But I have reconsidered. I now desire an air burial: I want my corpse thrown onto the edge of a cliff, thrown onto a boulder and made vulnerable to the birds like Prometheus, except no healing, no chains, no fighting or screaming—just a dead body, just a stone, just the wind, and just the birds. Just carrion.

  I am not sure how long my body would remain there on that stone, but eventually the birds, perhaps hungry and perhaps all at once, would remove my liver, my eyes, my veins, tongue and flesh. Everything soft would disappear into the maws of these birds while only my skeleton would stubbornly remain. The birds would consume me almost entirely and rise in warmth and fly over parched lands and defecate onto parched roots and foliage, transferring my basest energy—simple atoms—to them. I would become part of, used by, the birds and the plants and the fruit and the whole entirety of everything, eventually, just as I would be were I cremated and buried with seed.

  But this is not why air burials exist: Tibetans are not deathly neurotic like the Judeo-Christian West. For them, there is no afterlife—only after life, only energy consumption. They are practical, scientific in this way. Air burials, unlike how I used to think of cremation, are in part about conservation of energy: nothing is to be wasted. Our carbon must not be boxed up and thrown into and separated from the earth; we must feed those who cannot easily find food. Our deaths are charity.

  But it exists for another reason too. Death and decay and rot and whatever kills a person, and whatever feeds on that person in life or in death, is evil. And we must remain separate from it, lest we meet the same end. The stone is now evil. A corpse becomes evil, because death is evil, and things that feed on the dead, that use the dead, are evil; so if we touch it, we are too. We provide air burial so that our very society will not collapse in yellow smoke and plague, will not succumb to evil.

  The problem here is obvious: I will die and you will die, and eventually each and every society will collapse. There is no avoiding this. So it is that either evil does not exist in this way, or we are always already in it: the body itself is evil.

  Regardless, in an air burial, my anatomical, chemical, physical body would not be consumed by plant life or rodents or worms—I would be consumed by black hideous ancient dry birds that only feed on the dead.

  So then this is what bodies become: food.

  Dispose of my body however you wish. There is no loss of energy. Except in illness. That’s how illness is defined: a loss of energy. Things, parts of us, decompose and separate from us. We lose our own energies. And this, I think, is the reason why I am writing any of this at all: it is difficult to believe that the body can differentiate between all the ways it can decay to only thought and memory.

  Toxicity

  I began with, My chest hurts. He began with, Something to get off it. I want to laugh now, because it is clever. But I don’t. And I didn’t. And, really, it is not.

  He does not ask, Who did you have over today because he is innocently curious. Curiosity would lead to, What did you do today. Curiosity omits who. We ask, Who did you have over today or Who were you with or Have you cheated on me because we think the answer is yes. No matter the form they take, no matter their directness or candor or camouflage, the questions mean fear or worry or suspicion or, twice, accusation.

  I would never. I showered, because I wanted to. I didn’t feel my phone vibrate. Because.

  My defensiveness about this is read as guilt. He cannot see how it would corrode and damage. (He cannot see that the innocent can be corroded or damaged.) He doesn’t understand that chronic exposure causes irreversible side effects. And, really, how silly to need to explain why one takes a shower.

  It pains me to think that you don’t know me well enough to understand, to recognize that I couldn’t. Love does not allow that to happen; don’t you know I love you.

  I began with, My chest hurts. He suggested I not smoke, but of course I have. That he said it made me want to smoke right then, because a part of me wanted to collapse and crumble and become completely unresponsive, to be found seven hours later. By him. That seemed the only way to prove how invasive and harmful the question was. My health, my body, and potentially his—because my body always relates to his body, it is part of our relationship, we are that kind of couple, apparently—is not as important as a thrashing suspicion. The problem is that, once relieved, another suspicion bubbles up in its place, and the more quickly you try to calm them, the more that arise and more quickly and bigger.

  I have smoked several times already today. I think the manufactured mint of it has acted as an anesthetic or counterirritant. That is, the more I have smoked, the better I have felt. But then again, so often I want to collapse in ruin.

  My pulse and breathing, both regular. Both fast, but normal. I went to the hospital once, panting and shaking and complaining of hurting and throbbing everywhere and how I couldn’t breathe. The tests showed I was not lacking oxygen; I was breathing normally. I was told I could stop shaking whenever I felt like it.

  Menthol is also a metabolic inhibitor for nicotine. It stays in my body longer, and I cannot process it as fast, and I continue to smoke, and I put more nicotine in my body that cannot be processed, and it is likely being processed more and more slowly as I am also exposed to more and more menthol.

  There is something comforting, calming about the burn of smoking these mentholated, unfiltered cigarettes. Like intentionally flossing too hard, bleeding and scraping because I want.

  I knew I had the desire to tell him when I first thought, This feels like pneumonia. I have never had pneumonia, and I don’t know what it feels like, but I can imagine it. I don’t know if I am imagining it correctly. Regardless. It feels like this.

