I see me, him, steadying himself against the sink in the violent white light of the
bathroom, commotion of the party straining at the door’s edges. The churning in his stomach
claws at the depths he can only feel when the churning claws at them. It happens, it’s okay, he’s
normal, just needs to breathe. Pressing his forehead against the cool porcelain sink-edge to
remind himself that his body has an outside, he sees himself fish-eye in the white sheen, gets
scared, pulls back, falls over.
On the floor, churning rising from his stomach, what would his girlfriend, who he is the
boyfriend of, think if he saw her, she saw him, salivating on the vinyl tile, world spinning
around? She would see his toppling image and into his stirring depths to know that he was not
boyfriend but sickness itself, unfit to be captured in pictures with her. Unfit to be seen holding
hands, to be heard saying ‘I love you’, to be talked about fucking. And his friends, who he is the
friend of? Outside now, circling among themselves, shoulders interlocked as rough and ruinous
puzzle pieces, fists clutching beers, gold chains dangling to their chest, hair not, their reactions to
his nauseous form lying dormant in them now. They would recoil, they would understand that
though his shoulders too interlocked, his were not the shoulders of their puzzle, but a different,
undesirable, puzzle.
On the floor, in comes the vivid gnawing: in fingers so far from his body that he can feel
the motor-signal delay, in toes so far that the signal takes some wrong turn and gets lost, top and
bottom teeth meeting too soon, hands meeting ground too slow, when they do clawing his limp
body to the tub, the churning crawling up his esophagus, farther than it’s ever got. He can feel it
now, lapping against the back of his throat, liquid. He can taste it now, acidic, disinfectant. Not a
stomach-product, non-biological.

And, steadying himself against the spinning bath lip, the churning comes tumbling out of
his body, a nauseous clean overcoming his senses, steady stream of clear liquid shooting out on
the white tile. His body now the mere mouth of a hose twirling against its product, perpetually
thrown every which way by its discharge, coating all four walls in a dripping turquoise sheen.
Completely at the mercy of his prodigious waste, his body propelled backwards against the
mirror, head thrown squarely into the glass, hair decorated with shards, scalp run red, body
sopped and wet, nothing but the breathless gallons from his mouth. And the river wavers. A
pastoral stream, a delicate faucet, a mindless drool. The room smells like chlorine.
He falls to his hands and knees in the puddle below, sobbing quietly. Then, a rip inside.
Tearing his throat open, something solid lugs up from his stomach. Thrown into the depths of an
agony inconceivable by those so lucky as to be subject to worldly pains, weakened so much that
he can merely curl on the cold wet and whimper, he feels something hard come into his mouth
and then out of it. Blood wiped off, a glass necklace.
Another pain rises, tearing at the lining of his esophagus, harder and harder to think, mind
overcome with pain, blood dripping from his lips and pooling in the water, clouds of red
dispersing, from his mouth a small shell, ridged and white, perfect and pristine.
And another, this one significantly larger and sharper than either object before, but
malleable and bendy. Its jagged edges tear open his throat, severing the thin slice of tissue
between esophagus and trachea, spilling blood into his airways and then into his lungs, losing
ability to breathe, the object expels itself. A thin square coated in blood. A Polaroid picture:
He sees himself, me, long hair, loose sweater, with people his girlfriend who he is the
boyfriend of and his friends who he is the friend of would never let into their sights, would turn
their head away, pretend they didn’t exist. I’m smiling in the picture, looking at my undesirable

friends, joy, life in my eyes. His vision darkens, his movements slow. He carefully arranges the
items in front of him, side by side. Floating in the water and the blood: objects from a better
world, fragments of a truer life.