U ; I

Please, star in our lives, When the star comes down To sing at our feet We give a title to ourselves -Haley Brooks Salvador

1.

Remember how sounds sound when you haven’t heard in a million years? When you lay on top of your covers and your cat leans into your side and drags his tongue through his fur. When the heater kicks on with its little push of air and asserts woosh and the button on the phone goes beep or it goes buzz or it goes the oddest of all, hello? Do you think you can remember what a semicolon sounds like, can you remember it over the woosh asserting itself, over the buzz you feel in your left arm, weak as it moves over the button or your head that silly balloon held together with a rubber band, held too tight like the constant moment of impact to the base of your skull, now and now and now.

Have you heard of Objet petit a or have you heard of la petit mort or didn’t they ever tell you they are the same thing, the little death, and the black hole? The nothing that imparts a push, that assertion, that lack goes on and on, and now, where is the desire here? When we get it, what will we do with it, or do we have it, a constant present, the hug of the rubber band, a mystery that turns to a mystery and then another mystery and so you ask your roommate to ground you. You say to him: Is Cheryl dating Archie or Jughead or that girl? Oh god, what’s her name? You know her. You know, you know, the serpent?

If we had the little a, if we held it in our hands and watched it in the constant present, the single catastrophe, if we watched it grow up, stretch in our hands until its limbs were fully formed until it went from 300 pieces down to 206. Were we the angel on the edge, the thing that sees a million years as a blip, that hears both the stop and start as one, that watches the present happen again and again and always because everything was now, everything is rubble at our feet, is nothing but a flash before our eyes, would we learn like it does our own invisibility?

If you were to take that fully grown a, with its spindly limbs, with its rhizomatic branches, its interconnections, its root-like grounding, its horizontal reach across and stare at it and see it fully happening; it would be that flash, that moment of catastrophe, it would be staring into the stars and understanding the braille that god left across the sky. Reading the words written in the points of light that desire to blind you, knowing your existence is the only reason for that desire; You become buzz, or whoosh, or sound like a semi-colon. You become the invisible lack of, that produces the desire, the stopping and starting place. The essential need to have stopped to continue, to continue to stop. Isn’t that what we all want, to be two different points all at once, to stop and to continue at the same time, to be vertically stacked; self on top of other self?

Which now are you: Are you laying in your bed on your Romanian down feather pillows, on your “hotel quality” duvet, on the stained memory foam mattress you found in the basement and put on top of the other one that was hard as a board? Or are you asking your partner: Who doesn't know what a duvet cover is? It’s a cover for a duvet, and they go, Ok but what's a duvet? And you roll your eyes and the lady at the bus stops laughs. I know she laughs because I laugh because I saw you there smirking and thinking it’s wholly ridiculous to not know what a duvet cover is.

Ok Reader, yes I am talking to you, or I have been talking to you or I have been talking in you, though really it doesn’t truly matter, it is all the same. Reader did you know you could hear me even with your fingers in your ears? Did you know that in the midwest summer when the cicadas scream you can hear Jupiter like this too? Now reader I ask you to stand. Are you standing? No really, do it, now. Stand! And I want you to take both hands and place your palms over both of your ears, now I want you to woo- with a soft whistle, and then -shhh like to a child. Reader doesn’t it sound just like a semicolon: the universe and you?

Now repeat after me:

I have children. I have many. If you were to go out on a clear day you would see one. If you were to go out on a clear night you would see all. If you could learn to see them as a full picture To read them like braille which is as I’ve always intended You would be struck down Become rhizomatic Stretch yourself horizontally. Remove the necessity of your short memory. To know things are a construct is also a construct. To be lack of sign and signified. To be Object petit be.

That is: that which is beyond the void. Past the desire to desire. Past the first propellant. Before the before. You get the carrot. You make the leap. Crack the lens. Don’t call the construct a construct, don’t call anything at all. If you can never undo your human essentialness, never separate yourself from the idea of the body, or learn what’s more than your electrical synapses, you have never been the universe. You had not stretched yourself into the black space between words or between stars or blinks or breaths. No one had ever told you how to do this, had they? Now that I have removed what you lacked what else is there to do?

You looked so comfy like that I know I shouldn’t have bothered you. I know I shouldn’t but I always do. Where are you sitting, are you reading in a cafe? Are you allowed to do things like that again? Do you know what I mean by you? Do you know what I mean by again?

What does it feel like to be the void? I am talking about the actual universe. To know the great catastrophe is only always over? I have no desire to watch you pretend. I am not asking you to become a sign or even the thing signified. What could a word possibly mean by “itself”? I imagine you are shifting slightly uneasily in your seat now. That your brain for a moment has recognized the pressure your weight is exerting on the chair. I ask that you are the becoming. I ask that you relax and allow your eyes to unfocus the way those pop-out picture books so popular in the 90’s and 2000 asked you to do. Bring these words up close to the tip of your nose and then pull back slowly until the picture makes itself clear. Don’t worry I’ll wait. Go on ahead now. Go on!

2.

The attempt I am suggesting you make with me can be summed up in two words: stay awake. I have asked you first to awaken, to see what you are aware of now. You are aware of continual change. Besides, you have felt, in one way or another, a need to become something which you are not yet: but it is even possible that, not understanding me well, you say that you feel nothing of the sort. Even so, you can experience, if you accept passively the conditions being imposed on your consciousness, that you are asleep. Awakening is not a state; it is an act. And people are much more rarely awake than their words would have us believe. -Rene Daumal

I followed her through the streets, dipping under trees. Anywhere would have been safe because it was alive until she wasn’t. She’s still there in the trees, we walk up that path but it doesn't matter to me. It doesn't matter to me that we smoke salvia and I feel exactly like a big red ball but she laughs and laughed and drops quarters into the clear glass container that the bus held and I follow her through the houses and around though I am 27 and she’s 14. She stopped still, and stayed, but I keep going and I don't know why.

