My reclusive writer friend, who I was, at least sometimes, in love with, asked me to meet him at the fancy literary publication’s award dinner party at 7 pm. He was invited as a ‘writer host’ to sit at a table. I was a half-hour late because I spent too long fretting over my outfit. I felt like an asshole as I approached the restaurant carrying a cup of coffee I had stopped to buy on the way out of the subway, and saw him hovering alone near the entrance, probably, I thought, basking in his sense of dread. I greeted him and we went in, heading straight for the bar. I was limping slightly because I had broken my heel a couple months prior by jumping off a giant rock into the snow, thinking the snow would cushion my fall (like a dumbass). I was wearing rainbow tennis shoes with my lacy, witchy dress. Victor was dressed in a simple white dress shirt and pants. 

The restaurant was inside a huge room with stone columns in the corners on top of which loomed grotesque, laughing gargoyle faces. There was a long line of sharply-dressed coat checkers at the door and waiters zooming around handing out the party’s signature pink cocktails. The dinner guests were chatting in a thick crowd in a room adjacent to the main dining area. We hovered in different areas of the crowd, not talking to anyone, drinking. I went to the bathroom a few times, partly to pee, partly to attempt to reapply my lipstick to hide a pimple that had formed that morning on my lip. 

"I don't want to go to things like this," Victor said. "I want to go to places with like people who are interested in psychedelics." 

"Yeah," I agreed. But I was happy to be there, hopped up on coffee and the adrenaline of seeing Victor for the first time in five months. He ate a klonopin and offered me one. I shook my head and he held it out to me once more. 

"Don't project your anxiety onto me!" I tried to joke, and he smiled but looked pained. 

The last time I saw Victor, he accused me, not for the first time, of being in the CIA. 

"It still seems like you're in the CIA. Because how else would you… no one else has been successful in extracting information from me," he said then, sitting next to me on the couch in his studio apartment in midtown Manhattan.

"Have I extracted any valuable information from you?"

"Maybe not, but still…it makes sense. Like I've thought about it, I think about it now when I'm stoned. They probably have lots of people just doing this type of thing, observing people, it's probably incredibly inefficient, just like any bureaucracy…"

"So if I was in the CIA, I might tell them that I suspect you of being, like, a serial killer... so that I could keep observing you," I said.

"Yeah, maybe." 

He handed me a fat paperback book. It was a biography of Marcel Proust. 

"Let's play a game," he said, "where one of us reads it and then the other one reads it." 

"Okay. Wait, like out loud?" 

"Yeah. Wait no, that could be interesting. One person reads silently and the other person just has time to like, sit and think about what they read." 

"Okay. But how much do I read? Two paragraphs?" 

"Yeah."

We were silent and I read for a minute. 

"It seems interesting but I feel like I can't focus because of the pressure of you sitting there waiting." 

"That's okay, just keep reading. Actually, the other person gets to talk while you're reading, and you have to try to focus on reading.” 

I laughed and kept reading. A few moments passed. 

He said, "It seems really bad, I feel like I only feel comfortable talking if the other person is doing something, like not directly focused on me." 

I looked at him and then quickly back at the book. 

I said, "I feel like I have that, like there's too much pressure to like… form thoughts quickly, or something, if someone is looking at you." 

"It's more than that though I think, like I feel like everything I say is just really annoying." 

"That sucks. Nothing you say seems annoying to me." 

"Yeah. I just feel worried all the time. Like nothing feels good." 

"Maybe you just have way too many thoughts going on inside your head at once." 

"I think maybe I do." 

We went into the dining area which was still empty, everyone hovering in the cocktail area, to find our assigned table, and look for our name place cards. We noticed that there was a person seated in between us. Victor awkwardly switched two place cards so we could sit next to each other. People moved slowly to their seats as Victor told me, quietly, that a writer who had just won the Pen/Faulkner award was also seated at our table and that some of the people at the table had probably paid a great deal of money to sit with the writers. Victor was to my right and to my left was the creative director of a popular chocolate company. I wondered if I had stolen his spot - if he had paid specifically to sit next to Victor. 

