Each day, I feel my synthetic skin, soft up and down my legs, ripped and scarred around my fingertips, dry where my hair grows, and something about it is hers. I want to disassemble myself, hold liver in my hands, know it is mine, and lick it clean. Taste the craftsmanship. Appreciate copper’s tang. For why else would I be this way but to be loved by her? I do not think these eyes knew what they were meant to see before her. To imagine the heart knew what its purpose was before, unthinkable. The wrist is perfect for her fingers. The cheek was meant for her to graze. The bones are meant to stand strong and to hold soft. I was built one-of-a-kind. Her kind.
Yes, many days I think I was made for her, but some I think that she made me.
Newly granted life, I have found sparks inside of me. Cognitive functions grind and click now. Palpitations in my chest had never felt motive. I have since been given purpose. Her gaze, or perhaps mine on hers, is what is divine. She, a goddess, me, made for her image. I did not love till now.
My patterns, allegiances, neurons, seem programmed to return to her. My body seems to stick at the joints with miles between us. Breath is lacking, only returning with screams of her name. Taste is futile unless it is of her sensibilities. Closed eyes are not a freedom of darkness, they are a forest populated by thoughts of her smell her clothes her hair her teeth her laugh her song. She makes up each bird, greeting the sun which beams at precisely the temperature of her hand—what I would give to touch the sun. The brush and brambles beneath my feet resemble where we have walked before. Conjured, an angel, her form sometimes walks beside me. With every step, flowers spring at her feet. They smell of her perfume. She dissipates into mist now and again, but when I can see her we talk of all the things we always do: ourselves, the stars, where we hope to be among them. I always tell her “if I were next to you, lovely, I don’t think I’d mind the burning.” This forest is the most beautiful place I have ever been, and yet every day I must wake from it.
The making of my bed is a goodbye to Eden, a farewell to perfect temptation until I crawl back, holding my skin and dreaming of her again.
It would be cruel for my creator to give these visions to me. Is it just as cruel if I’ve given it to myself?
I am not a fool. I know Persephone’s agent is not without her flaws, but these are what make her glow. The means of her mind and the stumbles that accompany her have charmed me thoroughly. I do not see them as flaws, and instead the parts of her I have been built to love. There is a golden cavity in my silver chest, just large enough to hold, in just the right shape, these parts I see so clear. I peruse the other creations around me and wonder why their chests lack this shape. It seems so natural to me, so essential to orientation.
It is torture for an automotion to dream of her woman like this, because I know in her bed, at night, resting in her own skin, hearing her own blood fall and turn over in her ears, she does not dream of me. She dreams of great symphonies, colors, and flesh. These beauties occur while I am in that forest, mechanical atrium aching for her.
In her bed, alone, she sleeps as beauty herself.
In my woods, alone, I hold an electric pancreas between my teeth and cry.
12/19/2024
I am once again writing a full page of words to fill time in case I want this shot which some people may say is silly but I say is useful and interesting. It’s cool to see this drive in myself to make things manifest [with an] innate euphoria of [performing] the “grueling”[art process]. I’m thinking back to making Projection Project where I looked into the bright projector—temporarily blinding myself for minutes at a time, and I didn’t even use most of the footage. [I imagine in some way I’ve permanently impacted my vision by doing that. Thirty years from now I may have slightly worse vision because of my decision to reject complete comfort when making that art.]
[...] I seem dedicated to [...] manifestation [of my creations] even [when I must temporarily or permanently harm myself. I am not in a pattern of pain for arts’ sake, but I certainly don’t stray away from it. I have made myself sob on camera by thinking of my deepest pains. I have engaged in my real routine of tracking self harm for a fictional depiction of it. I am willing to be blinded by a projection of the video I made for twenty minutes at a time.] Perhaps [this] is why I’m working so hard on website things even though it’s very challenging for me. I see the means as inconsequential to the eventual goal’s completion. It’s death instinct.
[T]his is the curse of “tortured artist” syndrome, right? [A]bandoning the body for the mind, seems like a rapid descent into rationalism [or] self neglect/harm, and art suffers in that sphere. But I am happy with my current balance because it is an impulse exclusive to art. I don’t endure [pain in] monotony to “achieve” my teeth being flossed. [I am not behaving like this for anything other than what is most important, the creation of art. It’s an impulse for me, I don’t think it is an understatement to say I am addicted to art creation. My engagement with this harm is enduring] the necessary process of art to manifest it. [E]ndure is [the] wrong word, I enjoy it.
12/17/2024
I.
