Creature Comfort//Razor’s Edge

My mouth has been very dry lately. Like very, very dry. I try to fall asleep at night flat on my back with my arms over my head like a fleshy halo and my tongue feels like the carpet. It feels like a bunch of mothballs. If I’m in the mood to interrupt my horizontal stature I get up and get some water and drink the whole thing and then in five seconds my mouth is dry again. The internet says I have insulin resistance, says I’m diabetic. It also says it can be from too many antihistamines but I stopped with the nasal spray last week because it wasn’t doing anything. The internet says a lot of things. I’m probably dehydrated. Maybe I drink too much. I scroll groggily through the thousands of glowing links while smacking my mouth quietly, and it sounds like velcro. 

After you grow out of the phase of fear-of-the-dark it’s difficult to remember what it’s like to be afraid of the dark. I was thinking about this while laying flat on my back with my carpet tongue. It’s like a skill that you lose without use, the phobia that atrophies over time. So I was thinking about being afraid of the dark and then I started thinking about the book that I’m reading right now, and about the general eerie feeling permeating out of it that no one else on the internet seemed to feel. And I’m thinking about the premise of the unreliable narrator, unreliable omniscient third person narrator no less, and about my own very serious phobia of insanity and derangement. My dreams recently have been very vivid, lucid without explicitly thinking oh, I’m dreaming, but lucid as in—I’ll just tell you about my dream. In this dream the other night I waterlogged my phone and was exasperatedly trying to figure out how to fix it, what to do. My dream self is prodding around on my waterlogged phone and then, in my dream, I think: How is this an android? I don’t have an android. What happened to my other phone? And then, in my dream, I’m trying to remember why I don’t have my phone, the phone in my real life. I’m having an active thought process about something, which has never before occurred in a dreamstate. I’m sitting there in my dream thinking, like really thinking. Anyway, the line’s been pretty blurry lately, between dreams and my real life, what has occurred and what hasn’t, etc. And I’m reading a book with an unreliable omniscient third person narrator and the whole thing’s making me feel a bit haywire. Anyway, it all ties back. I’m thinking about all of this flat on my back with my carpet tongue, derealizing a bit, if you will, and all of a sudden, like the angel of death descending, I’m very afraid of the dark. The dark in my room. And I’m laying there with an extremely high heart rate and I’m very afraid, afraid of the lumpy shape of my coat hanger and the sinister shadow of my chair. But I’m paralyzed, and my mouth is dry. In the dead of night I’ve regained the skill, re-flexed the muscle. I was more terrified of the dark in those seconds than I had been throughout my entire childhood. 

It was a hot evening last night and I was chopping shit over a vat of boiling oil and instead of watching my hands I was watching the knife. Thinking about my reflection and the craftsmanship required, the Japanese characters etched finely into the side, thin like shredded coconut. I hate violence. I guess I prefer the flat part of the blade, the warm side of the knife. The part that tricks you into thinking it could maybe something else, like sheet metal or a baking tray or an avant-garde earring. I allude in conversation that I’m vehemently against any flavor of sharp object in the bedroom, but like any respectable thespian I obviously don’t say why. 

When I’m not busy pondering the ontology of knives or having panic attacks about the dark or trying to curb all of my pathologies with somatic yoga routines on the shower floor I’ve been thinking about what I’ve coined The Her Complex. I won’t get into it. I could give you the opposite story, the one where I’m not a soggy pile of socks crammed into a urinal, but it would be pathetic. I live in the real world, the one without ‘what-ifs.’ The real world where the audience watches me through their fingers, watches as I stand stony faced in the walk-in freezing from the inside out. The audience hollers instructions about the pico de gallo and rotten limes but I’m busy thinking about The Her Complex. I only let the misplaced hatred bubble up for five minutes a day, because I know it’s a fluke, character-wise, and God wouldn’t like it. I know it’s a fluke. I remember sitting on the very edge of the couch, like an inch of cushion under my ass, supporting myself with the weight of the divine, I guess—with my head between my legs unable to get the room to stop spinning. She just speaks in riddles, and it’s like I’m getting coaxed off the edge by the Sphynx. What they don’t want you to know about riddles is that there’s a wrong answer. Sometimes there’s not a consequence for this, like if it’s your baby cousin who’s just bored of themselves and wants to inconvenience you with snot and their infantile monologuing. But sometimes, like with the Sphynx, it’s a life and death thing. I’m on the couch and she’s over there. I’m at the table, both hands flat on the wood, and she’s over there. She’s saying something but it means something else, telling me to do something but wants something else. I’m not smart enough to figure out what she means, to understand the cost, to wager my own death, before the doorknob starts rattling. 

I don’t think I’m a very reliable narrator in relation to my own life. Like, I could probably look like Pam Anderson in Baywatch with my red one piece if I really wanted to but I don’t want to. I want to wear a frock to the bar. I tell lies like I didn’t see it coming and almost start to believe them. I listen to the saxophone, bleary through the sweaty air, and put my face into my wine glass and start blowing bubbles. I don’t graze the knee or the pant leg or jacket cuff. See? I don’t do any of it. I really didn’t know. This is all a lie. These are all lies. I’m up all night thinking about The Her Complex and the Sphynx and I’m breathing into a paper bag because I’m afraid of the dark. I don’t know how much of anything has been a lie. With the Sphynx, I guess she makes the rules for the riddle, so the right answer can change. The right answer six months ago is obsolete now. Now, I’m just sitting in the puddle with my wrong answer, pressing the wrong buttons, thumbing the wrong grapes into my mouth. Pouring the wrong glass of wine and saying the wrong thing. I’m saying the wrong thing. I only pretend I can read minds. Really, I only pretend. None of it is true. I’m not an omniscient third person narrator. I’m wrong, very wrong, consistently, about the only things that really matter.