“Have you ever imagined what it would feel like to live forever?” She threads a fishhook through my flesh, slowly, dragging it in and out. “I have.” I can’t tell if that means she’s imagined it, or done it.

“You know what used to live here, right?” she asks me. “Great monstrous things. Inhuman in every way. The world was different back then. Different gasses in the atmosphere. Different chemicals in the oceans. Nothing moved back then, like it does now.”

I passed out in a washroom of a pub. I think somebody put something in my drink. I woke up in this girl’s apartment. She cut off my thumbs and tied my wrists to a radiator. The drugs are keeping the pain down, but I keep vomiting from fear, and now my shirt’s soaked with it. I don’t know what she’s been feeding me; everything I puke up is thick and black, like motor-oil.

“If you saw what used to live here, what used to be king, you’d slit your own throat,” she warned me. “You’d see their eggs hatching in your dreams. You’d scream yourself mute, just trying to block out the sounds they made, breathing and moving.”

She’s attractive, I guess, in a sort of dull-eyed, neanderthal sort of way. She looks like she’s sixteen, and ancient. Like she lived through two ice ages and a great purge. Her hands are long ropey muscles, knotted with thick, knobbly bones. Her teeth are uneven, and jagged. When she smiles, it’s clearly a threat.

“There are things your people know nothing about,” she informs me. “Things with bodies miles longs, buried too deeply under the soil for your species to ever find. Great, giant things, and the things that devoured them. Parasitic tics that would dwarf you. Intestinal worms that could’ve crushed and devoured you. Scary shit, you don’t even want to think about.”

She takes out a knife that looks to have been carved from an ancient stone. 

Everything goes dark.
Again.

She was the perfect lover, built out of bits I found online. 

She crawled into my bed like a serial killer. She moved through the city like a snake.

I ask her to get me a glass of milk, but when she gets back, I ask for a bowl, as well. She gets the bowl, and then I tell her to fill it with milk. I see her get a nervous look in her eyes, just slightly.

Once the bowl is full, I tell her to put it on the floor. She does, and then turns to look back at me.

“Now drink it.”

She pauses, and then gets down on her knees. She puts a hand to either side of the dish, and she puts her face to the bowl. “Like this?” she asks.

She laps at the cream, and I know I want her now. I want her so much that it feels like something inside me is burning. Like a need for violence, or a hungering for something tasty. It’s a craving, and it starts and ends, with her.

Before long, she’s made a mess, thick cream all over face, some of it choking down her throat. Droplets spilled on the floor “Now come here,” I tell her. 

She looks at me like I might own her, if I’ve got the will for it. If I’ve got the strength to withstand her. Yeah, she draws me down, like I’m floating to the bottom of the sea. 

I asked for love-notes, and she sent me pornography.

I said, “tell me how you really feel when we hold each other,” and all I got was this clip of two attractive strangers, fucking until there was blood on the carpeting. Some multi-ethnic blur of insertions and moaning and droplets of sweat cascading down to the floor.

I wanted to get to know her, to understand her, to feel her closeness to me. She said, “check out this group orgy; nobody knows where its coming from next.” And they don’t. Every orgasm is a surprise. Every cumshot is a burst of the unknown. 

They’re not in love, they’re just very well-paid, so it looks the same.

In pictures, using models as stand-ins, she shows me how she’d get down on her knees, like prayer with an open mouth. She opens up to me, like a stranger on the bus, flashing genitalia and danger in the next seat. She opens up to me, telling me truths like she’s taking on cocks two at a time, in full media res. No foreplay, just the pause button being taken off, and the action coming on.

She comes onto me. Flirts with me. Seduces me. Convinces me that all she wants is a place to stay and somebody to listen to. 

Her most romantic impulses are just dirty thoughts. Who are those girls kissing, while they fuck? Who are they fucking, while they kiss? 

She sends me porn like their instructional videos detailing how to tear her down. Break her into little pieces. Learn about her. Spoil her. Ruin her. Keep her forever, in bondage and love, like there was ever any real difference. 

I asked for something that expressed emotion.
So she fucked me, until I felt it. 

She’s got me set on Repeat, and tuned into Random. 

Baby, I wanna be your vampire. I want to come for you in the night. I want to open you up and drink your blood. I want to command your heartbeat. I want to hear the disco-dance of the pulsing in your veins. 

Baby, I wanna be your UFO. I want to come for you in the night. I want to be your abduction experience. I want to be the probe that enters you when you’re not sure where you are or which way is up. I want to hear you struggle to breathe when there’s no gravity or reason to fall.

Yeah.

You.

You.

