A peculiar sensation has taken hold of my brain: there are extended moments of my waking life where all thought ceases, where the tapestry of my imagination goes blank and the synapses grow cold and lifeless.
Allow me to explain: the other day I was standing on a subway platform around 1 in the morning in New York City. My train came. I’d been waiting for it for eleven minutes. The doors opened, the trans woman’s voice said “stand clear of the closing doors, please,” and the doors closed. I watched the train gain momentum and depart the station. I stood there, blinking, immobile.
Last I wrote was many moons ago, in the wake of my father’s death, before I left for Berlin for a life-changing two months. I rediscovered my creativity there, I wrote a draft of a feature film, I began a novel, I had sex with men, ugly and beautiful, public and private, one-on-one and all at once, I made new friends, I bought an oversized sweater vest, I stained that sweater vest with blueberry pancakes, I walked around and listened to music and biked and challenged myself and looked at my phone and got STDs and cried and got laid off and drank and did drugs and saw myself in a new light and came home and went to Los Angeles and then to Mexico City and then to Zipolite and then back to LA and watched a lot of Sex and the City and now I’m here, once again, back in New York, looking out at the cold sunlight of Park Slope on a Friday afternoon that feels like a Monday.
My travels are, for the most part, stories I wish to keep to myself (and anyone I come into contact with for the foreseeable future). I intend to divulge every dirty detail in my forthcoming novel. But there’s a couple small memories I wish to share here, since the central theme of them is my brain Short Circuiting and ceasing all activity.
For instance: my first night in Berlin I opened Grindr and some muscly older man with the username “Wanna bump?” invited me to come suck his dick. He lived nearby, and I went, charmed by the quiet tree-lined streets of Friedrichshain at night. His apartment was gorgeous: high ceilings, cork floors, a mattress without a bed frame. He wasn’t as muscular as his profile had led me to believe, but I decided to immerse myself in proper Berlin culture by receiving this man’s genetic material into the fermentation chamber of my intestines. He offered me wine, which I promptly spilled across his precious cork floors, leading to a five-minute pause in our fornication while he sopped up the Chardonnay with a rag to avoid cork warpage. He smacked my face while I rode him, and pumped into me rather aggressively, although the fervor felt a little put-on, like a performance of dominance rather than a successful immersion into that gruff character. The deed done, I slid off of him and asked to rinse off in the shower. The second I stepped under the nozzle all dreams of fermentation subsided, and I realized it would be a perfect time to let the semen drip out of me with no muss or, indeed, fuss. I gently squeezed, hoping to release the fluids and the traces of Wanna Bump? still clinging to my cells, but as I pushed a fully-formed turd came out and plopped to the shower floor. Just then Wanna Bump? came into the bathroom and asked if he could join me in the shower. “Of course!” I responded, my already nasal voice thin and shrill, pushing the turd into the shower drain with my foot and stomping down, hoping it would fit through the grate and leave us to cleanse our bodies as a duo and not an unintentional triad (the turd being the third). I left Wanna Bump’s house with my fecetical secret intact. But what had I been thinking, so boldly committing anal release in the presence of a balding stranger?
Or there’s the time I decided to kill an afternoon at the cinema, seeing Ira Sachs’ Passages, which I’d heard wonderful things about. I purchased my ticket and my popcorn and went and sat in the red cushy chair in the theater. I was the only person at this screening in Kreuzberg at 2 PM on a Wednesday. As the trailers began to squawk at me, I realized something: the film I was seeing was not necessarily in English, and the subtitles for the trailers were in German. I hastily Googled what language Passages is in, feeling the vibrations of my edible making its way steadily into my cranium. Passages, Google reported, was half-French and half-English. The film proceeded to play and was masterful and beautiful, and luckily mostly English. The French parts I just had to smile and nod my way through serenely, pretending I could make sense of the funky German lettering displayed in the bottom third of the screen, looking like the goblin at Gringotts in the last Harry Potter movie when the Imperius Curse is placed upon him.
