Lying in a room, silent except for that high volume screech protruding from my ears. Silence isn’t real anymore. Years of playing with notes and bashing away thoughts, feelings, and verbal communication reduced the great intensity of oft-hard to locate modern silence (nature, in reality, has no silence; even quiet tracts of land host winds and chirping birds fighting auditory battles in an eternal rivalry to rule the sound waves) to a 10 million meter wall of frequencies proportionally fit to drive a dog insane. The room, my room, is hot, hotter than it’s been or will be again, for I hate the heat of this miserable peninsula I so often find myself in, despite my best attempts to escape it or perhaps even cut it off and let it float into the Atlantic, taking me with it, this hatred I hold for it only being fit for disappearing once both parties are consumed by nothingness. My back is sweaty and I feel short even in this fortress of dreams that I know incredibly well. My heart is violently beating, seeming to hate every ounce of my being and telling me through Morse code not to be here. Still, I don’t think all of this during this event, these reflections only come after, on a train ride to Amsterdam, where I tilt my phone to the side just barely enough to prevent my mother from reading and finding one of my faces I hide from her, even during the times where the need to express my feelings and foster familiar trust has become incredibly obvious but is neglected by a me that has outlawed being in touch with one of my other faces, whose facial features denote a person who endlessly devotes time to thinking of love and all of its accompanying afflictions and wounds. 

A fraction of this face is present in my being in this bed here. There is another one of my faces, which, coincidentally, also finds itself at this meeting of faces, continually locked away, perhaps for eternity, owing to my perception that this body of mine is incompatible with any others. We are sitting upright on the bed looking at each other and saying words of sparse meaning. I’ve forgotten what happens next, but some way or another we are both undressing, leaving our clothes in a messy pile on my rug-like floor which contains an infinite quantity of spectators in the popcorn looking fibers that make up a small jungle of a comfortable mess, though still, without adornment and removing my pedestal for it, really only is the floor of a suburban room. We are leaning into one another as our voices stop and our bodies begin to mix. We are a blend of two distinct bodies of flesh, made homogenous in pleasure and attraction. I stretch out my hands to her like a young tree’s frail branches in a long winter who suffers in the wind, unadorned and vulnerable. She takes them in and guides me through her body, showing and letting me feel every crevice and the roughs and the smooths and the holes and gaps and small fluctuations and occasional hairs and scars and bumps and breasts. She offers me her hand and I take her through me, through the entirety of what constitutes my external self. I spare nothing and I lay myself bare for her. We lie with each other and become accustomed to what the border between us is and where it seemingly begins and ends. Our entities merge and trade their vulnerable parts, and we start to perceive how we fit each other. My perception of her and this moment appears unhindered, ever truthful and hopeful. Within her eyes I see a thousand futures and nights together and the perfection of the very essence of her, unburdened by her physical body or a soul or a consciousness. 

I can see the sunset out of my window, which I hardly ever open, but inexplicably, conveniently, is open at this moment. I no longer feel hot and my room becomes my world. There is nothing else that lies outside of this miniature biome that’s filled with everything I could ever want. Now I am almost asleep in her lap, victim of infinite comfort as she caresses my hair with perfect smoothness, unparalleled by any futuristic medicine in its ability to cure ills of both a physical

and psychological nature. My eyes have closed and I’m away, asleep in a perfect land, far from anything capable of resembling even a minute worry. 

My eyes open and I’m floating above the middle of a raging sea and I see her floating, leaving. My body, now weak and ugly and dirty and fat, is incapable of catching up to her. She leaves and I fall to the sea, held down by weights and chains and blood and bruises and cuts and countries and governments and beds and lights and screens and I’m drowning, drowning and I’m calling for help but left unheard by the density of the water and a devastating wall of white noise. I’m torn to shreds by the infinitely brutal hacksaw of some maritime monstrosity, a primeval horror whose appearance I didn’t bother incorporating into my memories. I’m split into 49 different parts and laid on my bed, alone: appendages, organs, blood, cells, atoms, quirks, appearances, thoughts and nonthoughts, everything but mostly nothingness adorns my blood stained sheets. I’m watching this and I cry, over and over again, and I breathe slowly as I open myself and remember it’s a Saturday and my room is cold.