Content Note: drug use/addiction, suicidal ideation, internalized transphobia, an acute mental health crisis

and in a strip mall parking lot off a side road in some Baltimore suburb my hand is trembling as I take the last of the voidwater in its little bootleg dropper and I peel my eyelid back and though I am so careful and try so hard a bit of the precious fluid dribbles down my temple cold and slimy and for a moment I am seized with furious regret, for this and for all the waste, all the waste in all the world, everything that has ever missed its mark

 

and then the drugs start to kick in and I feel myself unclench a bit, like: okay, I’m going to be here for a little bit, it’s not even that late, there are other cars in this lot, I’m normal, I look normal

 

and I think that maybe I can calm down, get some perspective, and I feel the very very front of the voidwater kicking in, the feeling that there’s a trace of something here for me

 

but whatever it is that’s here isn’t you

 

but it was you who offered, it was you who suggested we intertwine, I remember the day, there is a part of me still back there, looking out over the East River from down past that Rite Aid by your old place in Astoria and the sun is folding into the skyline like warmth emanating from one body into the body it is pressed against and you said that you’d looked into it, you’d asked at work and Helma knew someone who could get us in and that we’d probably qualify

 

and in my car in Maryland the edge of the drug starts to swell into focus

 

and so you talk to Helma and Helma puts us in touch with Robert and Robert gets us an appointment at the NYU experimental biotech clinic, and when we go the intern in charge of conducting intake interviews looks at the names we wrote down and said that at this stage of the experiment they are only testing “opposite-sexed dyads” but then with all the proper language you explain the situation (although if I’d opened my mouth it would have been obvious) while I sit next to you curled into myself in shame

 

and the intern goes and gets the lead scientist and she says something about chromosomes and “morphology” which I have always found a humorously gentle way to put it and they say that since I have not had (she paused, uncertain) “surgical intervention,” we are not only eligible candidates, but particularly interesting ones, and god knows I love being both particular and interesting

 

and the visions are beginning, the voidwater singing directly into my optic nerve

 

and I am sorry because I know you know this story, you were there as much as I was, but I am telling you because I have to make sure you know it in the same way that I do, because despite it all I am no longer assured of a common ground between our experiences

 

but I am not actually telling you, you are not here with me, you are back in New York and I am in Maryland, but even miles away and high as a cloud I cannot keep myself from addressing you

 

and so after we check in they tell us for the nth time that we must be conscious for the procedure in order to ensure that we are okay throughout and for the nth time we agree and they lie us face-down next to each other because we have to be close so they can calibrate the interface-ports, although this also means that when there is nobody standing in between us we can reach across and hold hands, and I am probably more scared than you but your hand is the one cold and trembling and after what seems like endless preparation I feel through the local anesthesia a weird kind of pressure and they tell us they are inserting the brainstem ports inside of us, one at a time, and at a certain point there’s this horribly resonant click down my neck like I cracked it wrong, and I am holding my breath now out of fear and they tell me to remember to breathe, to make sure to breathe in and out, to breathe in the air and breathe out the air, and you squeeze my hand

 

and then they turn them on and I am inside of you

but now in Maryland it is night and the crickets are singing and my blood is warm and humming and I am alive and completely alone

 

and I lean my car seat back and the colors from the drugs are swirling on a kind of flat plane, horizontally bisecting my optical nerve, a surface of the world between the world and the sky, widening vertically, separating things, making distinctions

 

and in the towering hospital we turn the intertwine off in order to maneuver shakily down the elevator to the cab but while we are on the way back to our apartment we make surreptitious and romantic eye contact and nudge the small switches on our necks into the on position

 

and suddenly I am inside of your body, dizzy with recognition, I see what you are seeing 

 

as in exactly what you are seeing

 

and I cannot read your thoughts, but I have been inscribed along the grid of your body, I feel it in my own nerves, which correspond with yours

 

and the voidwater’s images are telling me something, they are giving me a message that it is imperative that I understand, but I cannot understand it yet

 

and there in my seat I scratch my cheek absently and realize that I have not shaved in days, the scraggly growth an expression of the part of me I have tried and failed to kill for many years now, or at least one of the parts I have tried and failed to kill, an invasive species—but not actually invasive, unfortunately, a native species which I, a demanding homeowner, have attempted to eradicate

 

but then I draw my hand down and look and around me in the car my memories have arrayed themselves, the days in a circle around me, and they are dancing calmly around me, in a beautiful order beyond the familiar, splendid and wonderfully occult, and for the precious and temporary moment I do not care about my face

