Dating : I love it and I can’t have it and if I have it I must reject it.

The feeling of shampoo, green apple viscous liquid dripping down my throat, soothing the raw red raggedness of the skin on the inside of my neck, extinguishes me. I want to feel clean on the inside, I want to be scrubbed up shiny sparkling so when they cut me open I’ll look nice for the photos. There’s nothing better than the feeling of being totally empty. Clearing out the sludge of your entire existence, spewing chunks of old memories and bad feelings until the soap scrapes out your brain like a pumpkin on Halloween.

I’d felt like I was teetering on the edge for a long time, but by the time I let myself topple over the cliff into the vast rushing river below it was so cathartic it felt like flying. I let myself drink the shampoo, felt the waste rush out and away like a cursed pilgrim in search of a new body to make its host. I loved the feeling of control, of restraint, of squeezing some goose neck tighter and tighter til its eyes popped out of its head and I knew I was the king.

I sat in the shower, eyes wrinkled shut, thighs caved into the weight of the porcelain that curved up around me, and I pretended it was a tropical rainstorm, warm and wet and totally absolving. I was surrounded by the crap I’d drudged up from my gut through my esophagus. Dislodging something stuck just behind my uvula, an outpouring of old shit and newspapers, and I didn’t even mind it when I felt it brush up against my leg like a fish in some murky lake. I knew it would disappear eventually, and I would be left in this otherwise perfectly clean fluorescent box that smelled like bleach and lavender toilet bowl cleaner. Regardless of my euphoria, I began to cry.

I never know what triggers tears. It’s the same feeling, almost, as when I puke up my guts, except this is mostly involuntary. My grandpa kept a pinball machine in his garage, a crashing light up neon box with a silver spinning ball that hit every edge and corner, and in my mind I was that ball, and I kept hitting myself up and up and up and bouncing off of everything until I couldn’t anymore, and I would hurtle toward myself and disappear in between the levers. That’s when I would cry. It all happened too quickly to predict. Sometimes you missed yourself.

Snot dripped down from my face into the vomit that was slowly swirling toward the vortex of the drain, and I got the urge to bash my head into the pristine white tile that lined the walls of the shower. I wanted to see something crimson and gutsy stain that beautiful perfect sparkling scrubbed up surface. I wanted to feel a black arrow in my head and close one eye and sink into a whirlpool. Dissolve into the liquid and travel with my old shame back to a body of water and mingle with the foam.

Instead I stood up and turned off the shower, and I stepped out and looked at my fleshy new skin and my puffy red face and the lips stung by salt, and the stringiness of my old brown hair and a shape I hated and wished I could melt down like a candle and reform into some other thing. Except not really, because wouldn’t I have done it by now?