A little bit on the side

We walk down the street together, quietly, only her steps reverberating against the asphalt. This is the city that never sleeps, lovers with under eye bags looking at each other on the bus, softly oscillating their way back home. And so do we, but hugging clumsily. I start to walk faster for no reason and she pulls me back and kisses me. Why are you sad, I ask; I am sad because you’re leaving. I am not going anywhere, I say; she says everyone leaves in the end, this city is not made for long lasting relationships. No big city is made for long lasting relationships and that’s why I keep all my interactions shuttered and I shuffle the pieces when I travel, that way I last forever in the eyes of my friends and lovers. You’re like a fucking sailor, she says; I’m just a slut I say. Same thing, she replies.

I pull her closer and take my time to taste her lips, who knows when I’m going to see her again, so I let my tongue in a little bit further and firmer. She moans into my mouth and I know we have to go home and fuck, I am burning and her breath is like a wild wind. She pushes me against the wall of a building and presses her leg between my thighs and my pleasure just cracks open in my lungs and splashes all over my insides, everything is pulsing.
I grab her hair and pull until her neck is completely exposed to me, and I bite hard, I bite deep, I don’t have a better way to tell her how much I want her, I want to eat her and carry her inside me forever, I then want to melt in the sun and have the Nature take its course.

I love you, I say; I love you, she says and I take her in again, I want every drop of her saliva to contaminate me, transform me, make me hers and destroy me. Please kill me, I whisper; and she says I will kill you a million times but please come back to me.
I have nowhere else I want to go if she is alive, I will crawl back to her from the other side of the globe and beg her to lick my bleeding knees until I feel no pain, until I am pain, until I wake up with the first rays of sun to look at her face next to me.

I will come back, I say; I know, she says, let’s go home, let’s fuck.

Going back to the future

Well hello,

You.

I’m in the future. The one we discussed in detail, from frustration to frustration, from your end to my end through Space, our drops of tears and sweat that designed a dotted end you were drawing all along.

It’s wider here, and brighter, I don’t feel trapped and my only limit is my own rib cage, as you always said, and I swear I listened. I listened and I turned my entire world upside down because I trusted you, because you matter, because I agree with you and because I want to be happy.

I want to be happy even if you are not here to see me rise. It’s been a wild ride, my love, but the best was yet to come. I know it because I feel it... My feelings are not backed up by science, yet. And that’s the whole point, you just didn’t have the tools to decipher my silences because there was no data. But oh I knew your silence too well and I have the bad habit to let people do what they want to do, to see what they would rather do.

I demolished myself over and over again. Your words really hurt but at least I was alive. Is it the dick in my brain? Is it the binder over my chest? I am finally and unapologetically me, and I am scared and lost but I am happy. I am not giving up on me. And of course it is not all about “that”, but “that” is a huge chunk of “me”. I’m that little subatomic particle of neutron dust, I feel myself expand and reverberate through the world, sometimes I can even feel you, less and less in the void of Space; I am the place you used to call home because we knew we were going to find each other when the Universe imploded. It does happen infinitely, it is happening now, we are just not there to see it... You are not there to see it. I haven’t gone anywhere. But I am not here either.

I spent weeks grieving, spitting disconnected words into my hands and saving them for when I’d be ready to write, because that’s what I do to talk to the world when the world is too much, when I am too much. I create my own universe of pain and pleasure, a space in which every little particle has a story to tell, and I listen, oh I listen; I listen with every inch of my naked, bleeding, dying human body. I melt into the ground and I feel the Earth vibrate, and I am not scared anymore, and I regret nothing.

“And it feels like we’re living in that split second of a car crash”.

Myself by Philipp Morozov

Eros and Thanatos

It’s very early in the morning, and I feel the electricity under my skin, it just keeps buzzing throughout my bones. I won’t sleep again today.
I feel a slight pressure against my body: it’s something small, warm and velutinous. I turn to my right and I look at the cat. How can you be so fucking peaceful? It’s like the Earth isn’t spinning, and the Sun is not exploding endlessly into the void of the Space. You just lay here, your guard down, stomach rising and falling softly. Conor doesn’t give a fuck either, sleeping like there is no tomorrow at all, and I feel left behind in a future with no Conor and no cat, and yet, here they are, just not quite alive as I am.

I caress the cat and with its eyes still closed it sort of reacts to my touch and stretches slightly, puts its paw on my arm to reassure I am not completely alone and carries on sleeping. I am astonished by this creature doing its own thing, mastering its awareness with grace and arrogance. I feel uncomfortable because my heart fills up with blood and it’s almost like it’s bubbling its way up to my throat which becomes so tight not even a needle will get through. I know what this suffocating velvet-like feeling is: love. This is not ok.

I always wonder why with love comes this visceral shady fear. What is it? What is it really?

It’s the fear of Death.

