Now my conversations don't pass the bechdel test
Artist
Lee Karian
Author
Ramitha Nagarajan
20 October 2024
Lee Karian
Author
Ramitha Nagarajan
20 October 2024
This has been two years coming and I’m too lazy to bid adieu the parts I’ve aged outgrown. I still think if I write this in Times New Roman instead of my defaulted Arial, I will take myself more seriously. I hope nobody else does.
Femininity can be cool, I’ve learned, depending on who’s doing it. I give it a shot, donning a pink Baby Phat top as if I'm one of Greta’s girls in late July. Thunberg reminds us that the world is heating up. I can feel it too, forgetting that being cool means not being warm. Being hot is fine. Carry summer into fall, the burden of a spare number that needs to be summed anywhere but the one’s place. This must be what the first season of harvest feels like.
I feel a lump named Adam form in my throat and suddenly the tips of my ears (except for my left helix’s cartilage) and the apples of my cheeks match my costume. Do you feel the world warm up too or is it just mine?
I’m leaned against a door, my right EarPod on, my wired headphones swung around my index finger like a lasso, being the cowboy as Mitski tells me that she’s a geyser bubbling from below.
I scrape the edge of the curb like the sides of a runny sundae, lightly grazing my shoe over it to release only the softer gravel. Everything I hold seems to have a mind of its own. A Stradda matcha conscious of the tense environment it’s in and condensing, crying as if to influence me to follow its ways. I shed hairs instead, squeamish at the thought of them clinging to something so cold. Endo exo endo exo hopefully ending in my vitrification, stronger but who am I fooling when I’m still fragile and see-through.
Mitski shut up I hear something. Stop the lasso. A bee buzzes into my left ear like a siren, says “I love you to death.” It’ll hurt but you will hurt me more. I must be deluded.
Come to your senses. I know I’m not shallow but if I am I blame it on the fact that there’s no more noise except for the white blankness in my head that’s made me ocularcentric. My eyes wonder while my brain wanders. You are the heat that scalds my tongue and leaves me numb to everything else.
Next on queue this boy Frank sings of something sweet called Novacane without an I, and you seem to have stolen not one but two from me. I’m beginning to think a symptom of your use is stupidity, sheer as the gloss and embellishment I’ve been hoping would distract you from my inherent pinklessness, the only fallacy that I’ve successfully scripted for myself: untactile, incompetent, unfuckable. Do the words evade you too?
And speaking of heat: matches are made in heaven but one has never been struck. If hell is hot I’m sure heaven is a cold place.
I’m convinced you meet your maker (or the ghost thereof) twice: once when you are born into your mother’s arms and the next when you are held by your first love.
And your iterations of self are everything in between.
My wearing pink, my wringing out my mind until it’s dry like a towel, mine this and that. My face is all wet from the salt on my wounds because I’ve made myself small like the matcha I hold that feels as though it’s callousing my hands. I’m aching for a time when pain was only physical.
But it’s all too much, so I blame it on the cotton stingray hanging out of me soaking up all that seeps. Actually that’s a lie, the stingray is soft and benign but in my mind it isn’t; a writer I’ve been obsessed with as of recently puts it perfectly: “I turned 19… Before [this isn’t my story to tell admittedly, it’s Rayne Fisher Quan’s] I had a medically too-tight vagina and [just read her article] I was scared of being filled with something other than myself. Sometimes I think maybe that’s also why I was anorexic — but then I think maybe that’s one of those things that’s more clever than it is true.” Thank you, Rayne.
For my own account of 19.
At 19 years old, I feel myself disintegrate from my experiences instead of them aggregating into a positive sum. This is the risk I run with having made myself an accumulation of experience. When I looked at myself as a mosaic the last time I wrung out my heart here I was wrong. There are some people who provide the mosaic a dimension, once they’re gone you can’t get it back. You simply wait for a new filter or dimension to take its place. To create a box or sphere or cone out of a thin piece of paper without being cut by it.
So instead I write.
Plenty of things have happened at 19.
I met a hero who was a conduit between me and the heroes I was too scared to meet myself and ask questions to, I pissed on a beach redundantly christened Ocean, I climbed the Big C which was only a mile away in a co-op bathroom and indulged my eyes in colors I’d never yet seen. I sat on a rooftop with a friend and unpeeled the “romantic layers of platonic love” until our eyes bled from there more to sever through. I overcame my fear of capsaicin to be more brown. I found a podcast by the name of sighswoon that reminded me of most things dying of natural causes because our capacity for death is inherent. How relationships are a simulacrumatic mirror of life and death within life itself.
I had my heart broken in two; one part a result of someone else and the other a result of mine. I lost a left-handed right hand with some poor critical thinking and a lack of tact. It’s funny how interpolated the body is after being touched. After being breathless for a year and a half, I was disposed of without air for a few months, and then had to take care of what felt like my silhouette’s carcass with what was left.