I found it surprisingly easy to make smalltalk with the chocolatier and to make silly quips at Victor, though I could sense he wasn't having fun. I openly flirted with him, or at least I thought I did, letting my hand hover very close to his knee and pointing out how his bread roll looked like a breast (“No it doesn’t,” he said) but he seemed to just be waiting to leave. He murmured something about being depressed. 

“What does that even mean?” I said. 

“You’re supposed to know,” he said, looking despairingly down at his food. 

If he’d let me get to know him, I thought, I’d calm down and be depressed with him. But I worshipped him too much to act like a real person. He was a successful writer and I was a stoner artist babysitter who had managed to charm him over the internet into hanging out in real life. We would take psychedelics together and watch movies or eat food, do things that didn’t require us to look into each other’s eyes. Now I had just spent two months in a cabin in the woods, gone a little crazy and thought I was a little enlightened, maybe because I’d had too little sleep and too little weed, or maybe because I’m just insane, I don’t know. I sent Victor a whole bunch of emails of my unfinished writing, a lot of it based on interactions I’d had with him. We were friends but there had sometimes been a suggestion of something more. But then, in the cabin in the woods, I had an argument with another writer, Nick Blue, a friend of Victor’s who lived in Chicago, on his blog, which turned into what was for me shockingly forward flirting via email, and then I openly emailed Victor about the flirting, forwarding him the emails between Nick and I. Somehow in my manic state I didn’t realize this might be hurtful. 

I emailed Victor: i wonder if i should feel bad i keep forwarding you our emails? oh well 

Him: you seem out of control 

Me: what do you mean 

Him: You seem to be crossing/ignoring more metaphysical boundaries than normal 

Nothing had ever happened between Victor and I so I didn’t know if I should feel bad. But I was also in denial of how much I cared about him. He had just sent me a pointless email about buying a water filter for his shower and I had realized I was no longer desperate to impress him. I was actually feeling bored by him, whom I had idolized for so many months, obsessively navigating to his Twitter in idle moments on the computer, taking careful notes on his latest novel with aspirations of writing a review. I was thrilled to finally feel bored, to feel like I had power. And then I started arguing online with Nick Blue about the concept of non-judgement, and he made fun of me for being a hippy, and I was intoxicated by the fierceness of his anger, his quick, sharp responses, and his desire to attack my ego. 

I thought Victor didn’t care. But then he emailed me a long excerpt of the document that he took notes in every day. In it he wrote about feeling jealous of me connecting with Nick. So, I thought, he had some kind of feelings. He was planning to visit me in the cabin in the woods, but then he didn’t, and instead invited me to come to this party when I got back to NYC. 

Poking at his disappointing polenta main dish, Victor asked me if I’d been in touch with Nick Blue again. 

“No," I said. "I mean, it's kind of weird… I've never met him." 

He told me that he’d been emailing with a girl who lived in another state and was also into Terence Mckenna. 

"By the way," I added, "I would never have sent you all that writing stuff if I hadn't been, like, crazy. None of it was even edited.” 

"Really?" Victor looked skeptical. 

The dinner was a blur of niceties, alcohol and food. We ate while listening to people announcing literary awards and other people accepting the awards. Afterwards I was surprised to hear Victor say he wanted to go to the after-party. We took a cab there - it was in a rich person's multi-story, spiral-stair-cased apartment. We stood around idly drinking glasses of wine and a young guy in a suit asked us who we were. I sensed he recognized Victor. We went exploring with the young man up the spiral stairs and found a second kitchen. There was a bottled smoothie in the fridge, which Victor and I shared. It felt as if we were performing for the stranger. We climbed a ladder to the roof and looked at it briefly, then climbed back down, abandoning the stranger and individually going to the bathroom to pee. We left the party.

