Below is an excerpt from a November 2017 journal entry.
broke up with [Redacted] last week. that same day, a strange blemish on my face—not quite a zit, something hardier and smoother and resistant to popping for months and months—burst open, expelling something white and solid and smooth, like an egg yolk. it healed a few days ago, my skin the same as before it arrived, as if it had never been there.
[Redacted] is my storied Bad Relationship. We all have one. Art that comes to mind when I think of her include Tár (2022) and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, for reasons that probably don’t require a lot of explanation. Less obvious are Dennis Cooper’s Closer, God Jr., Ugly Man: Stories, and The Marbled Swarm, all of which I read in the months leading up to my announcement to [Redacted] that I was moving out of our apartment, which was really, for all intents and purposes, her apartment.
Though Closer was a revelation, I needed to check my reading list to confirm the Coopers; 2017 was a fuzzy year. But I didn’t need the journal entry to confirm the blemish. I think about it not infrequently, because I like signs, and things that lend themselves to interpretation as signs. I removed something repulsive from my body on the same day that I removed something violent from my life. Very tidy.
Personally, I don’t think that imposing significance is all that different from finding it.
Earlier this week, I woke up in the middle of the night to pee. A cockroach, big and sensitive, looked up at me from the bathroom sink. It’s the kind of insect that makes me feel like a cartoon elephant, so fearful of the mouse that it leaps onto the table. The blighter almost knocked over my almost-empty bottle of hand soap while fleeing the scene. I haven’t been sleeping well anyway lately, but that little nip of panic ruined the rest of the night for me. I was up until 4 am.
Yesterday, something happened that made me sad. When I got home for the night, I worked in bed for a while on the new book, Casanova 20. Then I shut my laptop, turned off the lamp, and closed my eyes.
Not long after, I woke up. I didn’t have to pee. But I did have a feeling.
There are surely thousands of cockroaches in my building. Who knows how many wait until my apartment is dark and still to climb into the drain of my bathroom sink, for water, I suppose. But I knew that the motherfucker in my sink was the same one I had seen a few nights before. I knew that he was back, waiting for me.
Insects—with their associations with filth, contagion, and overwhelm—factor into my mental health history in such a way that developing a relationship with an “individual” bug is never a great sign. But now that the cockroach had an identity, he and I had a rapport. Because I knew him, I was less afraid of him, though my disgust was just as extreme. But I was also more determined to end his life. He fled again, but waited on the underside of the sink, watching me. I knocked him to the floor and crushed his body with the dustpan. His corpse went in the toilet. Before I went back to bed, I bleached the whole bathroom.
When I was back under the covers again, I fell asleep right away. I slept all night.
There’s a sign there. What is it?
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