 

and we are sitting next to each other holding hands, now I am holding your hand but I am also holding my own hand, and I am looking at you but I am also looking at me looking at you, recursive beyond imagining: I am inside of your body: I am inside of your body feeling the things you feel, and you are feeling the things I feel, our proprioceptions mapped upon one another like transparencies, I am thoroughly out of control and paralyzed, and it is terrifying but it is a kind of release, I can let go and there I am, both myself and you, although if I let myself go enough I am only you

and leaning back in my car seat surrounded by memories and also thoroughly fucking zonked on voidwater I suddenly miss you so badly that I can’t but laugh out loud—

 

because it’s funny, the whole thing is extraordinarily funny, if my noble hunter-gatherer ancestors had known that a brain-damaged and monstrously confused burnout two weeks late for her sex hormone injections tripping out behind the wheel of a personal automobile would be the terminus of their lineage I have to imagine they’d have thought twice about procreation

 

and my laugh is deep and resonant booming out of my barrel of a chest cavity through my distended larynx into the air of the world

 

and it has been so out of my control for so long, this self

 

and when we get home from the hospital you pull me into the bedroom like you desire me and I tap out of your perception for a moment as you sweetly remove my humiliating boxer-briefs because I cannot handle watching that

 

and I cannot eradicate the sudden and shameful intuition that I have dishonored the air of the world with what has exited my lungs

 

and it’s all a waste

but when we fuck with the intertwine on it’s with a cool rationality, exploratory and calm, hands searching methodically for contact, as if the act had a rigor we could map, two scientists working in the field, as if we could draw asymptotically close to the sum of what we want from each other and stay there, perfectly suspended, resting like rafts atop the meniscus of our need, curved as a lens but unbreaking

 

but even blurred with yours, the wanting of my own personal body thwarts itself, it is in the way of itself, as always it is all wrong, desire is painful and extruded and grotesque and all wrong, all wrong, and I cannot feel the things I want to feel, or I cannot feel the things I actually feel, the map disclaims the territory

 

and I don’t even want to care or think very much about sex but it is also the place I have never been able to avoid the disjunction between myself and myself

 

and so when I feel my bear’s paw of a hand on your hip, fully tapped into you, it feels as alien as it always should feel, finally a thing of someone else’s—

 

because it is, finally, no longer merely my own, it is ours and it is not mine, I am not just trapped in here, you are trapped in here with me

 

and we are getting higher and higher together, the visions are beginning, our nerves contrapuntally entangled

 

but the danger starts here, in these moments, because I can want something I cannot imagine, but only out of the corners of my eyes, and once I have had the thing the want becomes sharp as a scalpel, and like a scalpel it slices open

and so after the operation they prescribed us both voidwater (which the doctors do not call that) to counteract the side effects of tapping out of another’s sensorium, the headache and vertigo and sense of impending doom that follow from the sudden loss of experience 

 

but as it turns out it, well, I really enjoy it, it’s a hearty little dissociative, it turns down the self knob to a much more tolerable volume, and I prefer to see myself from outside anyway—specifically, from above and a bit to the left, which is where the voidwater puts me

 

and so after I take all of mine and also take all of the rest of yours, which you don’t even notice, I dig around online until I find a place that’ll ship it to this PO box in Long Island City I open under my old name

 

because I do not want to inhabit myself anymore

 

because like perception, shame is recursive, it feeds upon itself, it observes itself and reproduces of its own accord

 

and if recursive thinking is a criterion of consciousness then shame too could be its evidence

 

and if being unconscious is what it takes to feel unashamed then I do not want to be awake any longer

and so time drones on, the promise of the future eternally slipping into the black hole of the past

 

and I spend the time I’m not in school or working circulation at the library tapped into you, intertwined, completely absent from myself, out of control, you are typing and moving and speaking and I am feeling it all

 

and everything about the way you move in the world feels different, the way people talk to you is different, they look at you differently, your voice emerges from your mouth with remarkable tonal and timbral consistency, you are slight and lithe and agile while I hulk and loom and when you grasp things it is with such dexterous tenderness that I am in holy awe of the smallest of things that you do

 

and one morning you avert your eyes and ask me to tap out partway through the day, during your speech at some GIS programming conference, because even though you can’t tell when I’m inside, the thought makes you nervous, and I lie and say I haven’t even been tapped in that much these days because I’m so occupied by my schoolwork, but when the hour rolls around I’m too high to remember so I watch the whole thing