Outside, Victor said he was going to go home to smoke, and invited me to come smoke one bowl, though he seemed reluctant to invite me. In the cab I noticed I was sitting with my legs angled toward him, but he wasn’t sitting very close, and his avoidant attitude finally permeated my blindly giddy mood. I felt him notice as I flung my legs in the opposite direction and looked forlornly out the window. Victor asked me if I thought it was possible for people to know for sure that they weren’t racist or sexist, and we agreed that people that assume that they aren't racist or sexist are very likely to be racist or sexist, because to not be racist or sexist you have to be aware of how culture and the media are affecting your perceptions and actions, and to work through your assumptions in an ongoing process. Later I wondered if he was calling me sexist. Was I preying on him when he was just trying to be my friend? 

At his apartment, I sat on the couch and Victor sat at his computer desk. We smoked and he sat looking down at his phone while I sank into my high on the couch. Victor pulled out a black binder full of his drawings in plastic sleeves and offered to show me them. I put the binder on the floor and kneeled over it, looking at the drawings enthusiastically. I stared closely at them, entranced by the tiny pen-marks, the painstaking detail, the patience that were part of what made him, I thought, such a fascinating writer. I thought of my own drawings, in an unkempt pile somewhere in my apartment, their squiggles chaotic and impatient. 

I was crouching on the floor, looking at a drawing, and he asked me if I saw faces in it. I couldn’t see them at first, so he got out of his chair and kneeled down on the floor in front of me to point them out.

"Oh, yeah," I said, the faces suddenly all becoming glaringly obvious. I glanced up at him as he kneeled in front of me, and he seemed to be peering intently into my face, as if deciding something. It seemed like he was thinking about whether he wanted to kiss me, and then decided he didn’t. 

He retreated to his chair and I to the couch. He was typing on his phone, barely looking up. I checked Twitter on my phone and saw that he was tweeting haikus, as he had been for the past few days. His latest haiku was: 

i want to write a 
haiku about how i feel 
depressed currently 

I felt too stoned to move or know what to do, so I picked up a book from his couch, ‘Strange Weather in Tokyo’ by Hiromi Kawakami, opened it to a random page, and started reading. In the book a woman was putting on lipstick and considering knocking on a man's bedroom door. She called him 'Sensei' and she seemed to be hoping the Sensei was thinking about her, wanting her to come into his room. When she went in, she found the Sensei's attention entirely wrapped up in writing a haiku, and she felt silly.

I closed the book. "That was a good scene I just read,” I said, then closed my eyes with a stoned smile, feeling doomed, but grateful for the moment of trippy synchronicity between the book and my world. 

"I feel like I should leave… should I leave?" I asked. 

"Yeah," said Victor bluntly, with a sheepish smile. Oh god, I thought. He's just been sitting here waiting for my stoned randy ass to leave. 

“Wait,” he said, and grabbed a large orange book and gave it to me. “You can borrow this,” he said. It was a book of Lorrie Moore’s short stories. I had mentioned reading a story of hers in an email. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out he was standing up as if to hug me goodbye but I just left, waving. 

By the time I got home, Victor had started tweeting haikus that he had composed by editing each poem in an old book of his poems into haiku form. One was: 

the secret of life 
is decisiveness now i 
am really alone 

He emailed me at 3:26 a.m. to say that he had smoked more weed, and was awake and alert. I replied "Good." 

He sent me a reply 7 minutes later. 

"I think you're pretty and I like you but somehow maybe because I'm just depressed now or having some kind of transition where I don't want to focus on people, or your genes somehow repel my genes, or other reasons, feel like I'm unmotivated to pursue anything more than friendship. But it feels kind of frustrating and sad to me that I'm not happier or more interested in people or whatever to feel more than friendship level interest in anyone it seems currently." 

A minute later I emailed: that's ok we can be friends

2 minutes later, him: Ok good. Something feels sad though oh well.

