Conscience Round

20,000 steps in Seoul again, with a pulled hamstring, and in a melancholy mood. But I don’t mind the melancholy much these days; it keeps me from looking at my phone.

Still simmering in a main meal of feeling as the sky outside goes from clear blue to the peachy green-pink of child vomit. I go up five flights; the staircase in the store is organized in a tight square inside a windowless white column. I am crying on and off for the first time in years, because I nearly [REDACTED] to the [REDACTED] with my [REDACTED]. Oh but don’t get me wrong. I don’t love that it happened but I do not feel any real remorse. In fact, had I been able to get away with it, I think I would have hurt her more.

Sit at the panel, tap the sheaf of papers against the teakwood table. Adjust your glasses and examine the typescript narrative under unnatural lighting. She used physical advantage to push me toward and against a wall during the spar; I was annoyed at this attempt to prove with aggression what she could not with superior technique. I saw an opportunity to reply overearnestly, to go a little harder than I knew she could stand. To punish a beginner for thinking they could get the better of me. A sour, savory, aromatic taste of ego, crumbling like oil-wet, salted lemon focaccia in my mouth. We kept eye contact the entire time and I swear to you that if she had cried out or otherwise signaled pain, I would have stopped. I swear it, I do.

The irony is I had tried my hardest, previously, to befriend her, though with a level of almost panicked interest that was inversely proportional to my actual liking of her. No, I never liked her. I find her dramatic, gossipy, fake, performative, criminally pitiable. I tried to quash these uncharitable feelings by attempting to submit them to the pressure test of friendship. The top blew off under the obvious artifice. But I still could have taken the path of self-restraint. Still, I could have let her imagine she bested me. But when she got me against the wall and then smiled (or did I imagine that, in an effort to bolster my version of things?), my charity was blitzed, in a whir, to mixed mush. I could not cope with the outrage at my failed minion. I have a recurring fantasy in which I protect the weak but when push comes to shove, I have shown that I have the drive of a mediocre predator.

Maybe this is altogether too melodramatic. Maybe I am just an average person with the totally average desire to cast all my average instincts in the worst possible light.

On my birthday, tears swim as I sit on the toilet. It’s raining outside; a warm and cold rain. I miss my brother. I miss the life on the other side. Springtime looking to summer through the window darkly. I hate to tear open the cardboard packaging, the glued-on plastic. I hate to smell green mango and ruby kiwi. I hate to see the pink daisies, stems tightly wound in rubber bands. I hate to eat the frangipane filling, the spindly and anemic microgreens. But if you insist, I will. Black spill in the strait, light, sweet and crude.

I know I was born to play the drums. I read the “Personal Life” section on every Wikipedia article. I spin around in a carnival teacup. Skin catching painfully on the scalloped edge when the rotation stops abruptly. Born in the same year as me so technically we could have dated. Died in the same year so technically I could be him, reincarnated.

Traumatize me with something we call love. Draw up the plans. Dotted, gridded, disciplined, bladed in cheap linens. Throw a pebble, sew a shroud. Draw in repeating concentric circles of crowds. Draw the cards and then, theatrically, show your winning hand. Boom! Pow! When it’s all said and done, draw down the intervention and, stepping limberly over arms and legs, say that drawing back was always the goal. Fragment and defragment. Grade and degrade. Seeing this flood of bits, I know heaven to be tragedy, farce, impossibility. Cutesy, even. Kitsch, even.

I’m not sure why I’ve grown so attached to practice. That’s a lie. I know exactly why. Fanatical self-improvement is one solution for shame. There was a time that art would have been the obvious solution but maybe the darkest part of this is I’ve lost both the touch and the taste for it.

Saw you in the mirror and knew from the set of your mouth that we were soulmates. But it’s too late, I already have my person. Saw you in the bloody pool and knew from the look in your eyes that you were my clay mold come to life. How can you dare to not know me when I built you from spit and scree, Galatea? But I’ve grown too cynical to try and live happily now and in a fit of self-pity I slap the surface of the water repeatedly until every surface of my life has gone to waves. I am a hairy, gnarled, black-boned tree emerging from the cliffside, dribbles of salted sap from my ripped bark falling into the hole below. It is meagre solace—maybe even twisted vanity—but know that it broke my heart to refuse you in the way I did.