 

and I have never told you this, but it is horrible and I did it, and I will always have done it

and now, even when I’d hoped I was getting too high to remember things, why is my memory still present with me

  

and I feel like some kind of pervert with the way I pay attention to particular parts of your body when I’m tapped in but you have to understand—

 

(but I suppose that you never actually have to understand)

 

and behind the wheel my heart skitters in my chest and I kind of panic but I’m way too gone to be too worried about it, I’m not even here, whether or not I’m here doesn’t matter

 

because you always seemed so comfortable, you wore yourself so comfortably, you draped yourself in garments that rendered your body legibly attractive, you were always so comfortable and beautiful, I loved you

 

and I know full well that this is a lie, that you were not always comfortable, because I know you, we have talked so much—and I have felt what you feel, I have felt your discomfort, the throbbing of nerves in your stomach, the vertigo of entering public, the cruel ways men express their perception

 

but it is not the same, even your discomfort I envy, and for all of the actual you in me, I cannot do anything with this knowledge, my idea of you has not died, the you I saw from outside is not erased by the experience of you from within

 

because form is a way of making things continue, a promise that things can continue

 

and because I am with you at work so much, you no longer have anything to tell me about your days, really, which is fine by me, because while the atmospheric visualization projects you perform are beautiful and important, at the end of the day your work is fucking boring

 

and here in the car the ruins of time are crumbling around me, and I still love you

 

but I would rather hold with your hand then hold your hand

 

but this is still love, it has to be

 

because if it’s not then what kind of broken animal does that make me

and now the drugs are getting weird, the vision has changed, the days are arrayed against me, they are the jury trying my life, and they are laughing at me, even though I am not really interested in laughing anymore

 

and one morning I wake up and you’ve left for work already and as I’m about to tap into you like I do every morning it strikes me that I am such a fucking creep, it’s unbelievable, it’s unprecedented and unbelievable, just hanging out all day kind of turned on stalking the body of the woman I supposedly love, everything the men my father watches on television have ever said about the kind of person I am is true

 

and it’s weird, because I know full well that I’ve Worked Through This before, but nothing ever dies, and nothing ever goes away, and I never get over anything, and so in the moment I am persuaded that I must have been lying to myself all this time, or you must have been lying about whether or not this is okay, or we’re both ideologically deluded, or whatever, and so suddenly I believe as thoroughly as when I was eight or twelve or fifteen or seventeen or twenty-two years old that I am a psychopath sex criminal and that there is no way any rational society would allow me to enter their public sphere

 

and so instead of going to class or tapping into you I dump voidwater into my eyes until I’m practically blacked out and don a chest-flattening sports bra (not that there is much to flatten) and my butchest clothes (not that I have much else to wear) and take whatever train comes first to the end the line

 

and this is how I wind up spending three hours walking around a Costco in Middle Village, Queens, nodding masculinely at men and asking the people giving out frozen dinner samples weird questions in my deepest monotone and digging my palm into the tip of a mechanical pencil in my pocket and texting you voice messages apologizing for everything I’ve ever done

 

and when you take the train all the way out here to scoop me up from the curb the rent-a-cops dumped me on, you are so kind and sweet to me, even as I can tell that I am taxing your patience to its limit, and you say I’m not a creep at all, which feels like a lie, but it also makes me feel like you understand me better than I do, which makes me want to drive my car into the ocean

 

and in my car in Maryland, a car which I have somehow kept myself from driving into the ocean, I open the door just in time and dispassionately note the surreal neon beauty of the glowing Burger King sign illuminating the pavement before retching bile onto the curb

 

and the next Saturday morning you tell me that you aren’t going to tap into me anymore, which I really wasn’t expecting but which makes sense instantly, and that you’ve talked about it with your therapist, that I can still come over to your mind as much as I want to (you say this in a way that makes sure that I understand that you are consenting) but that you aren’t going to enter my mind anymore, that this is a boundary now

 

and while I have been rigorously trained in the proper response to the invocation of “boundaries,” and while I understand that there are questions I am not supposed to ask, that these are the rules of even the most intimate social intercourse in the years in which we live, that afternoon I skip class to once again get completely fucked on voidwater (which you do not know I have) and hide half-under the bed like the lunatic child I ineluctably am until you get back from work and before your shoes are off I stand up and ask you why

 

and you get all upset and frankly your temper strikes me as idiotic but for whatever reason you do not appreciate when I tell you this and so you snap and tell me that you do not like it anymore, you do not like experiencing any aspect of the world as me

