LUST, DESIRE, DREAMS

Hard to compose: I lie in bed watching the world fly by around me, circular. Some days I’m 23 and rearranging sunflowers in the waning Californian sunset, I have my own apartment and people that love me. But today I wear a pink knit sweater and listen to The Smiths. Yesterday I was in the passenger seat. I watch on like audiences do through my actions, there is a current of desire strumming steadily through my pinky but I don’t act upon it. The air reeks of urgency and the eyes around me want to push me; I can feel it. I want to push myself, too. The clock strikes 12 and I tip backwards. Backwards, into my mother’s womb. There, I can feel her hopes and dreams and desires. My infantile self smells it in her placenta and funnels it through the umbilical cord, devouring it with perverted lust. It is her sustenance as well as her ache. An Erysichthon analogue of motherhood, the act of nurturing is reduced to a shell of self-destruction by the man-made world. You can wear matching underwear and bite down into overripe strawberries, have pink bedsheets and blend your lipstick with your ring finger, but you will never be a girl your mother is proud of. So how do I describe the love I have? The sacrifices I would make, dreams that I will only ever dream for her? There is a part of my mother that started rotting within her daughter’s womb the moment she cried for infancy. Tomorrow, I stand for it to emerge, unwillingly, out of me. One of my molars will accompany it to the restless grave, but I’ll keep my pinky and Erysichthon’s perverted lust for desire, desire for lust, because in the end, there is nothing as Sisyphean as the epigenetics of being my mother’s daughter. From the feeling of inadequacy, December 4th, 2023.