God help me I have never loved anything as much as her, I have never loved anyone this much and I cannot stop eating her, I cannot stop tasting her, God help me I have never loved anyone as much as her and I am devouring her, I am devouring her – I have watched her through the mirror, I have watched her through the window, I have watched her through the black flicker of the television, I have watched her through the reflection of her phone, I have looked back at her, I have looked into her eyes and I have watched her through the internet, I have watched her through the small flashing globes of pictures of her perfect life, I have sat awake at night sucking her dry, I have sat awake at night holding my eyes open unblinking as if I might melt into her if I stared hard enough, might become her if I looked close enough at the fecundity of her life, she is so perfect, God help me she is so perfect, I have never loved anything as much as her and
I cannot
stop eating
Her
God cannot help me where I am and where I’m going, and God cannot help how I got here, there is no God in the places between where I grow like a mold, where I grow like a virus, where I grow and it’s so damp and it’s so humid and it’s so warm inside the mattress, and it’s so slick and it’s so cold inside this mirror, and the red rope of my tongue cannot pierce the window, cannot pierce her pleasure, cannot find its way to the red home of her wanting, cannot penetrate the way I want to until one day I could, one day I had waited for long enough and become hungry enough that someone gave me a form – I do not know who gave me a form but it was not God, God will not help me – God will not tear the nictitating membrane, God will not liberate me from the third eyelid, God will not see me, God will not let me see – I am a creature exiled from His Garden, I am stamped out by the pregnant pause of his heel, I am forgotten beneath the cumulus clouds of his Heaven, his gates of pearl no more than the sand trapped in my jaw, and I am heaving up thick green strands of beauty beneath the crust of the Earth, I am trying to find my way back to the thing that I love now like a splinter of unbecoming, the thing that I love now like a midnight sun, like a black and gold and red nimbus of nothing worth worshipping, not the way I worship her and
God cannot help me I
cannot stop eating Her
God help me, please
He’s never listening and I’m so hungry, I have never been anything but an assemblage of ideas stolen at night from the bedsides of better instincts and values pieced together by experiences I can’t have because I don’t exist, not really, aside from when I am eating her and I am real in that moment, I am real as a fuck you that fights its way up to her cortex, which wraps a tongue of blood leather around the nape of her neck, which drinks and drinks and drinks of her perfect life, which drinks and drinks and drinks of her dreams as they coruscate and caper, which drinks and drinks and drinks of the pelagic pearls of her tears, of the pearls of her spit, of the pearls of her cum and the way it gathers in the swollen pink folds of a feathery breath, and God is not here but he is inside her so I cannot enter the way I want, I must devour from the outside, I must eat her from the outside like a termite does a palace, like a termite does a temple, like a termite does a holy place it will never be invited inside of and so it must come like a hostile cathexis, it must come as an invasive species: I am an invasive species and I
cannot help myself my God I
never truly could help myself and I
never stood a chance because
I only know how to eat the things I love
And she’ll never love me even though at night she breathes out a sulfuric kiss and she thinks that maybe she loves me but she just means she’s afraid – I disgust her and she is too nice to say it, too nice to reject the shadow in the corner of her room looming like a ghostlight and weeping like a loon on the lake through which you enter Hell, she feels sorry for me and the pity is a beheading, the pity is a private poison that burns my teeth into hot porcelain syrup, which sends me all chitinous back to the corner of her room, to the body of her mattress, to the shadow beneath her bedframe and the hole I have made for myself there, a hole made of shadow and hanging open like a fractured jaw, like the fractured jaw of the man who drank so much radium water he corroded from the inside out, hanging open like a door to an abandoned house, hanging open, open, open
And every night I climb through the shadow but
sometimes I climb through the mirror and
sometimes I climb through her cellphone and
sometimes I climb through the mattress
but sometimes I climb through the toilet and
always I come at night to devour her–
