I’ve never done it myself. Aniet disappears into a crowd that beats like a heart and returns with two silver elixirs, one in each of her gaudily beringed hands. She tips the whole drink down her throat; after a pause, I follow suit. What I appreciate about a light buzz is the permission it grants to be vulnerable which, with Aniet, naturally kind, a master of giving and taking, feels luxurious, intuitive, and right.

With the disappearance of the n, Aniet becomes Aiet, something airy, primordial, elemental. A molecule that was there at the start of the first day of the first year. On the shores of the ocean, no one but she sat to watch the hazy sun rise through misted, strawberry-colored skies. No one bathed with her in the pale waters. No one felt the stinging echo of the future calling back through time nor understood its warning. No one recognized the fatal grace of a world about to begin.

Return all the letters to their appropriate locations and send the word like a dagger whistling through the air. It flies inches past my sleeping face, waking me instantly from restless sleep, before vanishing into the sound of my ragged breathing. I get up, threads of sweat twisted over my back, and pace the cobblestone courtyard, beneath an unforgiving moon. The night is as still as a panther and as long as love. The only person I can talk to won’t be awake for hours. I finger the petals of the cut flowers in a vase on our dining table. No one sees me sit on the couch, staring dumbly at my hands.

I feel the terror follow me wherever I go. The terror is shaped like my mother, aged twenty-nine. Her long hair is the color of hot, oily espresso, of dark deer hides, of tan desert landscapes. On an alien planet, there are sunsets cast in the same shattered amber as her eyes. I turn around and catch a flash of her unsmiling expression. There’s a trail of freckles across her nose—a feature she had lost by the time she became my mother.

The terror tracks me down the street, into the train station and then onto the rapid express. Suburban Tokyo speeds by in a parade of squat, cement-block apartment buildings and forlorn pine trees. The sky is a patch of cloudy blue that appears only occasionally, crisscrossed in telephone wires. I can smell the artificial scent of her shampoo. Something sweet, frothy, approximately tropical. I count the seconds behind each breath—three in, three out—and try my hardest not to retch.

She follows me into a labyrinth made of tall garden hedges. At the labyrinth’s center, inside a pavilion of wood, the terror takes on a different shape. We cross swords under a red sky. I say everything I need to say. I hold nothing back.

When I react in anger, I feel the terror. It’s a wave that the ocean of my memory will always remember. When I break a boundary, I feel the terror. It’s a pit with no bottom. Soupy darkness that coolly eliminates every sensation. No, it does more than eliminate sensation—it erases my defining traits, like acid. It renders me less of an identifiable person, the way wind and time corrode a body into a corpse. In the presence of the terror, I can feel myself actively decompose.

I read my writing and see the terror everywhere. I see myself trying to reason with it, and, when that inevitably fails, I see myself plead with it. All the strength in me can keep it at bay only a little while. Pinpricks of blood dotting the margins. There’s so much anguish in my diaries I shock even myself.

But I feel the terror most acutely when I have no desire to write at all. It’s not that the terror takes away the desire. It’s that it knows how to get me to reject the desire, so that even writing brings no relief. Clothed in cheap chain-link armor, I feel the terror approach, an ochre sun at its back, with its strongest weapon. My mind trembles in total panic until even the panic subsides, and then I am left with nothing. My soldier’s shield lies in pieces in the pavilion. The terror takes the only way I have to express myself and casually, with no trace of violence, snaps it in half.

Her head aches behind her cheekbones, as though her mind were a ball of fire lassoed by cords of skin. She does her best approximation of a gentle smile as her work colleague explains his frustrations with a client. We both have so much more to offer, she thinks, but you’re a work friend and not a friend friend, so I can’t tell you that. We spend minor eternities here, together, entombed in synthetic ferns, dusty glass, and printer paper. We should be honest about our experiences. But there’s a vast and indispensable firewall in place when we interact. I see its flickering aquamarine flames when I lift my eyes from my laptop screen. A warning. We couldn’t be close, she thinks, and still do this job.

A dove with red eyes occasionally travels between them. Beneath its wings, out-of-office, vulnerability is admissible. “I don’t often tell someone the truth,” he says to her, on a Wednesday during lunch. She is ripping up a paper napkin—slowly, methodically, as though stripping the flesh off a bone—in her lap as she listens to him talk about his life outside of work. Beyond the eight to twelve hours that he spends clicking around the vapid and crushing universe of a PowerPoint, he has dreams, desires, many variants of darkness that bide their time before rapidly multiplying and, occasionally, overcoming his defenses.

They talk “purpose.” They talk “meaning.” Two notions as intrinsic to modern life as breath and heartbeat. They’ve had to exile both from their minds in order to take an office job and not die of cognitive dissonance. To discuss them now fills her with raw, divine emotion.

“I’m a negative utilitarian,” she says, somewhat loftily, somewhat intoxicated by the feeling of talking so freely. “I am focused on minimizing suffering and maximizing joy in the people around me. That’s all the purpose I need.”

For almost a minute, he says nothing. He looks up at the ceiling and then back at her. The dark brown of his eyes glimmers with something that is almost tears, the way the sound of a single guitar string is almost mournful. “Don’t you wish for something bigger than just that?” he says, finally. “What are you doing with your one life?”

It’s a gamble of a cliché, but it connects. Twenty-nine in 2023, and she holds her fifty remaining years of consciousness in her lap and, distractedly, thoughtlessly, is shredding them, one by one. Blood on her fingers. Petals in the soil. Something swells. A boom of noise. Flesh beneath a blister. Water approaching the shore. It surges onto the look on her face, and she finds she can no longer pretend.