  But I can’t have pneumonia, can I, since I have been vaccinated, by the insistence of my doctor. Because my immune system is impaired, and pneumonia is one of those infections that kills us when we can’t fight it off.

  I have explained HIV to him several times: it lowers your immune system until it is nothing, and without that immune system, you cannot fight off infection or disease. AIDS doesn’t kill you. You die of a cold or pneumonia—those are the two that doctors mention most often. All the virus does is replicate. The body, a womb.

  A friend said that we are suspicious of that for which we are guilty: I have tracked conversations with his ex. In one, I love you. He replied, I will always love you. In one, I am pretty sure I have contracted. He replied that to accept and understand is one thing, but one should not invite another foreign body into his life. But in none have I found anything suspicious, nothing to make me worry. Not any more than I do now, enough to follow these conversations. But I have yet to find guilt. And I don’t think I will. Not because he is not guilty, but because he is too clever.

  (Except this is his guilt. Except that, for so long, I’ve apparently been convinced one could love multiples simultaneously and differently; that residual, half-lifed emotions were normal and appropriate and did not get in the way of a relationship. How stupid of me, to see but not admit to the transgression. (Neither his nor my own.))

  But I check because a friend suggested we are most suspicious when we are guilty. The more he suspects, the more I do. This is positive feedback, the beginning of a crumbling bridge. The way the wind wobbled Tacoma Narrows.

  I began with, My chest hurts, but ideally, I would begin each of these conversations with, I am not him. I want to begin each of our conversations with, Effective toxicity is determined by the relationship between the two parts. I want to tell him, No one thing is innately toxic.

  Periphery

  I trust that his and my eyes are consubstantial. There is a filter, a glaze, a lens; there is something behind, inside, underneath. I feel it, this throbbing, this itch. Hyperawareness and self-consciousness.

  And so I’m aware of where my gaze falls. Not of where I look, just of that which happens to be in my light of sight. Intentional, not.

  I never wanted to be yellow. And yet, or perhaps because, so many of my memories are nearly all yellow: wheat, dry grass, book pages, hair, flesh, a little sand, soles of feet, light wood, autumn. For so long, I have desired gray, silver, metal, crowned, collared, opalescent-chested, white-tipped. But I’ve compromised: between bone-white and decomposition, between rust and moss, between cracked porcelain and October. I have chosen womb-life gray, a compromise between imagined and experienced.

  This self-consciousness is not only of gaze but also of its consequence.

  It is not the gaze that is the problem, but its intent. I don’t want to be made responsible for what is uncontrollable. Because I want to say, I can’t help it or I look at a lot of things or It just happens that things come into my line of vision.

  This is not good enough.

  A woman asked this child what color pigeons are. An absurd question. Blue. And he is not wrong. Add black to white to gray to green to pink to reflective chests of non-color—of course blue. Her face suggested surprise, and she said, Yes, sometimes. I wanted to scream, No, you’re wrong. Pigeons are blue.

  Someone walks by the room in which I sit. I look, because the figure is very tall, and I want to know how tall. I scratch my nose and look at my coffee cup, and I look away but back, because I notice the pink lettering as if it is new, but of course it is not. Another body passes by, and, upon looking, I recognize him. Thus, I am grateful I looked at all. (Why.)

  While smoking, I looked across the street and examined a woman’s coat, because it was very pink. I looked behind her, twice, because there was a man, and he was walking too slowly.

  People pass this door, and I know because I see them in my periphery, but I do not direct my gaze away from the page. But I see them anyway. So I wonder if this counts, if that which is peripheral may be held against me.

  I look at my coffee cup to see how much is left, because I thought to grab it, because I want to take a sip, but I look away and back at this page so I can coherently compose this catalog.

  I looked at a man and a woman, because he was yelling loudly as they walked together down the sidewalk. I want to know why yelling, why sound, makes me look. Why I need to see to better hear, why things seem so confusing when heard but not yet seen.

  I look at the power outlet, because it is framed by two windows with a metal-covered cord running to it from between the windows. There are two plugs in one square. I see it, and it looks so much like art, so intentional.

  But we do not ask at what we look when we consider art. We only do when the intent of the artist is to direct attention at something particular. We only ask when we think there is something at which we should or could direct our gaze. The gaze. And only then when we find our gaze straying from that on which we are meant to focus.

  Do we punish—are we punished for that which happens at the edge.

  Rule of thirds. Line. Perspective.

  I was rolling a cigarette, and I saw a bird on the ground, periphery, background. Because there is something about the eye that better allows us to focus on that which is in full sight. Depth perception and triangulation. I wanted to better locate it so I wouldn’t crush it underfoot. Because I wanted to know what kind of bird. Because I wondered why I would look at a pigeon. Because I wondered why a pigeon would ever be so dark.