Love to see the shadow of a crow against the shattered pattern of the leaves. Love to see the moon and its light-limned rim, during this rain-wet mise en abyme. On the train to Ueno, a very drunk man in an elegantly pressed blue felt jacket crouches over me, smiling a little too broadly, his hands moving to cup my face. I look up and see him there, hovering over me, close enough to kiss, for a blue-red instant before he turns away sharply and vanishes through the opening doors. God, the way my blood rose to meet the air, slattern and cold. Catullus, say your last goodbye to these shores.

“Life is nasty, brutish and long,” quips Strawberry, and I laugh and think of every tender, doggy thing dead in a ditch. Dear darkness, I much appreciate your work and would like to know, do you come in many forms?

Spending an uneasy hour pulling my mind out like a silk scarf from a magician’s top hat, then wringing it out like towel soaked in blood. Spending a bloated day watching, unblinking, as the blue thunderstorm sweats above the field of green wheat. Ten seconds until I scream and don’t stop.

Annoyed at my boss and then annoyed at myself for being annoyed. Spending my life as though time were infinite, as though the balance would never know red. But please understand, this is the end conclusion of a girl in a world with no future. Sat naked and cross-legged on the scale, I am weighed against a feather and found wanting, but know this—I already took a look around and found myself wanting more than whatever this is. Let me frown at Anubis in his loincloth. Let me give him a taste of his own bile-black medicine. But picking out nuggets of tail meat from the bone broth, I wonder: Would it grant me peace of mind to give him a piece of my mind?

Planning a surfing vacation and thinking, I could fall terminally ill at any time. Golden pellets of PFAS could swim up my veins like so many tiny smiley fish. I could be a cute casualty of modernity. Anything could shatter the shadow of the law. Any girl born of man knows what prayer is for.

Walking an hour and a half to practice, three times a week. Writing lines in my mind that fall under the gears and then blur to smears of oil in my shoes. Examining the pools for tales from the grain. Crack open the diamonds, grind them back into blood. Thank you for your letter, so lovely to hear from an admirer. In response to your query, what are the forms of darkness? Oh baby doll, there’s only one.

In Eulji-ro, on a purple winter evening, my mouth full of baozi, my mind full of the New World, I hear a girl say, plainly: My mother is always negative and my father, passive-aggressive. I chug water from a tiny paper cup as she continues: We’re all afraid of him. My chair is turned away from her, so I try to conjure her face in my mind. All I see is orange neon, the snot on my jacket sleeves. I burn my tongue on a mouthful of patty.

“Now that we can do anything, what we will do?” I read aloud from the back blurb of a book on modern design. “Nothing,” Strawberry replies immediately, in his frank, declarative way, and in the skinny aisle of a half-abandoned bookstore, under awkwardly bright lights, I cackle with derisive joy. Judgment is the only way to survive judgment. I can’t explain how truly painful I find all of this.

The punch is not the punch. The blow from the left is in the pull of the right. The kiss is before the touch. Do you see what I mean? It’s all in the set-up. The brain is a blade and I whet it on blood, saliva, whey protein milkshakes. I talk in circles, in squares, in pentagrams, and in all kinds of perimetered gardens. I am directing a movie in my mind and I keep my lead actor at arm’s length.

The lever of my life casts no shadow. Here, the Martyr said: How to love is how to react. Walking back to the business hotel from the restaurant, I read the plaque and wonder at the aftertaste of history. The eve of war over a basket of hamburger and fries. Guessing at motive by reading lips. All my affection, attention, intention, reduced and evaporated into a chunky, failed sauce.

Eat with your eyes, shit with your hands, love with your phone. Sleep when you’re dead, die when you’re young, dream of things beyond heaven and hell. Devour your son, Horatio. Your body wants no legacy.

Returning home at night after dinner to find that you, my old familiar, have been here. You have left marks on my door and tablecloth. I make my way through the house, trembling all the while. Trilogy of similar sensation—fear, exhilaration, derealization—playing up my calf and thigh as I enter a parade of dark rooms and reach for the light.

Double date with my double life. She sits across the table, straw idling in her mayonnaise and moonlight-filled mouth, and stares with no expression as I double down on every feeling I have ever had. She pours the cherry wine and knows better than to interrupt her enemy. In the blush of oncoming night, every person in this restaurant is a predator. The wallpaper is speckled like a fish. Decorative plates—streaks of sardines in a circlet—hang from crooked nails. She is better-read, better-informed than I am, and yet still cooler of mind. The influx of information has not poisoned her as it has me. Bitterly, I make excuses. I smile weakly and rage. How dare she be hard on me, but easy on everyone else?