Another moment my brain short-circuited in Berlin: I walked into this thrift store called Humana. I navigated the aisles and my eyes alighted upon a disgusting green Peter Pan-looking top that had probably once been some sort of costume garment for a budget playhouse. Without trying it on, I blinked and purchased it for 22 Euros, then took it home and slipped it on and noticed it was the fugliest most foul piece of clothing I had possibly ever come in contact with. Photo below — the garment is still for sale.
I flew to Los Angeles to escape the winter only to shiver and ache in the tundra of Beachwood Canyon without heat, a pile of snotty tissues cascading across the floor beside me, the result of my overactive, inflamed nostrils, which remained congested for approximately seven weeks. I did nothing to combat the infection, just complained and stole napkins any time I walked past a dispenser, in case of unforeseen snot ropes. I rented The Land Before Time and watched it, shivering, eating tortilla chips under the sheets, knowing I needed to get up and pee but refusing to. I didn’t wet the bed. But I did cramp up, a sensation mollified only by the soothing “Yep, yep yeps” of Ducky, the first trans girl, a green Saurolophus who changed lives.

To escape the icy isolation of California I flew to Mexico City alone. Unable to speak the language I found myself starving rather than facing the humiliation of ordering incorrectly. I made soft-boiled eggs and tried to crack them before they were ready and found my fingers slick with soupy white inedible mush that I gulped down anyway, ravenous. I walked aimlessly through Condesa and Roma Sur, refusing to take off my Tabis even as my feet ached and wailed for softer soles. Friends reached out: I ignored them or lashed out, then wallowed in my loneliness like a hippo in a vat of hot mud.
In Zipolite I brushed my teeth with the tap water, forgetting the aquatic rules. I spent three days straddling a toilet, liquid gushing out my anus as does syrupy water from a fire hose, too ill to turn around and barf from a kneeling position in front of the basin, instead reduced to vomiting into my lap, through my legs, spattering my innocent little penis with the remains of the chilaquiles so boldly devoured earlier that day.
On the plane home I repeated an idiotic behavior I’ve engaged in for quite some time: attempting to watch an arty, inscrutable film on my phone in the middle seat. This time it was Persona, which I know would have been fabulous on a projector and a couch, but which failed to distract me from watching Catching Fire silently on the girl next to me’s iPad.
I ordered coffee I didn’t want. I bought groceries that went unused. I read books without absorbing a single word. I stared ahead, numb, as I allowed the world to unfold around me, without me. I was like a marble slab in times such as these, when brain function ceased, and I became something cold, immobile, pockmarked and aging, consumed in a chrysalis of lethargy.
What had brought my brain to these startling moments of pure inactivity? Was it a coping mechanism? A result of my freewheeling lifestyle? Was I sick of listening to myself complain so much that my neurons had decided to shut down behind my back just for a bit of a reprieve? I wasn’t sure, but I figured I’d call these little lapses involuntary meditation and move on with my life.
I’m back in New York now. I don’t have a job or an apartment or access to my Grindr account (don’t ask, don’t tell). I do have my friends, and hope that things are about to get really great, and the long shadows the sun is casting across the wooden floor, and the idea to rewatch The Hunger Games, this time with sound. I have my olive green Tabis and a new blue dress I bought in Mexico City and tan lines and a few messages in my inbox at the Unemployment Services section of the Department of Labor and I have a craving for chocolate and a new therapist. I have my memory of Highland Park, in Los Angeles, walking with my bestie as the light develops that delicious foaming golden quality just before sunset, and of the flowers and the dogs screaming at passersby and of Lana wailing about her trip to San Francisco in my headphones. My brain can’t come up with any other artist to listen to besides her. But one day it will. And despite it all — the vomit, the sexually transmitted diseases, the hurt, the uncertainty — actually no, because of it all: I’m really, really happy to be home.
P.S. Poor Things should win Best Picture!
P.P.S. If you hear of a job opening in any field please disregard everything you just read and reach out.
P.P.P.S. (that doesn’t look right) Same goes for a studio apartment in Brooklyn!