THIS IS NOT THE STORY OF SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED BACK THEN
The first thing I did was delete my Instagram. It wasn’t that hard—just a click and then another click. The icon wiggled on my phone screen, pink and pulsing, and then it was gone. Just like that. Then I locked the bathroom door, drew the curtains, and filled the bath with searing hot water. We didn’t know where the drain clog was for the house, so I used the flat metal lid of a mason jar. It fit perfectly, found a great suction once the water was properly pouring on top of it from the spout. Our friends had left us a candle filled with jade crystals and so I brought it to the rim of the tub and lit it. Winter had just started. Snow was fluff in the sky around us and the lake had begun to freeze. The area where the ducks could scoot and play was getting smaller and smaller, they were driven from the banks of the shore into a little ellipse in the center of the lake, which made it much easier to spy on them from all angles of the house. My nails were getting too long again and I reminded myself I had to cut them, as I eased myself into the very very hot water.
It hit my skin like a deep burn. I nearly cried out, but I wanted the scalding. Didn’t want Eva to come running. I bit down on my chin, with my lip sucked all the way into my mouth, and kept easing myself into the water. First my calves, then my thighs, then the toes of my feet, arched as they were to keep my legs properly bent. Finally, my torso lowered down, so that my butt and vagina were pushed fully in. I felt the water going everywhere, up inside everything. Oh it felt good. Hard and devastating and good. I wanted to lose myself in an overwhelming feeling, because life had begun to feel so bad that I couldn’t remember what time I was waking up each morning. The days were melting just like that. One into the other and then the next. I didn’t have a job. The government had started to send me unemployment checks and they padded into my bank account as quickly as I was forced to take them out. It had taken me six months of daily calling to get these numbers to start to cohere in my bank account. There were debts that had accrued within that time, and now I was somewhere in a limbo of having enough, but only very temporarily. Just for a few weeks. And then? What happens after the few weeks? Congress was stalling and no one knew what the next stimulus package would look like. Jobs were evaporating like mist off of a mug of cold cider. There was none to begin with: the cider was cold. The jobs were transparent. There was no economy. There was money being laundered from person to person for doing unhelpful things that supported nobody but those at the very top. Celebrities were renting private islands and throwing intimate parties, as usual. So the world spun and hundreds of thousands of people died. This was more than usual. There was a virus, airborne. It had started to spread maybe a year ago. But no one had taken it seriously until early Spring. By then it was already everywhere. It took a few weeks of rapid science to decipher how and where it would live and what kinds of outdoor activities we could all do with minimal risk. It seemed, at this point, that being outside was alright, so long as you wore a mask. It could linger in the air and it stuck to surfaces like hot glue. But mostly it was spit out of people’s mouths invisibly when they talked, so we were warned off of each other in huge strokes.
I hadn’t properly seen or talked to another person in six months. I was slowly going mental. I learned that word from a British TV show I had taken to watching. I loved the accent, the phrases, the ruddy way British cheeks express themselves when emotional. Everything had become the television. And my iPhone. Which was why I had decided to cut myself off from it, all. Cold turkey. As I had learned from the few Al Anon meetings I had attended: the art of the cut-off. I had barely been able to practice it anywhere—my family members rang at all hours of the night, ex-colleagues from work texted and emailed me whenever they saw fit, demanding things be done whenever they pleased. I usually acquiesced. I didn’t have a very strong or robust sense of self worth. And I wanted things to be done right—no, better than right. Perfectly. I wanted things to be done perfectly and so I worked my ass off to get them that way. Often to little applause or even recognition. People just expected it of me, and when it happened, they felt pleased about themselves, that they had managed to get me to do a thing that they could then feel they had done themselves. I was small and large, commanding rooms full of people without anyone’s knowledge and spending way too much energy on things I didn’t need to. I wasn’t a very good practitioner of work smart, not hard. I only knew how to work hard, work excessively hard, and be exhausted before, during, and after. But today I was changing all that. I had been told that the moon was in a very rare conjunction and the season was especially close to the veil. I wanted this magnificent energy of scorpio, of lust and secrecy and power. I wanted to feel it coursing through my veins, like an injection. A hot bath injection. Lately I hadn’t been shitting right. Or eating or sleeping right. My back hurt in all these weird places, felt stuck and intractable. When I talked on the phone with friends, I noticed a chipper tone in my voice that I didn’t recognize from all the other times I kept company with myself. But it wasn’t a chipperness that stayed for very