  This morning, I was told I looked at a man coming onto the train. I don’t recall looking at him. But I was told I did. I was apparently seen looking at a man coming onto the train. This is the gaze. I cannot say, No, but I can say, I don’t recall. It didn’t register.

  To look: to direct one’s eyes toward something to see.

  To see: to perceive either mentally or with eyes.

  I looked at him. I looked at lips and cheeks and eyes and eyebrows all almost simultaneously. One registered as sad, so I compared one feature to the rest: all sad.

  So, perhaps, I saw him.

  I looked between bodies, through the train window, at rooftops and birds and sky and power lines and trees graffiti cement subway walls and platforms. I struggled to look between bodies and toward the platform, because I wanted to see if his walk registered as sad too.

  I lay my writing tablet down, and I look at its reflection in my phone. Because I could see the page’s reflection in my phone.

  Sometimes things are just this simple: just because.

  I read what I have written, now, because I want to track the information. Because I have not gotten to the point. The point that the problem is that I supposedly look at men but maybe I don’t or maybe I only see them and I don’t know why. I don’t think about why I see them or if I look at them, but he does and thinks he knows. The problem is that he sees a problem.

  The point is that I think he thinks that I ought to be blinded or blindfolded when I am in public. So that he may not have this fear, this worry. Scoop out an eye and place it in a deep well.

  For what.

  As I wrote that, and now this, I looked closely at—I saw—the ink and how it is distributed across the page, thicker and wetter in some areas, and my gaze always lags behind the pen a little, because I want to watch the ink spread and dry, but I can’t see the drying, because I have to keep up with the pen so that I can compose along the lines.

  I see movement, and movement is seen, but one cannot look at movement. Objects are looked at, and sometimes seen. Temporality is not something one is able to look at. I am, then, always viewing twice, seeing simultaneously, double, like a hallucination.

  I look at my writing, the purple ink at the top of the third page of this. It is when I said that I look closely at the ink and how it is distributed across the page. I see that the writing is so much clearer. I was closer to it, then. I had my head on my left hand, holding the left page down, my right dragging ink across paper.

  There is no analogue here though: with proximity only comes distortion.

  I do not know why I do not feel him inside behind covering, filtering my vision now. And I do not know why I am cataloging anymore. The point is made, I think—that whether I am looking or not, you are paranoid and accuse me regardless.

  But I looked at leaves today.

  I looked at leaves because they have changed since I last looked at them. I looked, because instead of being netted in the trees, they were strewn, now, under my feet.

  I want to say that I looked at the lake in the morning, because I like to see the colors cast by the rising or seemingly always already risen sun. Because I like to imagine you seeing them, like to imagine that my eyes are in fact your eyes, and by looking, I am letting you see that on which my gaze is fixed. I want to know what you think when you see this line and these colors and the contrast—the black sides of buildings, painted that way, because the sun is still so eastward that it casts nothing on anything opposite yet. But there is so much reflection there over the lake that some mornings it is intolerable, and I don’t know why we do not spend time there the way we once said we would.

  Eyes have four and a half million cones, cells that turn light wave frequencies into electrical signals that are translated as red or as green or as blue. I know any three of the four and a half million can receive the same light wave and collectively determine any single color.

  Compromise. (And how often does that mean sacrifice.)

  Ninety million rods turn light wave frequencies into electrical signals that are translated, somehow, into sight, but not into color. I know they function in low light. Low light, less color.

  I know that cones do not exist in the areas of our retinas responsible for peripheral vision. That is to say, our periphery is colorblind.

  But I have seen movement in my periphery.

  I look at his eyes out of the corner of my own. It is difficult, with glasses and no color, but his eyes are so dark and the whites are so white that the contrast makes them so obvious. I know where he is looking, and I know that he is so often watching me, but I don’t know if he knows that I am actually watching him; and how often he is not looking at me at all but at other men. I think that he is looking at them because he thinks I am looking at them. Looking at them to determine whether or not I’d look at them, whether or not they are worth looking at; which, of course, means that he deems them worthy of looking at.

  Something happens somewhere between the retina and occipital lobe. Solar energy, reflected how many times, is changed to chemical, to electrical. Color is only perceived, color is a process, color is something that happens, color is not tangible the way light waves are tangible, the way the sun is tangible, the way waves are tangible.

  Thus, relative.

  Carrion

  Faceless. (I infer so much, so why not his, why not this. Because he has changed so much, perhaps, or perhaps because I know its irrelevance.) He was boarding or alighting the brown or the purple line train at Merchandise Mart. I see his black-Chucked feet, but not even these, just his pants, mostly movement. I see a flight of pigeons bobbing and treading around a dropped bag of chips, I see him see them and walk over to them, out of his way toward them—perhaps they were far off, not under the canopy by the stairs but out in the sun on the cement toward the front of the train—and steps on the chips. He steps on the chips so that they would become manageable, smaller, edible. For the pigeons.

 

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