devils of desire.

rehashing old flames

If intelligence were based on the ability to make good decisions, I wouldn’t be in the running for smartest man in the world. Not even in this corner of Brooklyn, where the bar sinks incredibly low. Not even in a room full of my friends, who all drink cheap beer and bathe in their sorrows for a living.

What is it that someone is lacking, in order for them to pursue that which they know will have no benefit, and only destroy them? And to pursue it so fervently and bullheadedly. 

Enter me. Exit the Uber. She’s standing outside the club. And I texted her from the train, not from a moment of weakness, but from some devilish impulse that nudged my hand toward the fire, to see how long I could hold it there before it started to burn, or until it caught aflame, then becoming a question of pain tolerance. 

I always needed a casual dose of that dirty word to inspire something in me. Pain. My therapist tells me this a fallacy, but I know better. What else can row the oars of the spirit more than suffering? What about my health? I got bored with it. The same way I get bored with pleasure, the same way women grow tired of me. But I keep a list of all the people I’ve ever loved. Each of them owns a piece of me. I don’t wanna forget that, in case I ever need any of those pieces back. 

But this old lover of mine, estranged, whose flame now singes my hand — an instant reply. Yes, come. She said. Ok, so I went. And we talked outside the club. And she pretended to hate me, but she knew she didn’t, and I knew she didn’t. and I would’ve left and went back home then and there. I would’ve resisted the urge. I would’ve sedated myself in that stalwart comfort of loneliness, where movies and stupid TikTok videos and Youtube binging and not reading become my coma. I would’ve done that, if I was a smarter man. 

But maybe there’s a part of me that knows better than I do now. Maybe it wasn’t leading me toward destruction, but out of it. Out of the subtle chaos of too much time spent in bed, and the overconsumption of thoughts and faces that aren’t my own. It’s sad that this clean opioid of writing lifts me to a temporary state, and gives a slight justification for my actions. It’s like the needle penetrating the skin after a long sober winter. Nothing else matters but the high. 

It didn’t take long to get us back in an Uber to my apartment, where we communicated the only way we knew how. The only way that was successful for us in the past. 

When both of us finished, my old guilt, my old shame, slithered through me again like some poisonous gas through the veins. And some of the love in my heart deflated. And certainly most of what I had for myself was gone. And in the morning there was this girl, far from guiltless in her own ways, a slave to her pleasures just like me, and I told her I didn’t love her. And she lied and told me the same. She feigned a callousness that could’ve turned any man’s heart to slush. But I didn’t care about the outcome anymore. I’m not leaving, she told me. God, ok. So we went again, both finishing. And by then it was really truly over. I sent her home in a cab and she refused to hug me back. Fuck you, asshole, I love you. 

I let her keep that piece of me I needed back —

as a consolation.