long. Sometimes the calls with friends helped me feel more rooted in the world, but often their effects vanished as soon as I got off the phone, sometimes made me feel worse. What was connection when you couldn’t even lock eyes with another person? Feel the warmth of their energy wrap around you like a fur stole? I missed my friend Wren, who had gone with me to the beach, earlier in all of this. When things like that still felt okay. We had decided that the strong winds of the ocean would be safe for us, keep the virus small and unable to filter in through our nose holes. I had brought my low-slung green chairs and together we had carried them from the parking lot and staked them into the sand, right above the tide line. The sand had felt good and beige beneath our feet. The wind strong and salty. I had pulled all my clothes off and ran into the water, she right behind me. I got battered about by waves and she searched for shells. We talked in our chairs about whatever it was that crossed through our minds. Then we packed up and drove home. Now Wren was, I don’t know somewhere doing something with her boyfriend. The man who played music in the closet and had somehow swept her off her feet. They were inseparable, she followed him around like he was a magician or an orchestral commander. I was used to being forgotten when a boyfriend shows up, like a blood moon, to sweep the girl away. It had been happening with all of my friends for all of my life. Maybe it was just feeling extra: the weight of all these people coming and going according to the whims of their romantic attractions. And I was sick of it. I didn’t want a boyfriend. I didn’t even want a girlfriend. I just wanted love, the kind of love that felt permanent. That felt like it would be there no matter what kind of mood or hair you were having. But, as usual, it was all feeling very conditional. Even being alive was feeling conditional. Conditional on what kinds of words I used and when. Conditional on how at ease I felt spilling myself over the internet, accruing not just likes but people’s envy and respect.
It was getting harder to remember why I had started, why I had started wanting people’s envy and respect. Perhaps this is just how one survives these days, in a very competitive capitalism that causes us to eat each other’s flesh and call it bon chance. I wasn’t very good at being a vegetarian. Even though I grew up as one. I loved meat, loved the texture and the chew. But, come to think of it, I hadn’t eaten real meat in quite a while. I was eating squash and rice most evenings, when I ate. It was getting harder and harder to eat. To cook. To prepare. To prep. To pull, out from the refrigerator, any food at all. I nibbled at my lip and drank seltzer water. I ate carrots dipped in sauce. I ate power bars that I found in a box at the bottom of my closet, from my brief stint of marathon training from two years earlier. I found things in the freezer and gave them new life: like enchiladas from Trader Joe’s and unusually labelled smoothie supplements. Going to the grocery store felt like an event that I wasn’t sure that I would survive, so I alternated between getting very excited about going and avoiding it at all costs. I wasn’t sure anymore whether my mask was really protecting me or just signaling to others that I believed in what we were all going through. I wanted a private island to rent, to invite all of my closest friends, to let loose for a weekend. I suppose that was what Instagram had been trying to be to all of us: a private island with our closest friends. And I wasn’t very happy there, so maybe I wouldn’t be happy on a private island with all of my closest friends at all. Maybe I didn’t really like people. Or maybe I did and that was why I was feeling so depressed. I loved people and it felt unbearable to be all alone like this. Now afraid of them, afraid that they would blow air on me and make all the cells in my lungs shrivel up and blacken. I didn’t want to get brain damage or be intubated at thirty four. I wanted love and a grilled cheese sandwich, I wanted thick tree bark and wind in my armpit hair. I wanted to be a lesbian again, but even that was feeling far away and wishful. I was lying on my back now, my chest bobbing up out of the water and my knees in an awkward triangle. I always try, at this point, to get my whole body under the water, but I’ve never found a bathtub that was big enough for me to fit. I slid flat on my back, pushing my butt close to the spout, which let my neck and face slide under the water. It felt so good and hot and forgotten. I moved back and forth like this, from head to feet, for a very long time. Steaming up the whole room, trying to focus only on how it felt for my skin to be stabbed by a million hot pins.
hannah rubin is a queer writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. They work in the tension points of language and perception—invoking language as a site of desire, magic, intimacy, manipulation, and violence. They were a 2017 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow in Poetry and have published, or are forthcoming, in BOAAT Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, The Bombay Gin, smoke + mold, Entropy, SFWeekly, and HOLD, among others. They run Poetry in the Dark, an intimate listening experience that happens occasionally in small spaces, and coordinate 20 lines a day, a durational daily writing collaboration with sixteen artists. Together with Noelle Armstrong they co-host the radio show mellow drama, where mysterious voices call in to read from long books of poetry.