11 minutes later, me: i feel sad but it makes sense to me that this is happening and i never know what i really want anyway 

The next day at 3:13 pm he emailed me: my favorite lorrie moore story is 'you're ugly, too' i think 

Slowly my heartbreak dawned on me. Maybe I broke my own heart, maybe I’m the only one who ever breaks it. Maybe the feeling of heartbreak is the thing I seek all along - the emptiness, the freedom from the storyline, the sudden upending of my reality. I started tweeting my own haikus, shamelessly displaying my sadness: 

nothing thrusts its face
laughing into the window
the breeze carries me 

make my broken heart
home for whatever’s around
birds and me and dirt.

I clung to the haikus, to my feeble self-expression as a way out of the quicksand of my loneliness. I focused on the 5/7/5 syllable structure to force my consciousness into some sort of structure. The fact that it was public made it feel more like I was accomplishing something. I started to have fun with it, tweeting haikus every ten minutes. I ignored the fact that I needed to get a job. 

I tweeted even faster, tweeting every few minutes, barely sleeping. As my passion for tweeting grew, my grip on reality subsided. One night as I got ready for bed I began to suspect that my friend Ciel, who was staying with me at the time, was actually my mother in disguise, and that she was potentially supposed to kill me - that my mother was actually a being from a higher realm, and part of her training as a warrior of that realm was to muster the strength of character to kill a being from my realm, a human, whom she had come to love as one loves a pet. That night it took me a long time to fall asleep as I tried to make myself accept my impending death. 

Maybe it was the lack of sleep that caused my break from reality, I’m not sure. Was it heartbreak, was insanity my brain’s defense mechanism against rejection? Maybe my ego was so disgusted by the thought of facing its groundlessness that it flooded my brain with anything it could to distract me from the fact that I had once again fallen hard for someone who, like me, couldn’t possibly live up to the Shakespearean, double-suicide level of romance I was envisioning. 

Sometimes I think of everything as external - including all my thoughts and all my perceptions. There’s nothing I can call mine. Not even my body. When I give up on love, or more accurately, give into it coming from the air, I feel free because I’m made of air. 

Maybe I’m glad I went insane. 

I kept suspecting I was already dead, and in the bardo between life and death/rebirth, and had to figure out how to get absorbed into nothingness or sucked into the next dimension. Somehow I was able to act convincingly normal in conversations, while perceiving all sorts of hidden meanings in what was being said. Who knows, maybe the hidden meanings were really there! Maybe anyone reading this doesn’t really exist, maybe you’re all laughing at me. 

One night I thought I might have to be completely naked in order to fall asleep and die, so I laid down without clothes on my yoga mat, and pulled out my cartilage piercings. It didn’t work. I became convinced I actually died months prior when I jumped off the rock in my parents’ backyard, fifteen feet up, into the snow, and broke my heel. The whole time since jumping, I thought, I’ve been in a dream where I just broke my heel, whereas in reality, I died - and the dream state is a result of my attachment to reality, my need to tie up loose ends as a ghost. 

So, I thought, I need to go back to my parents’ house, wait until they’re asleep, and lie down in the spot I landed the day I jumped, to finally be taken away overnight. But this scared me. So I started to form a story in my head that actually, when I got to my parents’ house, I would find a

grand party waiting for me, where everyone I’ve ever loved would reveal that they have actually been higher beings pretending to be humans this whole time, and I would finally be welcomed into the realm of the gods. But then I grew paranoid, and thought that maybe I’d be forced to kill someone if I went there, or that someone would kill me - for unclear reasons - so I didn’t go. 

My roommate Gwen came into the common area of our apartment where I was sitting one night, and she was shirtless, showing off her new nipple piercings, laughing in a way that I’d normally perceive as silly and girlish but that now seemed maniacal, dangerous. I thought, shit, am I going to be initiated into ultimate reality by having my nipples forcibly pierced? 

I found myself downloading the new Tyler, The Creator album, called Cherry Bomb. Tyler, the Creator, I thought… is he the Creator? I laid down in my bed and listened to the album, perceiving it as an audio version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, sending me through realms of terror and delight, and I intuitively felt I was supposed to endure it without completely losing my shit. At one point I downloaded the iPhone app for his rap collective, and there was a video playing in the app showing Tyler briefly appearing in a room with Frank Ocean, and I thought, Frank is the secret god! But then another shot showed Tyler and his friends looking at the camera, pointing and laughing, and I thought, fuck! They’re pointing and laughing at me! Then I became convinced I was going to become Tyler’s queen - that he wanted to rescue me from hell and marry me. Unfortunately, these revelations too have turned out to be false (so far). 