The car is beige and it slams both sides, both sides on and off the freeway. I watch the blue powder slide up his nose earlier, far earlier and he didn’t know I would walk out of that car. I know I walk out that car so there was no other option. He drives us ramshackle, drives us broke. Down to the place she never got. 19 not 14, not thrown through walls but gone. Thrown through walls is better than how she moved through cars. He held his hands on the wheel and drives and we be her, stop, never stopped not when I’m there. I wake you up and say do you know what you did. Look at your car. The axle is broken and the thing that holds the wheel is spinning freely. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be her. Did I bury that child alive?

“My fear its not that I’m a fucked up person but that i am not any 1 single coherent person but I think all the time about how when u try to “still” your life to look at and try to comprehend who u r in that moment in time it’s a false image, a utopia but honestly for me it’s a dystopia, so i fucking hope it’s a false image. It makes me like low key panic because it reminds me of a past [me] who had his own thoughts and feelings intrinsic to him. And it makes me feel like… oh shit is that bitch still in here? I thought who i am now was just a natural evolution and development of who I was then, but maybe it’s just layers over layers, which means I buried this poor child alive??? And clearly he exists in there, operating and feeling and thinking just as he was then, unchanged. But then it’s like.. Ok wait does that mean I’m as disposable to my personhood’s trajectory now, as I was then? IDK i’m almost scared of my own self, like a survival instinct for my psyche. You know what I mean? Like, me today is actually the castle built on top of the cottage, not an expansion of the cottage. I literally have an established house rule that [no one] is allowed to remind me of the linear passage of time.”

Sent: Saturday, September 8, 2007 5:35:33 PM Subject: hey, babe whats up hey shak,err kari,errrr i feel sooo bad i cant remember wich is the one u like and the one u hate im sorry! =[[[ uggg so today has been interesting for me hows ur weekend been for u? i miss u sooo much its crazy idk the next time i can possiablly see u ill be 17 its crazy ive been really wanting to just call u one the fone latly but i kno i cant haha its just stupid me right...ahhhh idk whats wrong with me latly all i feel like doing is crying all the fucking time it like like ALL THE TIME its fucked i dont get it im just all emo latly i need to talk to u amd to hear ur voice say i’m being stupid silly just freaking like i always do. when i cant go to anyone else ive always went to u and now ur gone im breaking and all i want to listen to is sad depressing music that doesnt help me feel any better idk i want to leave for a month or soo and not talk to any of my friends from school and just cool down and chill but i cant and even if there was a way id never be allowed and couldnt anyway i cant leave my friedns there my life support but its all going hay wire and im tripping idk i cant put this in to words its fucked up im trying to explain to u because u always no what to do but idk if even u can help me get through this one i hope u read this letter even though i know its fucking hella long but i just need help

plzz help me u always no what to do??? Please?

“Ok here’s another one. That's the thing. There aren’t any issues everything’s fine for once. I’m EYE-EN stressed because of school. So much going on but other than that, I can’t think of any EN-EE thing that's would make me act like this DOT DOT. I stayed over at Natasha’s til like midnight last night and then walked home. That freaked the crap out of me but it was the most fun I’ve had in so ES-OH-OH-OH long. We didn’t even do any EN-EE thing we just watched tv but I don’t know AY-DEE-KAY, it helped and I don’t wanna DOUBLEYOU-AY-EN-AY listen to happy music it makes me wanna DOUBLEYOU-AY-EN-AY cry for some reason I don’t know, AY-DEE-KAY AY-DEE-KAY AY-DEE-KAY what's wrong AR-OH-EN-GEE with me I wanna DOUBLEYOU-AY-IN-AY go back to carefree Jennifer, how I was 3rd through 5th THREE-DASH-FIVE grade. That’s what I want. Not the mess of a person I’ve become. haha you YOU know KAY-EN-OH what’s funny though TEE-AITCH-OH? I’m exactly what everyone wants me to be. On the outside I’m perfect for my mom and smart for my dad and everything else I do for myself and everything I do for myself is exacly what everyone told me not ALL-CAPS to do I want to be stupid and do somthing that’s not like me. I want to let go of all the fucking pressure and stress and shit I don’t know. Isn’t that sad and also hilarious? It’s like I don’t even remember talking like that. It’s like who is this girl?”

3.

If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep. -Andre Breton

And she just dropped; I never saw her, I never saw her. Just a blackness. I am holding a pomegranate. I squeeze and my blue button down is covered in specks of bright dripping red. Harder and harder. Someone shakes me and eyes wide I look up, their eyes say I am screaming. Was she screaming? I am covered in dripping bright red. A soft bloody crushed corpse laying leaking on the floor. The group to the left all turn and looked at the same time. pupils wide as saucers. They try and play catastrophe but they can only pretend. From inside they couldn’t stop her. The girl ran straight off the balcony and kept going. I assume I did the same.

I follow like a dream, her life shining after it was snuffed out and we snuffed out but everyone unable to see it, the fabrication, this I shining brightly. She knows it’s not there, what is waiting, what already has always been. You are just burned into the insides of their eyelids like those color changing pictures with the dot in the center. “Stare here for 45 seconds and Jesus will be in real life color and not black and blue.” Events like dominos. tick. tick. tick. they all fell. one event leading to the next, the girl, the car, the deaths. I watch over the single catastrophe. Watch hers surrounded by the little deaths. five, six, seven of them all at one and room for many more.

I spin. Blur. Swan dive. I know you can't anger invisible people. I know, I know they don't exist. But she died. The dirt is still under my nails, I can only watch her with the audacity to pretend I’m fucking real. Knowing what comes next.

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Georgie Fehringer

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