I wanna be your beat-up taxi cab. I want to come for you in the night. I want to pick you up at a bad situation, and drop you off at the airport. I want you to admit a secret to me, because you’re leaving town, and never looking back. 

Baby, I wanna be your rainstorm. I want to come for you in the night. I wanna get you wet, like you’re crying or full of lust. 

Baby, I wanna be your porn star. I want to come for you in giant, climatic bursts. 

I want to come for you like a hired killer. Like a good dog. Like the hour that’s at hand.

I want to come for you like a revolution, like a secret in the night.

I want you, I want you, I want you, I don’t even really know you that well. 

Bad thoughts are collapsing all around me; it’s like an earthquake in a book store, but all the books are my own; as they come cratering down around me, it’s my own words, raining down, reigning over… my own words reigning in me in. 

My computer’s gotten sick so I have to haul it across town in a cab to let some dull-eyed savant glare at it until it’s happy again. 

I have a story I want to sell you.
I have a story I want to show you.
I have a story I want to write for you.

But they’ll have to wait a while. There’s candy rotting in my belly, and bad dreams going stale in the breadbox of my brain. Molten waste stews and churns in my stomach, a sea of unhappy emotions and a scattering of refined sugars. I wince, and come up with something creative.

Somewhere in the future, the me, The Real Me, is looking back on this, and laughing. The laughter wakes up at night; distracts me from the worst of my dreams.  

Her tongue was a weapon; she’d weaponized all aspects of her sexuality, like there was some sort of a war coming. She crossed and uncrossed her legs like she was loading a gun. She looked at me, licked at me, like I was an ice cream, melting too fast in the hot sun, like her tongue was a long line of napalm about to devour me with heat.

She said something like “Oh baby, baby, please come back to me, come back home, come back to bed.” She claimed to have bought treats, snacks, young school girls trained to be sluts, their anal virginities still mostly intact. She claimed to have nuns stacked up next to the strap-on vibrators in the closet; sexually repressed zealots just looking for a good time in their tight little crotches. 

I wanted the sex, or maybe just the attention. She wanted the tension, the bits that made me stand on edge, that made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand on edge, that made my cock stand at rigid attention whenever she stalked by. She wanted to feel me wanting her just enough to take her. Take her where? Take her down with me.

Yeah, she could come down with me. She could take me down with her.

She had tapes and tapes, old black video tapes, piling up in the back room, of Spider Snuff; hours and hours of arachnid copulation that ended, inevitably, in the death of the male just after the point of orgasm, or whatever spiders did when they got off. 

“They’re my favourite sort of love story,” she explained to me, watching me squirm uncomfortably in my chair as I watched the spiders squirm uncomfortably on the screen. “The kind that ends in cannibalism.” 

All love is a form of cannibalism; I read that once, somewhere, in some book about romance and mystery. All love is a form of consumption; devouring something, consuming it, taking it in, taking it on…

Yeah, the back room is full of things nobody wants to know about. Shirts with strange stains. Underwear that’s been worn a little too long. The hollowed out shells of giant insects that ruled these lands back when humanity was still a distant dream of tiny, cave-dwelling prototype mammals. Big, hungry bugs, that grew monstrously large on the oxygen-thick environment of ancient earth. She uses the shells as ashtrays, and lousy conversation pieces. She loves a lousy conversation. 

She tempted me to get close to her, so I did that thing where right at the last second I revealed a bunch of fangs and totally tore her throat right out. She quivered, like she was getting off on the attention, maybe the attention to detail. She always wanted to live, or die, like somebody really sexy in a really violent movie. Something with a lot of shot-in-the-face moments, maybe a porno that ended a shotgun snuff sequence.

She’s got a cunt heart as big as all the outdoors, and a gun on her hip. She’s got a sneer on her lips, and bright red lipstick, and a cigarette. She’s got a smile that tells me she’s been drinking.

“We could be friends, we could be enemies, I just want to fuck you.”

Blink.

She says it like fucking went out of style years ago. She says it like she’s afraid oral sex might be outlawed tomorrow. She’s got desperation in her eyes, and a little shard of glass too. She’s got a little shard of glass in her eye, and it makes her cry blood, but only when she blinks.

“I’d like to get to know you, but not if it’s going to get in the way of getting you naked.”

Blink.

Her gaze is a curse, a spell of intimacy broken up only by space and time. When she looks in my eyes, I feel like I’m inside her, except for the way she shuts me up out. I could go to her, lie to her, be afraid of her for a year and a day. I could crush her up and snort her in big thick long lines, like those big thick long legs of hers. She could fucking crush me, with half a thought.