Love is ephemeral and comes unexpectedly. Death? You know it’s coming. You know it for the entire duration of your life. Just know that every time you go to sleep, you might not wake up, and you have to be alright with it. I kind of am at peace with the fact that I will die, and lately I’ve been making sure that my day is not garbage I will regret living and leaving behind me. If I died now, I would regret nothing. And yet, I am not so ok with the idea of other people dying. People I love dying? Not ok. Animals dying? Not ok at all because I love all animals unconditionally.

I shift a little lower to be at the cat’s face level. Now I can hear its breath and feel the fur against my nose. This is so not ok because I know it’s aware of my love now. It knows and it’s almost as if it’s smiling at me. Death smiling at me.

Back in 1998 circa, I am on my way to my best friend’s apartment. She lives on the ninth floor of one of those ugly soviet buildings. We spend a lot of time at hers because my dad is at work and I always make sure I have a peak from the balcony because the view is mesmerising, the whole city opening to me, all the possibilities, an escape from a life I don’t want.
So on this day everything is the same but the air is still, I can feel the stiffness as I am walking up the staircase; I never take the elevator because Death stares at me and giggles in the flickering lights of a poorly maintained system; I once got stuck and I felt its fingers caressing my shoulders. I reach the last floor and She is standing there in front of her door.

My friend is very worried and I think I’ve never seen her little sister without a smile on her face before. Everything feels wrong. We get in the flat and they say they can’t find the cat and they have a suspicion it might have fallen from the balcony. We get out and look down, windows vertiginously carrying our sight all the way to the little roof above the main entrance. Impossible to see what’s on it, we have to go downstairs.

Once we are on the ground floor, I climb up the pipe and get on the roof above the main door. It’s full of trash and all sorts of unanimated objects but somewhere in between all the shit, there is a tiny black shadow, it’s not moving but it’s definitely breathing. I take the cat in my arms and it’s so light I can’t believe it’s the same animal I spent hours of my life with. I pass the cat to my friend and then make my way down as well.

They are shocked and something cracks inside of me. I love this animal to pieces and I know it’s dying and I have to be strong because no one else will and the cat needs me. I take it into my arms and I realise its spine is broken, that’s when it hits me hard. There is blood coming out of its mouth and it tries to meow, it can’t raise its head but I know it’s telling me something I will never understand but my heart knows. I am sobbing now that I am writing about it but in the moment I just accept it, I feel the cat dying and I just hope it goes quickly now because I can’t see this shit unfolding like this anymore. This is not ok.

I don’t cry, I am just glad the cat is not suffering anymore. I swallow the trauma and pile the experience in the back of my mind until something triggers me twenty two years later and here I am writing about it.

Conor is awake now, he looks at the cat with that same Love I am afraid of and the cat moves and stretches and does its cat things. They are both back, they are alive and I just want to fuck because that’s how I fight my fear of Death, and generally when the cat stares at us fucking I am kind of ok with that because if it’s there watching, it’s not somewhere else dying.

I can quite relate to Joe in Nymphomaniac, when she lubricates as the awareness of her father’s death sinks down, lower, lower, lower... Off she goes to fuck. So I sort of fuck my way through life, and the more I fuck the more I realise that Love and Death are the same entity. You are never fucking just someone’s body, you are embracing the fact that we are all going to die, and that’s ok.

in photos Conor J

Infinitely

You are lying beside me and we pretend like we are busy with our own aimless fumbling because no one can push each other’s limits any harder. They say. We took each other’s intimacy and enmeshed to the point it hurt, so now we separate because that’s what’s expected. But we are, oh my love, so thirsty, filthy, lonely, horny, wet, cold, frightened, stiff, tense, lost, delirious and perennially unsatisfied.

Open your legs for me, let me take you in, let me get in, let me tell you everything is going to be alright forever, let me reassure you with my tongue and fingers, because there is that me in you that never ends, I never run out of that strength that no one reminds me I have. That strength is you. I can take you because I am too much myself. I will lick you clean of all your fears.

I know where you go when your cunt tightens around my fingers, I know why you cry only when no one’s watching, I know why you push me away and your eyes beg me to get back and stay. I’ll stay. I’ll stay even when no one’s watching. I won’t let you fall apart.

Skin on skin I’ll unleash my atoms to explore you because there is so much of you I don’t know and can’t see. I can only embrace your pain as it comes, as I come, as you moan, as I please and tickle the corners of your mind. Your thoughts will bleed all over my hands, my fuel to carry on dismantling the idea of you imposed by those who can’t dig any deeper. Leave them out. Forget about them. Breathe.

I’ll make your emptiness mine because there is nothing I haven’t seen before when my eyes were closed and the world retreated in the dark and told me not to worry whilst the only monster I should have been afraid of was feeding on me without me knowing. My dreams, my power, my will to live and blossom and devour energy to be, to just be, it has all been taken away so I am building it from scratch with you, through you, don’t give up on me, be strong.

I am here with you, cane in one hand and my heart in the other, to confess that if you give up I will die too. Aren’t we tired of dying, my love? Show me the wounds we designed together and I’ll give you a world so safe and so free that the physical pain will be less than a memory. Pleasure. You deserve only pleasure, and that’s what you will feel with me, forever.

photo of me by Conor James