Maybe she likes it and maybe she needs it but she never rejects me even though she’s afraid of me and I do not think I could stand it if she did, if she sent me away – can she send me away? – I don’t want to eat anything but her; I don’t want to sup on the flesh of – I don’t want to sate my appetite on the sweetmeats of another, on the hot steaming florid organs of another, I want to eat her because I love her and maybe secretly because I hate her, because I cannot be her, because she gets to be what I want before I even know that’s what I want to be, or maybe I discover I want to be it because she’s chosen to be it; I’m not sure which came first, the hunger or the hatred; I’m not sure what came first, the wilting petals of her flayed skin or my nails of bone and starlight rending it; I’m not sure what came first, the longing or the window of the unhinged jaw steeped in shadow beneath her bed; I’m not sure what came first but
God will you please
save me from this hunger I am
eating her flesh I am
eating human flesh and all I wanted was someone to love
someone to love me
God you never fucking listen to me – even when I am begging, even when I am desperate gagging handfuls of unblooming madness, even when I am a heretic praying on flamelight tongue up to your supernal spotlight, even when I am so tired of being this no-thing, this hole in the heart of the shadow of a human – I’m fooling no one and I know it, I’m fooling no one and I’m chewing the ligaments from between her knuckles, I am choking on her gut juice and her gold hair, I am a parasite whose bigger on the inside and I’m shivering back to my hole: banished, vanquished, do you know what it’s like to be so alone, God, so alone that she apologizes to me even while I devour her, that she’s telling me she understands while I am on my knees
swallowing this sacrilege and deciphering the haruspex of
waxing oblivion in the name of my
hunger in the name of the great unloveable weft
of my b o d y in the name in the name in the name of
God why will you not help me, help her, I am crucifying the bird bones of her body bulge, I am trying so hard to become her, I am trying so hard and you are not stopping me; do you hate me so much that you would let me unbuild one of your creatures for the sake of my appetite, for the sake of my covetousness, for the sake of my envy, for the sake of the thing I call love but it’s more like a black hole, a septic pit of tar in the center of my chest, a mausoleum of quick sand that sucks, and sucks, and sucks her slipstreaming sinews from their skin sacks, who spits an exegesis of venom and bitter citrus in her eyes, and all that I have is this red wanton mouth, and all that I have is the underneath of electricity, and the only way I can touch her is through the things she touches – through the screen of her cellphone, through the moist weft of her mattress, through the porcelain of her toilet, and it is through these bridges of flesh I find the homecoming, through these tethers of touch I am no longer alone, I am not alone when I am touching her, I am not alone when I am eating her, or at least if I am alone, she is alone too and
is it love to be alone together and
maybe it is love to be
alone together do you think
God do you think she feels that way too, that our loneliness is a slick wet silk spread over the moratorium on love, on this punishment, this punishment we both know between rib and fang and the skin that is shed along the centuries, and beneath the mattress I am stirring, beneath the mattress I am a nesting anaphylaxis, beneath this mattress I have a nest strewn with paroxysms and promises she made with her breath upon an apple so red it could have been my tongue, so red it cleaves my corneas in quarters, makes me weep, makes me wet, she never finds the nest because she’s not looking God, don’t you tear your eyes away from me God, if she will not look than someone must, I am so hungry, I am so lonely, don’t you know, God, the nest of a serpent is always empty?
Sasha Ravitch (she/her) consults, presents on, and writes fiction, theory, and creative non-fiction about the (posthumanist and otherwise) gothic imagination, quiddity vs haecceity, and monster theory. With a forthcoming manuscript with Revelore Press, she’s published by Strange Horizons, Cosmic Horror Monthly, ergot., Bloodletter Magazine, Cursed Morsels Press, Infested Publishing, and more. She’s a grateful recipient of Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity’s Science Fiction Writer’s Residency, and EIC for antilogos press. Ravitch is a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College, and recently finished her first novel. Her current academic research specialty is tracing what she refers to as the “eschatological gothic” in the early works of Nick Cave and the Berlin post-punk and no-wave scene.
