Flesh Would Melt

By Anj Baker

A prologue; nothing:

[@2am laying out my flaws on a space in my mind, some space like the roadside motel duvet on the roadside motel bed.

[The rock bottom. (?)

[A last push for independence. (?)

[Independence before (?) choosing (?). (?)

[My suitcase (?) has no bottom, not anymore. I keep pulling out flaws and laying them down.

[I set them all prim and proper, like a flatlay.

[They nestle within the gyri and sulci of my cerebral cortex; they settle amidst the wrinkles of the duvet.

[They are at home but I am not.

[Not yet. (?) One day. (!)]

[(Here? What’s here?)

[I know one’s life is their greatest art but I cannot apply that axiom to my own, because life doesn’t seem like art @ all while I’m living it.]

I try so desperately to be Good but my soul stays paper-thin.

Flesh is a white blaze along existence’s moon-disk. Flesh is solid and good and it is just as much as our souls, our souls made only of finite, quantized neurotransmitters, but my flesh is unwarranted and undeserved.

[Meanwhile, you underestimate how vital the fact of your existence is to me. When granted confirmation of your continued existence, I feel- not happy, but like one deep breath that fills the sad, starved very-bottom of the lungs, in and out and gone.]

On this day, I’m at a point of despising myself where I wonder why I’ve ever dared to expect respect, ever dared or dreamed or expected to be human. The space inside of me feels pale and empty and hollow- like a white sand cave, a barren womb where thoughts cannot take root, where feelings go to die, an elephant graveyard for nobody.

Everything I do for me, as me, feels like a diversion, an action performed for a mind and body together devoid of a soul.

At this point the next step is presumably to dissolve into a pile of dust.

[What is it? Desire? That pestering, lingering desire? A body in the doorway?- come, go, do something, please. And you don’t care what happens after- and you don’t know if you even really want to- but what you want is catharsis- for the world to tip back into place.]

“Forgot to tell y’all Saturday I went to some nice girl’s 21st birthday party and I smoked an herbal cigarette in my friend’s car in the dorm parking lot after while jamming to ‘Rock Lobster’ and we drank absinthe from the bottle and went up to my room and ate some of my roommate’s Oreos and did mindful meditation.”

A Mood:

Waking up painfully early the Monday after your own 21st birthday weekend. Trying to sit up. Getting sick to your stomach. Lying back down. Remembering how it took you forever to fall asleep last night because the only things you could feel were whiskey residue and vape smoke down your insides, acid reflux, and the accompanying deep, deep discomfort with being alive and corporeal, a pulsing, living thing. All you want is to go back to sleep.

Another Mood:

Waking up in the middle of the night, convinced your feminine body is a farce, a grand cosmic joke made even worse by the parodic nature of your assigned iteration of physical sex. You don’t deserve femininity and what you have is malformed, disgusting, heinous. Your existence is natural and yet it is blasphemous. You wish you could explain your deep, molecular discomfort with corporeality, but nothing comes to mind, because it doesn’t seem like you have one.

Yet One Mood More:

The Duchess of Gloucester’s monologue to John of Gaunt in Act I: Scene 2 of Richard II.

Sensuality in prestige television.

Homemade cherry pie with lattice crust top.

Early ‘70s heavy metal culture.

The kindness of gay teen movies.

I close my eyes and the world stretches out before me, like a white rock beach at low tide, a skeleton of a beached whale in the distance, a creature with lungs that suffocated in air. The skeleton is bleached white and the horizon is bleached white and the sky above me is the nondescript color it’s always been. To the ancients who didn’t see blue, the classicists say, just dark and light and red, like blue was the color of the world itself and the nothing it was built on- so commonplace so as to not even have a name. Blueness was irrelevant. Imagine the first blue-eyed man. A man with voids where his eyes should be. Tiny tears in space and time. Tiny tears on his cheeks, down his face. And the horizon is still bleached white, but my bones are not- they are wrapped in Earth. The white rock beach at high tide- the white rock beach wrapped in water.