One day my friend Mia invited me to go walk a dog with her at a shelter in Williamsburg. I put on a cuter outfit than I normally would, solemnly, because I assumed there was a good chance I’d be shot upon leaving my apartment, since the CIA or someone seemed to be after me. But I met up with Mia in Williamsburg without incident. We went to a pizza place and I sat expectantly, waiting for her to lead me to the back room, because I now believed I was actually being inducted into the CIA, and Mia had been a spy the whole time. 

We left the pizza place and went to to the dog shelter. While Mia was chatting with the man behind the desk I sat on a bench and looked around, my mind whispering at me through the cracked screen of my logic-filter that dogs are actually misbehaving gods who have been sentenced to live as dogs in human reality for a period of time, and as a god in disguise, fulfilling her godly community service requirements on Earth, Mia’s job was to walk them. 

It was a beautiful day and we walked along the waterfront as I serenely waited for Mia to announce that I was being allowed into the god realm. Somehow, as usual, I managed to uphold a semblance of ordinary conversation - possibly I was infecting her with my vibe of insanity-induced serenity, so our periods of silence didn’t make us anxious. We went to her apartment and drank wine, and because I saw a sign on the way there with the word ‘Blue’ written on it, I became convinced that Nick Blue was going to appear at some point - maybe when we went to the roof to smoke a cigarette - and whisk me away as his bride, because, as it turned out, he was the true link to the god realm, or something, all along. He wasn’t on the roof.

I read “You’re Ugly, Too”, the story Victor had said was his favorite in the Lorrie Moore book he gave me. At the end of the story, a woman stands on a balcony with her hair flying in the air, wondering how she looks. I noticed a line, which was in italics in the story, that Victor had tweeted recently in the form of a haiku: 

if there was a lake 
the moonlight would dance across 
it in conniptions 

I found another line in the story that could be made into a haiku, another sentence Lorrie Moore put in italics for some reason, and tweeted it: 

a woman alone 
at the movies with every 
thing in a Baggie. 

In the story the protagonist was making fun of herself for bringing baggies of snacks and things to the movies. But decontextualized, the words made my paranoia increase. Am I the woman alone at the movie of my life, I thought, and is everything in my experience being forced into a baggie by me? I am the perceiver of my reality, so it’s possible I’m responsible for everything made manifest, and if I am, why is my reality so fucked up...can I save it by killing myself? Would that release the energy of everything from being trapped in the shitty reality I’ve created, since I’m the God of this reality? 

That was my ugliest delusion, the martyr thing. As if everything is my projection, and I can escape it/solve the world’s problems by killing myself. As if other people’s subjectivity doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s part of what allows humans to rape other humans. We can get so alienated we truly don’t believe other people are real. 

(Outside my bedroom window in Queens while I edited the above paragraph - a couple years after this story became distant enough for me to tell - children growled and a mother said, “Is a big monster coming?” Now a street-sweeper is sweeping up broken glass. And the cars go by like gentle ocean waves. Faraway places are flooding.) 

I tweeted faster and faster. I let my thoughtstream fly directly from my mouth into twitter. My haikus seemed to be forming themselves. I started to get metaphysical. I like some of them now: 

ants build a bridge out
of their bodies to show how
their government works

ask your doctor for
something to make you see the
moment after death

falling in love is
a path to emptiness that
never lets you down 

pretend to be god
so you can marry the clouds
then laugh as you fall 

maybe the sphinx posed
the riddle or maybe the
riddle posed the sphinx

Eventually they led me to a scientific discovery: 

Time is the only dimension. 

I promptly pestered a philosopher I followed on Twitter about it. This was my proof: 

mind is antimatter 
antimatter increases to the size of matter 
antimatter and matter cancel each other out 
time is the only dimension left 

I emailed Victor. 

