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I HOPE IN THE MORNING YOU WILL MELT

I have made an art of drowning. Each day, I step into the shower and shout, “Fill me!” The water obeys. The shower head opens and in flows hot water, trickling down into my throat, seeping into my lungs. I love every second of that dying. I am naked and you are not there to witness me. There are also major health benefits to this, for instance, it makes it easier for me to breathe. To be around others. During this time, I am not forced into speech. Into anguished vocabulary. Into castrating myself from others by way of communication, all the ways we find to misunderstand one another.

Chekov once said: Нельзя ставить на сцене заряженное ружье, если никто не имеет в виду выстрелить из него.

Now, there is a pistol in this story. You hold it in your hands; it is hot. You remember the first time you hunted yourself, your shadow oiling itself against you like a hairless cat, wanting to murder the part of you that wants. The pistol is now an important part of the plot. I am unable remove it, even if I want to.

*

I am learning Ukrainian from my neighbor, who is somewhat now my friend. He is also somewhat my building supervisor, meaning that they force him to perform all the duties of one without actually awarding him the title.

My neighbor texts me after I tell him that the management is not paying him enough or giving him rights: “Have a good night — and I hope in the morning you’ll melt.”

In Ukrainian, one says: Відпочнь або Охолонь in response to when someone is angry or upset. It was meant as a joke. This is neither a joke, nor metaphorical, I think to myself, as I perform my daily ritual. Today’s water unfairly cold. It will not do the job that I want for it to do; meaning, the microbacteria of my memory will travel into tomorrow’s conversations. I will do my best to not hurt others. To use my words wisely. A breeze whistles through the curtains like a train and I shut it fast before any hurtful news can reach me.

The other day, we spoke about race for 30 minutes. The conversation was confusing for both of us and I felt angered by his seeming lack of care toward racial disparities in America, especially after having helped him move 60 boxes placed inside of an apartment building that smelled like piss. Then it turned out that I was speaking about race, as it relates to the human species being defined as separate groups, and he was speaking about race, as it relates to the human practice of driving a car at a rapid speed.

To become a friend is to be the practice of raking the soil in one’s garden of hysteria and hypomania. You perform the motions, day after day. Each time you are forced to drive a new and unknowable car in the Super Taikyu Series. You drive recklessly, at 150mph, with your eyes closed. It does not matter. What matters is routine and discipline. What matters is that you didn’t actually pass your driver’s license test at 16. The woman felt bad for you and she let you pass, and the next year she was fired.

It is better to drive past anyone who might try to hold your gaze. This avoids the dangerous territory of potentially ever knowing another person; though, of course, this hardly ever happens.

*

As a child in grade school, frogs floated belly-up in the thousands, their green little corpses creating a constellation. We were instructed to scoop them up and place them into buckets, the dead frogs.

“When we first saw it,” my estranged grandmother says during lunch, “We all thought it was so pretty. What a beautiful shade of pink.” She was speaking about the atomic bomb. I didn’t know she had a brother until six years ago. They went into the rubble to find his body and came back with leukemia. Japan committed so many rapes that they are impossible to count; in the Philippines, Korea, China, Malaysia, Vietnam. All of their corpses shoveled together into buckets. On Twitter, Jordan B. Peterson says, “Give ‘em hell, Netanyahu”, speaking about the colonized Palestinian people. Bombs and missiles land like Gobstoppers in the middle of Palestinians’ homes every day. Ukraine also receives such gifts from Russia, day after day. My neighbor shows me a picture of the kebabs he made right before the first missile fell. The president of Ukraine, Volodomyr Zelenskyy, tweets in solidarity with Israel on October 8. I am my neighbor’s only American friend. The pistol doesn’t go off in this story. Rather, you are forced to witness yourself holding it, cradling it like a child you never wanted, all your life.

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