james has been dead for months now, and the eeriness of his soul’s collapse begins to melt away, like the snow at may’s gentle arrival. we spent the night pretending to study, which meant drinking, smoking, and listening to her tell stories about her time in italy. by "her time" i mean "all the men who drooled over her". she pulled a tissue with the word bella and a phone number scribbled onto it out of her pocket to confirm: the story is real, i was the hero, here is a relic of the conquest, my trophy.

the shaman sat at the computer next to us beside the overflowing bookcase, candid and immersed in his screens, playing skyrim on one and streaming a hockey game on the other.

but he wasn’t attractive for me, she concluded. so i didn't call him.

you didn't call him, you just saved his tissue? (bitch) me. i was being a bitch. i want the attention, i want othello's handkerchief, i want to die the death of lust.

well i saved it to show you, bitch!

i'm moving out of waterloo soon and in with vic. will only have one class to teach and one more class to take next semester, easy ride from toronto (etobicoke) twice a week. the rest of my work will be comp prep before i write the thesis.

sitting in the basement, smoking a spliff, waiting for more contents (pepperoni, mozzarella, breadsticks) to fill this empty shell. polyboy just left, but i can still smell the lime smirnoff. i didn't feel like knowing him. still the wet parts of our faces touched but no nudity. he’s shy around me but presumptuous (cozy with my eyes, coy with my body, and brimming with contempt—like a cat). what is the point of polyboy anymore? what is the point of having people i don’t like around?

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“you meant it for harm, but god meant it for good,”

trump was on a platform, behind a big wooden desk. i had traveled up a long elevator to the second last floor to meet him. we were in a big, open oval room with a window wall, him and i and a few other women i didn't know. one of the women had black straight hair and a body guard of sorts with her. we were there to accept an award. i asked for the bathroom. the guard pointed towards a door at the end of the room.

the door led to a long corridor, lined with little, empty, windowless rooms. i didn't need to use the bathroom, i wanted to escape, but i couldn't find the elevator that we'd come up in. i started to move faster, more nervous, down this endless corridor, past room after empty little room, until the door at the corridor's end brought me back to the oval office.

trump and the guard were staring at me, so i smiled not to look suspicious. when i smiled, trump smiled, and came towards me. i thought that i could charm him, so i put on an accent and played coy.

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old news.

she is not surprised. not because it's trump but because children are in cages all over the world and even three years later, people still aren't over the fact that a great orange tiger is the president of the united states. did you hear him say.. did you see that tweet he.. can you believe he ignored that reporter who..

yes, she can believe it. in fact, she is not sure what else people expect. eleven broken nations later (and counting) and all americans care about is their president's digital footprint. sure a democratic president sold the west bank to the israelis—but he cheated on his feminist wife who ran against this spray-tanned pop-tart, and that makes him a friend of growth. sure a democratic president authorized the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in yemen and somalia and iraq and pakistan--but he was black, and that's called progress, a progress being threatened by this current president's lack of class and unwillingness to mollify his assholery. at least the others tried to hide their crimes.

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[in arabic] the americans are the bullies of the world, roger said, trying to cheer me up. and now with covid? they have even more excuses to be nasty. let's just thank god that they didn't treat you any worse!

and that she's not still in their custody! my dad chimed in through a mouthful of tomato salad.

oh yes! with covid and testing and all these rules, you could have been in a terminal situation.

terminal situation? i asked.

eh, like the movie, the one with that actor, shu esmo george? tom cruise.

tom hanks.

sahh, tom hanks! tom travels to the u.s. and while he's on the way, a coup happens in his country, kazakhstan aw shi.

krakozhia.

krakozhia. is there a place called krakozhia, dakhlak?

no, they made it up for the movie. inu it's supposed to be ex-soviet a la belarusia aw kazakhstan.

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smoking so much that everything i put in my body gives me a stomach-ache, everyone i come in contact with is part of a scheme to humiliate me, everything i say makes me want to rip my tongue out so that i never speak again. a smoke before we go, a smoke after the meal, a smoke with my coffee, a smoke before the film, a smoke before my shower, a smoke after sex—my life has become a series of disembodied motions compressed between cigarettes.

need to return to a somewhat sober lifestyle. but what would i do instead? breathe.

vic is on his way and there are still several things i need to do to be ready for him (be ready for him—who am i? whose life am i living?) and brunette still hasn’t left. i’m scared. it’s nothing i’m overreacting. or maybe he knows (i smoke waaaay too much). just wait a little longer. just write a couple more things. i hate being like this. when will i be free of the weight of myself?

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just you.

just being.

as awake as you are now …

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sharing covers, giggling all night, tobacco ash showering the sheets, trying to fall asleep, huffing and puffing and trying again, have you seen this video? this was when kanye was a real artist. did you know they rented out the louvre for that? not a single feature on her face is real. something on that roof is on fire. habibi come look, something on that roof is on fire! the whole world is on fire. can you see the sun yet? no. never mind, someone's putting it out.

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please ma’am step outside so we can finish up here.

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been trying to tell you what happened but can’t focus on the page yet. i’m not sure where to start. it was the longest 40 hours of my life.

part of me is still there.

will breathe and return.

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Smoked so much today that I can still feel the cigarette butt hanging from my lip like a ghost pain. Went to the funny Romanian’s house after work. Drank beers, smoked pot, bobbed our heads to the background beat and called it dancing. Polyboy was there, with Polygirl at first. She left early but he and i barely spoke, even after she was gone (like humping a skeleton). Stood around laughing at stories I wasn’t listening to, asking people for their thoughts on death, waiting for someone to ask me. The world kept crying outside, acid tears cracking against the windows, tik tiktik, tik, offbeat and musical.

Straight, blonde, shoulder-length hair, bored bright blue eyes, and a perpetual pout etched into her porcelain, Russian doll chin. She likes to smoke cigarettes and hypnotize people. She read Ulysses in two days, and was reciting lectures as an infant. She went to the best schools and is classically trained in dance and singing and piano and—on our way back from class she had to point out unprompted (again) that she received a better education than me because she went to the University of Moscow.

Because it’s like, a good university, you know? And like I studied philology there, we had a huge department, the best professors, oh my god you would love them. I mean did you guys even have a department or was it just you and like two professors? I don’t imagine a lot of people are studying literature in the middle of Lebanon.

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Iman says that people need to be “shown the way”, that they’re ready to drop everything and move if they’re just “shown a way”. I disagree.

Waking up at nine am in Tijuana’s city center. The room is cold and damp, beats dance in from the street through th…

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we were never together, but we had each other, the way one has a tattoo; under the skin, painful at the outset, painful to remove, but satisfying, cool, complementary, could be p…

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