IF I CAN'T FEEL ECSTASY

I calculate if it’s ethical to kneel in this political climate.

When I was seventeen I had a dream of fucking the DJ. 

It ignited the first time I watched a set in Bushwick. An impulse spined, sinewaves rippled on a CDJ, fringe worn with bpm whirled with a slow flick of disk. 

In May I finally slept with one. My blood seeped his sheets, vents rolling to the rhythm of rain. That night, I was one step closer to satiating the longing of my younger self. One step closer to killing myself.  

He told me stories from his time as a teenage drug dealer and later fixing planes in the army, traveling the world, skateboarding in the countryside on the outskirts of London. The planes he worked on flew to over ten thousand feet, dropping three thousand pounds of dynamite on villages in the Middle East. Every five hundred dead was one more bronze star pinned to his lapel. His nightmares clawed like Rauschenberg splotches, haunted by all of the lives he was indirectly responsible for.

He was batshit crazy to me, but I don’t think it’s possible to be normal after what he’d done.

⊗

When I was nine I was told confidence is what’s going to prevent me from getting kidnapped. Every time a car floods by I know I should have called bullshit. The deciduous trees carve into the fog, they’re the only shelter in this southern town.

The fire station’s a beacon bathed in cosmic apple. At the end of the road there’s a lodge that forgot to take down its Christmas lights 10 months ago. On the porch: two patio chairs. In Oklahoma, a cowboy’s turning thirty, having tea with his dad every Sunday. His dad’s boisterous but there’s white straggling his beard. The cowboy waits for a lull in the conversation to list conclusions he’s overthought into: I’ve fallen for someone almost a decade younger than me, I want to move to Brooklyn for her, she makes me so happy.

I don’t know his dad well enough to know how he responded but I know I used to dream of wheat fields in Oklahoma. I ended things when he told me he hated the way I spoke and then he bought out a grocery aisle of vitamins. His fallout still haunts my hair. 

Sometimes I wonder if the underlying reason we broke up was because Oklahoma had the highest proportion of red voters in the 2024 election — and I go to school on College Hill. He never understood the urgency of my despair.

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You’re so American, no? an esoteric programmer said, in my Causeway Bay apartment. He’s Indonesian, pouts, kicks soccer balls in black sewage, only thinks of me when he’s drunk or sometimes when forest fires flare out West. 

I didn’t like how he saw me. He played too many video games and watched too much porn. I think his only redeeming quality was his love of jujitsu. At least he reveled in the pleasure of a man's touch. 

Once, I came home after a bad trip on Molly and he watched me coil in front of his World of Warcraft stream. I don’t remember much besides smoke stuffing the back of my head. I probably repeated euphemisms like: Do you even see me? or Why don’t you care? Why don’t I care?

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There is a lot that is insurmountable, like the haunting of a third person.

In November I met a golden boy in ShenZhen and we spent the hours past midnight talking our way through the border into Hong Kong. He waited the entire awful two hours I was pulled aside at Customs. In the interrogation room I remember judgement of my singed skirt and thinly veiled accusations. When it was finally over, the sun had risen and his arms felt like home.

He was addicted to checking the news, went on impassioned rants about the rise of conservatism in Germany, and cried at documentaries about Japanese toilets. I loved more than anything how much he cared, how he felt everything. At the same time his intensity divided us. There was an irony between his inability to respect my time and wishing death upon politicians. 

He broke up with his girlfriend of almost two years. In my nightmares she is always prettier. I remember my anguish when he couldn’t look at me. 

It is a betrayal of her. He said. His love of socialism was not enough to save what we had. 

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In Providence I’m on my knees. I’m compelled to an abstraction of heaven by a force I knew two Februarys ago. Next door, the TV’s playing the news: Texas is invading Illinois. I calculate if it’s ethical to kneel in this political climate.

He believes in the same things as me so maybe it cancels out. Yesterday he asked me to order an extra dose of meds to leave in his apartment for when I sleep over. It’s going a bit too well. 

So I spend the next day crashing out about genocide. My survivor’s guilt bleeds through the cybernetics of my screen. There’s an incalculability I can’t be held responsible for but I wonder if to exist is to be complicit. My therapist says it’s more crucial than ever to embrace the things worth living for. What is left after love is taken?

In his bed his back is framed by cobalt blue sunrise. For a zeptosecond, I indulge — a bite mark is revolution; my submission is my freedom; if I can’t feel ecstasy fascism will win.

AUTHOR: Heidi Lin
ARTIST: Amelia McGovern