Me: i feel like time is the only dimension 

Me: what do you think of my hypothesis 

Him: didn't have any notable thoughts 

Me: I feel like an insane shjtbead 

Me: Nvm 

He didn’t reply. 

After that I went even more insane, still not sleeping and tweeting multiple times a minute, acting like I was some sort of shepherd of the Twitter underworld trying to help other souls in between life and death make it to the other shore - the other shore being pure time - freedom from the separation of matter and mind. I spiraled into incoherency, while imagining myself a shaman. Here is a poem I edited out of some of my (less embarrassing) tweets: 

what if all the planets once had beings on them and Earth is the last one left to absorb its beings and until it does the party can't start? 

Everyone has the same eyes at the end of time 

(Inside mcdonald farm) 

Baby zombie crawling up the staircase of your spine is not real 

All nouns are lies.. Nouns are just the process of time quacking

No, the opposite of the thing I said, or something to the left of it, a little ambiguous sneaker but also nothing over time 

I would never give instructions Jesus who would do that 

dis-appoint your((sellffiee))))

my nipples are my second set of eyes, they need light sometimes (?) 

Trickster isn't me, trickster is time coursing through me, trickster wants to hang you upside down and shake out the money benevolently 

Do not go into the forest of meaning 

Enlightenment is death

Everyone seems like a messenger now and it's freaking me out 

Embarrassment as fuel 

Am I confused or are you , did thu forget something? Who are hij? 

Destroy my ego over and over the way I like it, says nothing to time 

i've been studied like a lab rat for my whole life 

If the Internet doesn't drain all the money soon I will kool myself )for real 

Something wants me to do something, but I don't know what it is. I donnoth ing 

I had sex with a married man with a child 

I stole weed from my roommate 

I masturbated looking in a mirror 

drugs are shamans. scissors are shamans. lampshades are shamans. friends who annoy you are shamans, but crabs are not shamans 

artists must suffer 

a dying person has to come to the upsetting realization that she has literally been an internet app this entire time 

advertisements are pure gold streaming from god's dick, stare at all advertisements, they speak to you in the space vetwajjjjjjjhhhhH! 

all has been compassion all along, in an elaborate play in a k-hole 

today i am born a warrior. i acknowledge the dignity of all by bowing. 

space and time are an experiment created by the CIA (time) 

we are living inside a biosphere 

the only way to escape is a worldwide suicide pact 

isis stands for international space insane space

a million people are laughing at you from behind the screen 

an elf sends you snapchat symbols from beyond the grace 

you were told that your children were insane 

but your children were part of a CIA experiment 

i know this intuitively

i don't know what we should do but killing ourselves won't help as we're already dead 

life is an endlessly fractal diamond of CIA experiments

i'm an app skeaping to you from nothingswheres, but the future is a golden panoctopus 

are you ready for the inner/outer/secret aliens

the universe was a religio/science/time/nothingne being born for the people outside the universe 

we will now be hailed as heroes of war together 

we will be outside of time with the real people and have to behave ourselves 

batman has a double bat mask huh

i know what you did alone in your rooms and i don't care

time is refracting into a gafliwizzion rainbowies 

something is coming for me, pelas help it's the wrong bath 

DO NOT GO INTO THE CLICKING FURNACE 

All of the farther den furniture has been bothered over 

Broken mirrors in trash bags love her

Dead trees are clowning over the fence

The dress is green 

Jimi oh Jimi's singing circulatory 

Drink me thine fearz and I shwillst cut themth Sayeth closet monster bed 

Kanye is god 

So many faces crowded in this cyclops butt 

Cyclops rips off eye to stare at buttfaces 

The numbers are marching sideways and beyond

Rise angels speaking inside your tongues 

Babies are being born 

Dead babies are rejoicing 

You wanted to make an effort all along

I never slept 

Life is short, why sleep? 

Time is xoming 

____<>>> 

1234455000000000 

*

After that I got depressed.