Our selfhood, the thing we refer to as the "me" or the "I," is just a story we tell ourselves. And maybe mine is one long suicide note. The words scrawled out, forming the pavement for this curvy, wet, cliff-side road I'm driving. My foot pressed hard on the clutch, engine revving. Then up. The other foot down. And the squealing of these ball-point tires. The long insurgent slide. The excited fall. And then nothing. Silence. Peace.

Because at the end of all that skid and confusion, this feeling. That I'm not going to die. Not now. Not ever. Because I've found that thing. That person. And this time I'm going to let myself fall.

It's not so much a sense of being invincible. It's more like: It could kill me, and it would be okay. It could kill me, and it would be good. He could kill me, and I wouldn't die.

A murder is just a suicide without the self-incrimination.

Mike and I went to dinner the other night. And he told me some of the story. When we came back here, we didn't fuck. And that's good, because fucking has a way of killing the story when it's done too soon. I do feel close to him, though. Which kind of scares me. We spoke over a few Irish whiskeys. And pretended we weren't thinking about the thing we were thinking about. He put his hand to his beard when he spoke. And sat with his legs crossed casually. And he always looked me right in the eye. I laughed at something he said, and I actually spit out a little whiskey on my shirt. Jesus.

I played it off, though. I said, "That's funny...I usually swallow." He laughed.

When he'd had too much to drink, he talked about his ex. And the place they used to live in the burbs years ago. He told me this story about a conversation they had once about beer bottles. I made a little sketch of it on the page this morning while it was fresh in my mind. I'm not sure if it happened like this. In fact, I'm sure it probably didn't. But this is the way it happened in my head. Which is the way I'm going to tell it.

I have a lot of sketches like this one. And together they make up this body of work. But to me it never feels like the body of work. There is always just the last sketch. And the one before it. And Christ, I hardly want to look at anything beyond that.

This is probably boring you. I'm sorry. I've got other stuff you might be interested in. More about my dad. Or how I never visit my mom anymore because she doesn't recognize me. But I'm too tired for all of that right now. So you're stuck with the little stuff.

Like how I've been changing up my morning routine. And actually this isn't so little for me. It's big. Huge, in fact. Because I'm very into my routines. But I think mine needed changing. This hangover I wake up into each morning—it just wasn't going away with the usual prescriptions. So I've taken to blasting music. Rock. Or rap. High-energy shit. And dancing in my pajamas in my living room. And I throw up a middle finger to the nature outside my window. And I straighten my lip and I bare my fucking teeth. And I shake out last night's demons.

Also, I'm using the mug without the handle. The one that broke in the move. It used to be my favorite. My hand found it the other day in the dim of my kitchen while the coffee brewed. It was so early, the moon still showed big and luminous outside through the pines. I started to reach for another. And then I paused and I put my hand back on the broken one. And kept it there. And I said, Why not? So now I grab for it each morning, this partly broken thing, and I rinse it in the sink if it's dirty, and it's always dirty, and I fill it and hold the entire mug in my hand. And the heat feels good in my palm on these cold morning tremblings.

I guess I should also mention the new vibrator.

It came in the mail a few days ago. It's called a "Butterfly Kiss." It's called that because there is a little butterfly-shaped thing that's supposed to flutter against your lips while the wobbly little shaft is inside you. I don't know if "flutter" is really very accurate. And that's kind of disappointing. Because "fluttering" had seemed to me like it would be really, really nice. But it's definitely more of a "vibrate." More of a "buzz" than a "flutter." Oh well. Also, the part that goes inside you, even though it has a pleasantly-sized swollen tip, it's just way too bendy.

Whatever. I still got off on the thing, but it did take some effort. You'd be surprised what I can get off on. Or maybe you wouldn't.

Most of the snow has melted off the gravel driveway leading to my house. So I got in my car and I drove over to the Main Street Tavern yesterday. And I told my therapist (bartender) that I've been feeling more contented lately. That I've been feeling something I might even refer to as "focused." And that, you know what, I don't actually need to fuck you anymore. Which was a lie, of course. And I'm not really sure why I said it. It might have been because I felt like hurting him a little. It might have been to try and make myself believe it. It might have been to see if he would push back. To see if he would try to make me fuck him. Or if he'd just fuck me regardless. I'm not sure what I wanted, really. Maybe I just felt like being a bitch.

The truth is, I have no idea who my bartender really is. I mean, I know how his chest feels when I'm hitting it. And I know the way his mouth feels when he's biting my shoulder. I know his real name is Danny but people at the bar call him Smitty. Whatever, they both end in "y." I know that he seems to want to grow facial hair, but it just doesn't quite happen for him, and how it doesn't really matter that it doesn't, because it's still kind of sexy. I know when he pops a cap on a Miller Light, it is swift and decisive and fluid, and he lets the cap fall on the floor and how this doesn't seem to bother or distract him, and how he eats me out with the same casual intensity. I know he smells like youth. I know he tastes like an engine sounds.

But I don't know what he wants. And I don't know what keeps him up at night. And I don't know how he puts his clothes on in the morning.

God, the thing that worries me constantly about people is that I've got them all wrong. That the way I'm painting them on the page, in my mind, is not the way they really are. That Mike, for instance, is not Mike. Not my Mike. Because there's so much I don't know about him. And I'm scared of what it's going to mean to find out.

But there is no right or wrong in this. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

Maybe what I'm really scared about has more to do with me. Maybe what I'm really scared about is that I'm the one not true on the page. That I'm not this me. That I won't get it right. That I don't have the courage to carry this thing off. And by the time I realize it's all wrong, by the time I find that person I am, it'll be too late.

The self. The me. The I.

I will always be a goddammed first draft.

Category: Fallout