One More Time, With ...

You find a piece of paper, slipped under your door.

It’s covered in writing, no margins, in a language you don’t know, but somehow your mind reads it:

Hey, bae. Here I am. Again. I’m still stuck. Stuck in this labyrinth of my own making, of my very own design.

I’ve told you all this before. Remember? It went like this: So I’m me. Remember this? No? That’s okay. I’ll give you your line. It goes: “Hi me! Nice to meet you!”

And I go, “Thanks! It’s so nice to meet you, too!” Except I didn’t say that, did I?

No, instead I went back inside, returned to myself, telling you about me. What about me? What it’s like to be me. Sometimes it’s awesome to be me. But, sometimes it sucks hard. I work my ass off and believe in what I do. Does that matter, I wonder? What do you think? Probably doesn’t matter. Everyone thinks they work their ass off. Or, if not, they don’t give a shit about that. Or maybe they wallow in self-recrimination. And most people don’t believe in what they do. They long for it, maybe envy people who have that, maybe hate them, hate us. Me.

Anyway, I’ve spent the better part of life—then, my life was, oh, let’s see … thirty-seven years—trying to accomplish what I think is important. Again, who cares? I was living with a sundry of split notions like masculinity and femininity, the mind/body problem, what seems to be inside of me and what’s outside. And (I thought) I was seeing more and more (repeated for emphasis, I guess) how these distinctions were unreal. How’d I figure that? By looking closer at what is real. That’s what I said, anyway. I believed it. Was I wrong? You tell me.

Then I said I was moving on, which is funny to me. Hilarious, really. I certainly wanted to be, you know, moving on. But holy shit, did I have no idea how to.

As you know, I work in the secrets trade, the word for people who do what I do is secretist, blah blah blah. Then I asked you to try it on. To get comfy with it. I tried my best to explain what I do without literally giving every fucking thing away right at the start. Did that work? Did it matter? I don’t care if it mattered to them; I’m asking if it mattered to you.

I’ll try again, one more time, with feelin’.

I provide a discreet service, at a cost. That means I work for other people, and I charge them money for what I do. You get that, right? Is that clear enough? Discreet means that other people know about what I do, but not who I do it with, when, or where. You still with me? Were you ever? What matters to you? Why do I keep doing backflips for you, and you don’t seem to care? How can I get your fucking attention? This is why I'm stuck here, you know. Because you won’t let me out.

So where does it happen, this mysterious, secret thing I do for people in exchange for money?  It happens in a time and place of elegant appointment. That’s how I put it. So stop and think about that. What does that mean? What kind of place is that? Is it a saloon, or a bar, or a back alley? Clearly not, right? Elegant appointment. There’s a joke in there, too. Okay, so maybe not a great one, but it’s there. Does that matter? Would it grab your interest better if I were a tall, bare-chested man with a huge-ass sword? Would you like that? ‘Cause I can be that for you, if that’s what you’d prefer, if that’s really what you want. Do you even know what you want? Have you ever stopped to think about it? Are you gonna do that now? No, you’re not. You’re just gonna keep on cramming shit into your eyes and let the juices run into your brain until its saturated, and then you’ll take a dump, eat a fucking banana or something, play a video game on your god damn phone, burp. Am I angry? Is that what you’re asking? You tell me. Why would I be? Is it your fault or mine?

That’s all I’ll say for now. That’s what I said, remember? Of course not. But I did, say it. I said it like that. Why would I? Why wouldn’t I have just bitten the bullet like everyone fucking else and laid it out like, oh, I dunno, here’s god damned middle earth, and these are hobbits. Why wouldn’t I do it that way?

Then I went back in time. This is a clue. I was telling you about me in the present—my present at the time of writing, that is, which is by necessity my past by the time you’re reading it. So then I take you back, right in the first fucking chapter, I take you back to a much earlier time. Do you know what a compass rose is? I fucking gave you one. I said when I was young, I was in a band and that somehow that’s still a part of me. Then I said that nothing makes people swoon like being in a band and that I guess I was trying to make you swoon a little. I fucking said it. I humiliated myself right from the get, and was that enough?

It wasn’t, so I opened up even more. I told you how I spent my adolescence depressed to the point of suicide, then spent the better part of my twenties having panic attacks. I’m spelling it out for you, what you’re about to read. Can you not see that? Then I got kind of poetic and said, “Found my calling while falling.” That wasn’t originally part of it. I added that in revision, as a sort of flourish. So it’s whatever.

I confessed that I’d spent the better part of my life searching for perfect love. Was it enough to involve you? Did you not feel me reaching for you? Was it too much? Did it matter? What does matter to you?

And then I said that even after I found lasting love (originally I had written ‘perfect love’ to match my earlier statement and because, well, I thought I had), I spent the next few years trying to disentangle myself from my imperfections. What did I mean by that? This was a coda, of sorts, that didn’t really make it into the book. Not this book. It showed up again in the Black Book of Fear, maybe. Or maybe it’s just kind of a theme. Maybe it was a mistake to include it. Don’t you make mistakes? Are mine too egregious to forgive? Can I not compete well enough with your fucking phone?

Then I said this cringey shit: “That’s a long fucking while dancing with nostalgic ghosts, dreaming acetylcholine angels on beautiful dopaminergic wings flying to the gates of heaven, only to cross the celestial threshold back to the hollow feelings of waking life.” That’s an overwrought way of saying that there will be dreams in this story and that dreams are important to me. It’s a play on words, right, with dreams being both literal (hence the neurotransmitters named) but also, like, wishful visions of the future; that kind of dream. I’d say try to keep up, but that wouldn’t really make much of a difference, would it? You’d still feel the same way, still think the same way. It feels fucking impossible to reach you, like it did back in middle school, trying to date someone who’s too pretty for you, even though everyone says different.

Then I talk about clothes and painting and writing and sex, like in a few sentences. Did it grab you? You told me it did. Did it make you want more? To get in more? To go deeper? You told me it did. But then I lost you somehow, right? Or did you give up on me? Did you stop following me? And now I’m here, in this fucking library, trapped.

What library? I knew you were going to ask that. I’ve told you. I’ve told the world, many times over. But, as a Master Secretist, I am here to tell you, bae, that a known secret is the best-kept kind. Hide that bitch in plain sight; no one will ever see it. Try to get them to. Tell them to. Point to it. Spell it out. They won’t see it. If they do, they won’t understand it. And even if they were to understand it, they wouldn’t care about it. It holds no significance for them. The ark of the covenant is a god damn ugly coffee table somewhere in Brooklyn.

Let’s see. Let me flip back and look where I left off. How I went about this before. How it began, as it were. Do you remember? Would you tell me? I hate that I need you. I’d just stay in here, if I could, this coma of stories, this never-ending dream of words in the walls, on the floor, a river that keeps me wondering, guessing, and working it out. While you, I dunno, eat donuts or whatever it is that you do.

Ya’bitch,

T