I realized what was left was dead from misogyny I had displaced onto myself, that maybe I hated myself for years, a sort of externalized misogyny. For a while I didn’t want to wake up in a girl’s body because how would I ever know what decisions to make with me for me? The surveillance had made me skeptical, the cycles made me cynical. There’s a new term for the ailment of hating your body and yourself: brainrot.
A new affliction for which the decay is generalized. Not demented, not atrophied. Just rotted. I didn’t condone it but found substitutes, projecting my opinions onto anything I could like a wall-sized Rorschach test. Denouncing the torn strings of Cartesian dualism as though I were a puppeteer putting on a show for myself.
Then I watched. I saw the TV glow, I saw the space between me and it as some kind of limerent limelight. I saw it in a refraction in rainbows. I saw it when Jerry couldn't pass the reverse Bechdel test. I saw it in Bojack being representative of the four horsemen of a broken relationship, Duncan Trussell’s characters processing meat in a factory. The packaging of literal death as a manufactured process one must mechanically trudge themselves through. Rue saying she wanted to be kept alive by machines and orange juice boxes and Fleabag when she wanted to be told what to wear and what to eat when she woke up every day, her paying homage to Donne and the elusiveness of religion (only to ignore it when it was in her face).
It made me want to fall to a boy’s feet realizing how badly I wished I were one myself. I didn’t know how to inhabit a body that couldn’t show it. In order to do so I had to kill myself from the inside out. And if I could not escape myself, surely I would be able to find the vacuous space where I was allowed to be nobody and anyone at the same time.
Shifting states of consciousness didn’t cut it for me anymore. Hubris was a word I didn’t know sober, and my shyness never cared that I betrayed it no matter how much I wanted it to. I wished to act like a man and have the power and attention of one. It took me back to when those stupid, annoying, weird kids in school tried to be like the bullies and despite being a dumbass I could see through it, because all they ended up being were stupid, annoying, weird, and dickheads instead. It was pathetic.
Something was running from me and I was running from myself to change it.
I am craving clichés in a city where triteness is frowned on at all costs. I pray for an emergency study abroad to escape to a country where people can own themselves.
Si tu te perds. I have lost myself as opposed to I got lost.
It reminds me of a color of the rainbow I had seen or heard about just a few months before, or the bends of it. Or a song that existed on The Bends itself. Anyways in French you're apparently always doing it to yourself.
And then I wanted to run back. Holding all your emotions must mean you know what to do with them. I had lost my mind, my already flailing lungs on their last limbs.
There was nowhere to go.
I was lost in my own house as though I had been broke my whole life and never thought more than a room of my own could exist.
I vomited myself into the toilet to rid my insides, discombobulated and no longer using anything I owned for its intended purpose.
And then I wrote my reflection in the fogged mirror from the exhaust going off on my smoke, crystallizing an expired insect, freezing the still river, post-mortemizing it all because it's dead to me.
Tabula rasa.
I invite my friends over.
We play catch with a disco ball and it catches the light of the lamp on my bedside that feels like a socially acceptable night light for a teenager still scared of the dark.
We try out every Photobooth filter on my laptop until we forget what we look like, something that happens at least six times a day but is only funny at night with the audience of someone who knows and someone who doesn’t.
When my friends leave I’m scared of being alone again, allowing a fifteen-minute dance of the door closing and opening at a right, an obtuse, and finally an eclipsing acute angle.
I wonder if people fold into each other the way we did. Like nails one hand digging underneath the nail bed of another, gnawing until blood.
It’s bittersweet, reminds me of love served on a plate from my mom: the garam masala-tinged taste on fruit due to a knife that was used to chop chilies before an apple, but now I cut my fruit in the same manner out of negligence and not maternal care.
I go outside to eat, sit down where I feel bones and my ass is deflated from no longer metabolizing on any additional machine. The machine is me. I’ve heard God comes from it.
I buy myself a book about self-delusion so I can subconsciously tamper my thoughts like a runner to a kite.
I go to bed.
I make snow angels in it with my bedsheet wrapped around my outer calves as the friction, simply because the undersides of my prickly legs are itchy and I feel nasty using my hands to fix it.
I think lucid thoughts about how the sky is only clear because it’s dimpled, although we can’t say the same about skin. I consider the fact that Jupiter could blow up right now and we would never know because the light wouldn’t travel. I’m proud of not wasting five seconds on a thought that could be more catastrophic to myself.
I go back outside. This is my sin. The words I search for are at the tip of my tongue and they reroute me to deviancy. I gift it the butt of a cigarette and write down the binary feelings I can with 0 and 1. Ow for 0, and Or 1 for a joke I think to call head in the clouds.
I forgot who I was without hyperbole and euphemism. I forgot I am a phrase. Here in writing.
