Confess

Why are you reading this?

Who are you?
I have so little to go by.

You were hurt once by a friend or a relative you trusted, weren't you? Even several times.
And you had a close brush with death at least three times in the last year and a half, did you not ?
I am a little torn.
I am tired of this. I want to rend the veil between us and tell you everything. But I need you to understand who I am before you know what I am.
For the first time in my life, I won't hurry.
I will wait for you, lead you from beginning to end, leashed.


In all order there is an element of coercion, scissoring through the intricate weave of thoughts, forming its own crude form, brutal associations. The more dispersed the order, the more it bares the true grain of thought.

You could take a walk in my mind, in any direction, without guidance. In the center stands a house leaning against itself; here they burn cinnamon night and day; the air is red with cinnamon clouds; cinnamon seeps into the pores. Dreams tumble out, disheveled, satiated, drenched. This is a choice.
I would prefer you stick by me.

What do we know of the true grain of thought? When I was a student, I once took a stranger on a table in a lounge. In the alcoholic delirium I remember her eyelids shivering, mouth upturned, her hair spread against a flurry of puzzle pieces that we had ruptured. The puzzle was a half-finished series of blue waves and the pieces were pushed away by the movement of her thighs, her arms, her cries. The waves moved, dispersed, fell off the edge onto the floor, pressed into her back. After we had finished, I sat tracing the curious indentations on her skin, shapes that resembled birthmarks or something spilt. Months later, I met a woman. As the night progressed, she acted more and more familiar, uneasily so, and, not being able to place her nor willing to admit this, I eventually entered her without solving the mystery. Puzzled, I probed further the next morning and found, by a chance remark on waves, that I had unknowingly slept with the same woman twice; I had completely failed to recognize her. In daylight, sober, I saw her and decided, privately, that the memory of that first encounter would have to be part-orphaned, solely mine.

So I would have this book also entirely mine, free of her intrusion. It would come in a box, the paragraphs in puzzle pieces that fit together. The pieces would be interchangeable as we are interchangeable, since we are a flux, a motion, a clear loop of dice.
Each time, it would form a dazzling design, a mosaic of heat and light unobscured by chronology or intent.
You would read it again and again, from all angles, let it fall from the table, watch the waves make their slow progression across the floor. You would make love on top of it, pushing the pieces into a new logic, engendering a cry of pleasure, the pleasure of words and paper, the abrupt pleasure of entrance.


You're wondering ---why this senseless brutality?

Do you pity me--caught in this narrowness-for no one disagrees that cruelty, however many forms it takes, is, in its dimensions, unyielding, geometrical, narrow---and that pain, too, is long and starved.

I think pity is the most appalling human trait; it stands upon the delusion that you could afford to pity someone. A repressed contempt.
But nothing exceeds the pleasure of pity; contempt is too rigid, pity has its own wet texture. You think I'm sick, depressed, lonely. Well, swim. Spread your mind wide. Open up. Floating on your back, legs kicking water. I like that position. I'm going to cram myself inside of you. Now listen to me, listen hard.
You come up once, twice.
Pity----any sort--will always kill you.

I am not saying that you should refrain from indulging in it; I am only saying that all pleasures have their price; the cost of pity is unexpectedly dear, perhaps too much.
A hidden tax.
Because you are also paying the price for your smugness, the delusion that you could afford to pity someone.
A luxury tax.
Because you realize, very soon, that you can't even afford it for yourself.

So, I want to ask you something.

It seems your curiosity is stronger than disgust or fear; why are you interested in this---snuff? To this invasion---you offer no resistance---why? I say I will hurt you and you are curious. Is it disbelief? I want to hurt you---and yet you follow---go back. The portal ahead of you is shaped in the shape of desire, an oval light. You are now threading the needle with your soul: you are going through the zero with me. Come.
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