Nausea & Nightshade
All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other.
Meanwhile,
I feel Fucked To Death.
For instance, there is something new about my hands, a certain way of picking up my pipe or fork.
I don’t feel degraded or aroused. I don’t feel anything right now.
When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.
I drank three beers and started yawning.
I started to laugh to myself. I must look very ugly right now.
“I hope you’re not expecting, like, profound answers from me.”
Everyone was pretty and well-dressed. I felt uncomfortable.
Why was I talking to these people? Why was I dressed so oddly?
I looked at myself in the reflective window of the train station.
I live alone, entirely alone.
I wondered if I was being driven by a self-destructive impulse.
Something has happened to me, I can’t doubt it anymore.
There was some silence. I wished I had a cigarette.
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out. That’s all.
I held my head in my hands. “I can’t stand these fucking people,” I whispered.
In order to exist, they also must consort with others.
And I thought about how he seemed very nice and gentle, but remembered hearing about how rapists and murderers often came off like that.
I wondered if I should go into his apartment.
I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me--and drag me--where?
I wanted to change the topic, so I recited the question I had thought of to ask him before we met, “Where are we going?”
Then there was his hand like a flat white worm in my own hand.
I wanted him to put his fingers in my mouth, but didn’t say anything.
I seemed to be full of lymph or warm milk.
He asked me if I thought there was anything wrong with what we were doing, and I said that I didn’t think so.
I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.
I wondered when I would stop abusing myself for the sake of new experiences, new sensations.
I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.
“You do look like an art student.”
I was too tired to formulate a response, so I just smiled.
I was once told that I make for a great sponge.
I will be a commodity, and I will be in demand and valuable.
Porous and yellow and absorbent is me.
It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident.
I examined my face with my pocket mirror, but I didn’t trust it.
A little more and I would have fallen into the lure of the mirror.
I thought then that not having to endure that kind of horrible stress and fear was worth whatever happened with this guy.
Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh.
The truth was, I was in pain because I have a latex allergy.
The beard in the air, the neck violet under the frizzle of hair.
I wondered if he noticed the cellulite on my inner thighs.
There is no sympathy between us: we are alike, that’s all. He is alone, as I am, but more sunken into solitude than I.
I lied and said I would email him.
We look at each other in silence for several seconds: he sizes me up, looking at me with half-closed eyes, up and down he places me. In the crazy loon category? In the tramp category?
“Have a lovely trip back to wherever it is you are going.”
I’m going to bed. I’m cured. I’ll give up writing my daily impressions, like a little girl in her nice new notebook.
XXX
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