 

and in the car in Maryland I wipe my mouth off on my sleeve and kind of roll back into the car and move to turn the engine back on and drive off into the night, but mercifully I’ve dropped the keys under the center console or something and I’m way too fucked up to find them

 

and I say do you think I like it

 

and I say who said love had anything to do with liking things

and now I am really coming down from the voidwater and it feels like I am dying into myself, like a hailstorm of the worst thoughts on earth

 

and the jury of me is trying my life

 

and I’ve never even liked drugs, what am I doing

 

because they give me nothing, the images they promised fail to congeal, if I am learning anything it is from their absence, the naked terror that follows from their retreat, the void of the void, the pit of rocks

and the end continues to play itself out

 

and on some level we know what is happening, but much to the detriment of collective human flourishing there is a difference between knowing something is happening and acknowledging it

 

and one Saturday morning I am complaining to you about my schoolwork and about how by this point in the semester (week two) I am already in utterly over my head and out of nowhere you say to me that my lack of belief in myself occasionally makes it impossible for you to feel affection for me

 

and I laugh once, sharply, and then say, “What on earth does believing in yourself mean, it’s not like I’m skeptical I exist,” which is really only sort of true, and you say, as if you’d rehearsed, “There was this outward-facing passion that I loved in you when we first began seeing each other, this immersion in the external world, you were so engaged, you were eager and engaged, and I miss it, I really miss it”

 

and your eyes are filling with tears, and mine are not, and I say, do you think I don’t miss the world

 

and I do not say, you were my door to the world

 

and I do not say, I miss the world because I miss you

and later I ask why you even wanted to sign us up for the intertwine-port trial, and you say you wanted to help me, and then wince a bit because you know you just choked, and I say so you didn’t want to experience it for yourself, and you look at me, and I say not even a little bit, and you look at me, and then you say a little bit, sure

 

and then I ask if you feel bad for me, and you stand up and look at me, and I look at you, and you say it’s not like that

 

but then what is it like

 

but actually

and in the brief moments I am able to look around me I perceive that things are collapsing everywhere, I mean they always have been but now they’re like, extra-collapsing

 

but I can only see you, just one stupid person, why is it I can’t stop thinking about you when there’s a whole world out there

 

and which of my thoughts are even mine and map onto my own body and which are vestigial references to yours

 

and if form is a way of telling things apart from each other, then what do I do when the forms I bear in my mind do not match the way things are actually apart from each other

 

and I don’t even like you anymore

 

but who said loving people had anything to do with liking them

 

and if form is a promise that things can continue, then what do I do when a form is gone

and it goes unspoken that you will get the apartment, it was yours before, you’re the one with the fucking job

 

and you offer to rent me a storage unit for a few months, which is very sweet, and I move my stuff into it slowly, dragging my task out

 

but I really don’t have that much stuff, everything in the apartment is yours, so after a week or so of occasionally driving stuff over, I’m done

 

and I have no idea what you are thinking these days about the intertwine ports, we haven’t talked about it in months, they have faded into the background, one of those strange shifts in habit where you can’t in retrospect pinpoint when or where it started, even I haven’t used them in a while

 

because they give a type of pleasure that reveals by means of its successful satisfaction how deeply you want what you really want, like sticking your head out the window to check out a nice cloud and realizing you’re perched above the bottomless void, and what good has knowing that sort of thing—or anything, really—ever done me

 

and I have no idea whether intertwining is in any part responsible for the failure of our relationship, because by this point I cannot separate anything in my experience from anything else

 

because I am formless on so many levels, unformed body, unformed mind, fractally formless, formless all the way down

and there at the end, during one of our last obligatory fights, you tell me you feel I’ve become too possessive of you

 

and I get all mopey and righteous, because it was you who suggested we intertwine

 

but I mean, you’re right

 

because it was my failure, I failed you, even if I couldn’t really help it, you were my best friend and I failed you, even if I didn’t mean to

 

and of course I didn’t mean to, at the end of the day who in their heart of hearts really wants to hurt the ones they love

 

and now in the car I’m finally crying, because I’m really really sorry

but I do not tell you the night I am actually leaving, because I don’t want to think about it, nor do I want to think about you thinking about it

 

and so you call at nine and ask sort of angrily where I am, and I tell you I’m at my friend Ellen’s place for the night, and I say that we can’t talk for a while, and you realize what this conversation is, and your voice flips into the most painful modality of patient kindness, and you say okay, yeah, whatever you need, kiddo, which is, or was, your nickname for me