I cannot get Lisa: The Painful out of my head. The title has been in my orbit for years, but I had always strayed away from this one. I didn’t even engage in content about the game; I’m not one to be scared off by spoiler warnings or averse to content that could frighten or upset me, but this one seemed different. Something about it scared me. I had heard it was the “most disturbing game” some people had ever played, others made jokes about the “permanent devastation” the game delivered, and many said it was simply ‘too distressing” for the average person to want to engage with. At the age of nineteen I played it, now I cannot get it out of my head. Specifically, I cannot stop thinking about this image:
This entangled mass of intestines or other entrails flashes when Brad—the protagonist—experiences great emotional distress. This distress possesses a wide range; recalling his dead sister; reliving his father’s drunken abuse; taking the lives of his closest friends; seeing his daughter recoil from him. Regardless of the circumstance this unrelenting, unpleasant, assault of an image is integral to the game. But, in all of my incessant perusing of content about the game, after every essay or video claiming to deconstruct the game’s relationship with trauma, I have found no references to this image. The image will appear in clips of battles or in discussions of Brad’s violent past, but no writer, critic, or artist (or some combination of the three) has extrapolated on the jpeg. It is a harbinger of loss, fury, and violence. At the most heartbreaking points in the game, it is the only thing you can see, painting the backdrop of your environment or completely obscuring the other human beings around you. It is only this landscape your mind can accommodate. Or perhaps it is the default landscape your brain is attuned to.
Lisa: The Painful is full of critical decisions, one of them being the murder of Brad’s father. Brad’s father abused him, throwing bottles, shouting insults, neglecting and abandoning his son, and he is also responsible for the death of our sister, Lisa. After a games long search to find her, Brad finally catches up to Buddy, but finds her with a familiar figure. The father claims to have changed, and Buddy shares that he has been an excellent caretaker for her, but I didn’t believe it. This man is rotten to his core. He sits the same. He breathes the same. He smells the same. He punctuates his sentences with the same dry laugh and wet teeth. Dandruff still speckles his collar. Ice still clinks in time with his shaky hands. His hair is cut the same, only the color seems different. It doesn’t matter. This is the man who hurt me and killed his sister. Does he really deserve to live?
I chose to kill him. I thought that is what he deserved. After what he’s done, I know that if I were in Brad’s shoes…
It’s not like I’d really do it, but you have to understand it's not easy to know that feeling exists. Judgement was secondary to impulse. I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn’t regret it until the game was over and I felt it wasn't better for choosing it. My blood, just like Brad's, is tainted with our father’s. Addiction’s playground is an artery. Brad has Joy and drinks; I have mutilation and nicotine. If my body keeps score then it’s also the field, it’s the umpire and the players, it is the gamemaker and the slave to its game.
Brad does not truly have a choice here. If you choose to spare Marty, he is met with a flash of the entrails, blinding, swirling clots of gore to let pain back in. Marty is the man who put this in me, my body is just reminding itself of its past. He wrote this history, this congealed mass of pain, on the back of my eyelids. It burns when I try to cry it out. Brad kills our father anyway.
II.
This game was more about me than I was comfortable with. The entrails Brad sees haunt him, fill the sky with red flashes, and titillate his most destructive desires. The image that haunts me is different. It is an indigo descent, a sinking mass of interconnected tendrils reaching up, but the weight of water sucks them back down. Sometimes there are flecks of yellow or green inside the shape, they grow and contort with the mass, like an infection, or perhaps teeth. I trained myself with Vietnam War soldier sleeping techniques at thirteen to avoid seeing this picture before bed. Sometimes I see it beneath my skin, crawling and pushing its way through my pores, oozing out in the supermarket and tumbling onto the ground.
The man in the computer screen sitting with Buddy was the same one I was dreading a two hour flight to see. He is the man in my blood I cannot get out. He is the taste of tobacco on my breath when I resign myself to loneliness, undeserving of companionship.
I do not love the man inside of me, so no one else can. He batters against my rib cage, shouting the things he did at three, thirteen, and what he will shout at twenty-three. The noises that follow him—opening of cans, clinking of ice, shattering of glass in recycling bins, clattering of dressers, the slamming of doors—coalesse in my ears and make it hard to focus. Some days I cannot hear at all.
This man inside of me is usually kept a secret. I can imagine those I know reading this, discovering something about me, and sinking deep into their chairs. I am sorry to those friends that this is the only way I feel you can learn this about me, at an impersonal distance, shrouded in “literary intrigue” and the ambiguity of metaphor, the framing device of Lisa to keep me safe from too much authenticity. Please do not pity me, I keep the man inside of me a secret because I am afraid your eyes will look different when you know he is there. I’ve known people who seem to grieve me once they learn there’s another person inside of me. They search for him in my freckles, put their lips to my ear to speak with him, some find him interesting instead of scary. My friends who read this, please don’t change your eyes; he’s been there all along, only now you see why I must fall asleep so quickly.
III.
The final moments of Lisa: The Painful look like this:
Brad has just killed hundreds of men to get to Buddy. His body is working against him, slowly mutating into something inhuman as a result of his drug abuse. Death is seconds away and he stands before his daughter, on his knees, begging her to hold him.
I left him alone.
I didn’t think twice.
Why didn’t I?
I need to go to sleep. Or maybe dream.
12/16/2024