“I want you to make love to you, but I don’t want to be cool or nice about it. I want to feel a little ruined for human contact when we’re done.”

Blink.

I reach out for her, feeling like my fingers are broken and the open air is as thick as molasses. I reach out for her, and she smiles, and offers herself up to me, even as she tumbles back and away.

She cries a drop of blood.

And I

Blink.  

I like to think that you’re a member of my superteam. You’re more than just a cool friend, or somebody I respect, or a girl I really want to mess around with. You’re part of a silent allegiance of ass-kickers, located around the globe.

We’re not do-gooders or world-changers.
We are caustic agents of karma, the bookkeepers of dharma. 

We have an agenda of a Good Time. Yeah, we want to have a good time. We want to get loaded on each other, on thrills, on kicks, we want to spend years at a time, locked behind a closet door, staring at a computer screen, levelling up and making strange new friends; creating strange new forms of friendship.

You and me, we’re part of a movement. A gang. A living meme built out of bodies and electrical signals. We’re an affiliation, and association, a loose-knit assembly of able-minded rebels, sulking off towards the front-lines of the culture war, dripping ashes from our smokes and drops of blood from our beautiful eyes. 

She kissed like a fireworks factor getting caught in a gasoline rainstorm. She kissed me like she’d forgotten my name, or the keys to her apartment. She kissed me like she wanted to taste every lie I’d ever told. 

For me, she was just another. Another woman, another chase, another city with different walls but always the same streets. 

She was a backhanded compliment, without the compliment. She made my lips bleed, but it was her blood they were bleeding. She made me hit her; she put a gun to my head and made me raise my hand to her. 

She liked her sex like I liked my animation; rough, and weird. She liked her breakfast like I like I liked my women; quietly delivered in the morning. 

“Hey baby,” she said, quoting some obscure song that’d yet to be written, “do you want to tell a lie with me?”

“Come on play with my fire.” 

I wanted her to give me danger, I wanted her to give me sympathy. I wanted to her to strip off that dirty old rock and roll T-shirt, and give it to me from off her back. I wanted her naked and honest, for once in her life.

I backed myself into a corner with my paints. With my pain. Yeah, I’m still limping from her visit, but that was something else. She made me hurt to walk down stairs, but at the same time, the elevator was a bit too smooth. Sometimes a bit of pain is a nice way to remember some pleasure. 

Murder, and the perfect life, is one rainfall away. Have you ever stood in that place, and listened to the cloud growling down at the earth? 

She’s gonna sing until her voice breaks; she’s gonna smile until it breaks her.

“Your problem is,” I explained, twisting the knife a bit, “that you can’t tell the difference between me, and somebody you love.”

“Oh, I can tell,” she said. “I just don’t care.”

I studied the dead look of hopeless affection in her eyes. It was trying to strike a spark off a dead battery. Holding her hand made me feel like I’d spent most of my life out looking for lost children in the snow.

She kissed me like I was something she couldn’t wait to regret. “Are you gonna want this knife back,” she asked me, looking down at her bloody wound, “when you’re done?”

Scars were souvenirs around this place. A treasure map of mismatched marks ran up and down her skin, signifying where I might go next, and what I might do when I get there. Biting. Clawing. Burning. She makes me think of pain, but endearingly so.

She makes me wish I’d brought enough for the whole class to enjoy.

God, how long have we been watching this movie? Is this a date, or a prison sentence? 

Okay, so I woke up early this morning, with a girl I didn’t recognize, dying in bed next to me, dying from boredom and disappointment.

I rolled off the mattress quoting song lyrics like I was in a music video nobody else could see. You were my camera, you were what I was walking and talking into.

I walked into the bathroom and I urinated and pretended to comb my hair when I was really just admiring myself in the mirror. My face reminds me of a book of love poems; I don’t really know why, but it just does. I stick out my tongue and I stick out in a crowd. 

I want to spit in the camera, I want break my face on the fourth wall. 

I want come, willingly, along with you, into the next chapter. 

Just for the record, and this is a weird little side note, but like, if you want to chat with me, message me, be my little internet friend - and 90% of the reason I keep an online blog is to make internet friends - feel free to ask for my email address. The one thing I hate about Tumblr is the message system; I feel like I’m constantly losing track of people I was just about to have an interesting conversation with. 

Anyway, obviously I’m mentioning this because there’s a couple of people in specific I love hearing from, and this is my almost-passive-aggressive method of imploring them to drop me a line, but then to also follow it up not on here. 

I don’t want to post my email address here, as I know I’ll just get a world of spam, but really, if you want the personalized version of my letters-to-nobody drop me a line. I’m fascinated by so many of you…