Delicate, pearlescent obsession, in a choker around my ankle. Insecurity like corseted diamonds, catching the red light. Runes carved on a radish that I pick up and fling against the wall. Pacing the cell, remembering the pink, orange, yellow, blue wildflowers in the photo. The horses, unrestrained. The window, above my head. Will I have the courage to place a bet on myself? Oh but, old familiar, I am afraid. If only we could speak, but then again, you never spoke. All your presence did was remind me that I feel better alone. Oh, but still I wish I had a friend who felt as good as a rhyme. I wish I could be as good to a friend as I am bad to the mountain range. If I cannot find or summon her, I’ll have to make her from shoestrings of flesh, like a magician. I’ll have to summit the peak with her limp frame on my back, through razors of cloud and then—?

Guesswork, linework, overwork. Work, then play. Playground, plaything, wordplay, foreplay. Sardines in a bucket. In a what? Bloodstream, bloodline, blood sport. Sporting wounds like a badge of honor, then honoring the bad twice as much as the good. We’re attracted to power, you see, but try again, appeal to my good nature. My what? Do the deed, then ditch the girl. Burnt brown sugar on the breeze in the pink evening. Chew on the end of a candy cigarette, not for the pleasure, but for the love of the game. Back in the restaurant, my double, surrounded by carnivores, confesses to a diagnosis of colorectal cancer. How painful to feel my envy, so much stronger than my compassion, rear its head, rejoice. Back in the house, turning the lights on in the workshop to find that the jug in the center of the kiln has turned back to clay.

Clever girl, but it’s a cleverer world. The television will make you tremble with how little it makes you feel. Throw a throat punch. Come back to reality, or its approximation.

What’s the appeal of this appeal? How long for the cold, cold, colder, freezing, warmer, hot, hot, hot war? And will the ads for it be cheesy? Will I look sexy in the pictures? What’s the reveal of this appeal? Man behind the curtain, appear to me in velvet, in furs. Come up to me and then close the door behind us.

Blustery Tokyo at my back as Margot complains that she’s not good enough, her voice wavery when it emerges from inside her oversized synthetic fur coat, and my first instinct is to fling myself bloody against a wall rather than commiserate with her. When she compares herself with younger women, my mind flees from the bog of this cliché into incoming traffic. I bounce comically off a parade of glittering chrome hoods. In the Impressionist rendering of this event, passerby in red and blue oils pause to watch from the sidewalk at the dark edge of the canvas, umbrellas up in the streaks of rain. “Margot, baby,” my wet, broken body cries out via improbable speech bubble, “Wake up and smell the coffee!”

In a crowded room, I look for you. In a crowded room, I look for you. In a crowded room, I look for you. Lie to me. Lie to me. Lie to me, when I ask if you look for me too.

Look, big ocean roller, I may be a lifetime user but I never subscribed to your newsletter. I don’t care to be reminded of the shadow of you. Good country with a bad king. Or bad country with a diamond ring? What promises and what deals. What flagging fidelity. The count tapping bare feet on the rich carpet. Bad seed from the towering oak. Cut it down and never repent. Cut it down and fantasize about the life you took in exchange for the life you don’t lead.

In silk boxing shorts, flung into the air. Blood in a diamond under the nail of my ring finger. Leg cramping like heartache.

Why couldn’t I be like this before? The thought pursues me up the road, nipping at my heels. Why couldn’t I be like this before? I turn and scratch it behind the ears. Maybe I was not ready to give what I needed to give. I can still feel the elastic membrane in me, showing me where I have left to grow. But for the first time, when I probe inside, I also feel the slim cylinder of iron that holds me together. No, it wasn’t always there. I extruded it with time, through the press of my mind. I grasp it as though taking up a sword. I grasp it and let go. Won’t Alvin be surprised, when he turns the corner in this seedy motel and sees me surrounded by arrows?

Associate me with citrus, with pine needles, with injuries to the hand. Sentence me to a lifetime and then to another one. Don’t let me die before pain has left my bed. Clothe me in white moonlight, in wayfinding that streaks the water in blonde. All this, because a loser wanted to feel important. Good luck, class of 2025.