 

and it hurts both because I will miss how it feels to hear the word from your mouth, and also because I can finally see what it means, which is that even though I am only three months younger than you, I am a lifetime younger than you

 

and then you correct “kiddo” to “friend,” which is also a nickname that we used, or use, if a word so generic can count as a nickname, but I suppose people can fill even the smallest words with way, way too much

 

because “friend” means the opposite of what we were, an opposite contained within what we were, just as I was once contained within you, just as I was, fleetingly, nothing more than a part of you, not my own self

 

and even before we intertwined I loved that I could not tell where I ended and you began

 

and what a mistake that was

 

and I say goodbye and hang up

and the summer passes, and I’m not getting any better

 

and I am living with my friend Maria in Crown Heights when the semester ends and Maria politely asks me to leave because I’m not getting any better and they are starting to lose their own shit by virtue of mere proximity to me

 

and then I live with a couple of other friends all the way out in Newark and I still don’t get any better

 

and when school comes back around I ask my advisor if I could take an academic leave and he says no and I ask the dean if I could take a medical leave and she says no

 

and at this point I don’t even know what school is, anyway, so I don’t go back

 

and I get in my car and start driving

 

and after god knows how many furious forward-facing hours I pull into a strip mall parking lot off a side road in some Maryland suburb

 

and the sun is nowhere close to coming up

and the sun is still nowhere close to coming up

 

and I have lost all sense of time, forever

 

and a great shiver rolls through me, and I am thinking about your face

 

and when I tried to tap into you one last time after you dumped me nothing happened because you’d gotten the port removed

 

and the experiment is over

 

and life is such a sad and tired thing

 

and I flip the switch in my neck again now and nothing happens

 

and what would I even want to happen, at this point

 

because the experiment is over

 

and when I have finally finished crying I step out of the car

 

and walking right down the middle of the parking lot is a family of deer, six of them, their coats scuzzy and tawny and their wild eyes kind and alien, the little ones trailing mildly behind the larger, utterly confident, in their territory, like they’re walking back to their car with craft supplies from Michaels, and though they are little more than pests in this part of the country as I watch them walking it feels as though the earth itself is moving underneath them, as if they are at the center of things and the earth is a great wheel rolling under their strange cleft hooves, they are walking right down the middle of my mind, carving a stream down my center

 

and I realize that I have no conception of what it would mean to be a deer, of what being a deer is actually like, that it is an utter blank in my mind, a word in a language I do not speak, and I look at them and they do not look at me, and they come so close, it is so strange, they walk so close to me I could nearly touch them, as if I were invisible, disembodied, although I do not touch them

 

and suddenly I twitch or shiver or something, I don’t even know, and the largest deer startles and flees, and the rest follow, hooves clacking on the ragged pavement, and the moment seems to last forever, and a part of me seems to follow with them, hitched like a tick upon their backs, driven like a thought behind their eyes, and I am disappearing with them, because I have really seen them, I saw them and it was real, and now I remember them, they are real in my memory, their bodies loping endlessly through my mind, they are within me now, just as I am within them, even without touching them I am inscribed now within their bodies and they in mine

 

because there really exists just one body, and it is the body of all of us, and it cannot be seen from outside, there is no Archimedean point from which to view it, no objectivity, we are all within it, it is truly the experience of all of us, the form we all see that we already take when the scales have fallen from our eyes

 

it is something truly universal because it contains all of us, and the world too, the animals, the winds, the waters, it is the planet, it is god, it is the way the universe knows itself, and it has no sex, or all of the sexes, no gender or all of the genders

 

and I have been given one tiny role in this body, a single cell amidst the innumerable whirl of others, I have been granted one small task by the earth, a gift to protect with my life, and it is not even mine, it is everyone’s, and I hate my task, but without it, the body of all of us is incomplete

 

and I will never be another animal, I am born and I will die the same animal, but that animal is never the same as itself, I do not know where it ends and where it begins, and it is not broken, it is replete, or it is both broken and replete

 

and I look past the curb and the Burger King sign towards the road, which stretches out to either side of me, a terrible and familiar scar across the face of this ancient continent

 

and I have to take this on faith but I can maybe sometimes see in the very corner of my vision that illuminated by the light of the truth my life as I have tried to live it would make at least my less awful ancestors, if not proud, at least not ashamed

 

and I wonder where in the world you are right now and I hope, for the first time in a while sincerely, that you are ok

 

and I stand in the light of the sign and breathe in the air and breathe out the air

© 2023 Theodora Ward