Every time I kill something with my words it just keeps it alive instead. I’ve heard it’s Sisyphean to mourn the same thing a million times before its dead.
And it’s a lot like Jupiter in the night sky: an end you can never see coming.
Femininity can be cool, I’ve learned, depending on who’s doing it. I give it a shot, donning a pink Baby Phat top as if I'm one of Greta’s girls in late July. Thunberg reminds us that the world is heating up. I can feel it too, forgetting that being cool means not being warm. Being hot is fine. Carry summer into fall, the burden of a spare number that needs to be summed anywhere but the one’s place. This must be what the first season of harvest feels like.
I feel a lump named Adam form in my throat and suddenly the tips of my ears (except for my left helix’s cartilage) and the apples of my cheeks match my costume. Do you feel the world warm up too or is it just mine?
I’m leaned against a door, my right EarPod on, my wired headphones swung around my index finger like a lasso, being the cowboy as Mitski tells me that she’s a geyser bubbling from below.
I scrape the edge of the curb like the sides of a runny sundae, lightly grazing my shoe over it to release only the softer gravel. Everything I hold seems to have a mind of its own. A Stradda matcha conscious of the tense environment it’s in and condensing, crying as if to influence me to follow its ways. I shed hairs instead, squeamish at the thought of them clinging to something so cold. Endo exo endo exo hopefully ending in my vitrification, stronger but who am I fooling when I’m still fragile and see-through.
Mitski shut up I hear something. Stop the lasso. A bee buzzes into my left ear like a siren, says “I love you to death.” It’ll hurt but you will hurt me more. I must be deluded.
Come to your senses. I know I’m not shallow but if I am I blame it on the fact that there’s no more noise except for the white blankness in my head that’s made me ocularcentric. My eyes wonder while my brain wanders. You are the heat that scalds my tongue and leaves me numb to everything else.
Next on queue this boy Frank sings of something sweet called Novacane without an I, and you seem to have stolen not one but two from me. I’m beginning to think a symptom of your use is stupidity, sheer as the gloss and embellishment I’ve been hoping would distract you from my inherent pinklessness, the only fallacy that I’ve successfully scripted for myself: untactile, incompetent, unfuckable. Do the words evade you too?
And speaking of heat: matches are made in heaven but one has never been struck. If hell is hot I’m sure heaven is a cold place.
I’m convinced you meet your maker (or the ghost thereof) twice: once when you are born into your mother’s arms and the next when you are held by your first love.
And your iterations of self are everything in between.
My wearing pink, my wringing out my mind until it’s dry like a towel, mine this and that. My face is all wet from the salt on my wounds because I’ve made myself small like the matcha I hold that feels as though it’s callousing my hands. I’m aching for a time when pain was only physical.
But it’s all too much, so I blame it on the cotton stingray hanging out of me soaking up all that seeps. Actually that’s a lie, the stingray is soft and benign but in my mind it isn’t; a writer I’ve been obsessed with as of recently puts it perfectly: “I turned 19… Before [this isn’t my story to tell admittedly, it’s Rayne Fisher Quan’s] I had a medically too-tight vagina and [just read her article] I was scared of being filled with something other than myself. Sometimes I think maybe that’s also why I was anorexic — but then I think maybe that’s one of those things that’s more clever than it is true.” Thank you, Rayne.
For my own account of 19.
At 19 years old, I feel myself disintegrate from my experiences instead of them aggregating into a positive sum. This is the risk I run with having made myself an accumulation of experience. When I looked at myself as a mosaic the last time I wrung out my heart here I was wrong. There are some people who provide the mosaic a dimension, once they’re gone you can’t get it back. You simply wait for a new filter or dimension to take its place. To create a box or sphere or cone out of a thin piece of paper without being cut by it.
So instead I write.
Plenty of things have happened at 19.
I met a hero who was a conduit between me and the heroes I was too scared to meet myself and ask questions to, I pissed on a beach redundantly christened Ocean, I climbed the Big C which was only a mile away in a co-op bathroom and indulged my eyes in colors I’d never yet seen. I sat on a rooftop with a friend and unpeeled the “romantic layers of platonic love” until our eyes bled from there more to sever through. I overcame my fear of capsaicin to be more brown. I found a podcast by the name of sighswoon that reminded me of most things dying of natural causes because our capacity for death is inherent. How relationships are a simulacrumatic mirror of life and death within life itself.
I had my heart broken in two; one part a result of someone else and the other a result of mine. I lost a left-handed right hand with some poor critical thinking and a lack of tact. It’s funny how interpolated the body is after being touched. After being breathless for a year and a half, I was disposed of without air for a few months, and then had to take care of what felt like my silhouette’s carcass with what was left.
I realized what was left was dead from misogyny I had displaced onto myself, that maybe I hated myself for years, a sort of externalized misogyny. For a while I didn’t want to wake up in a girl’s body because how would I ever know what decisions to make with me for me? The surveillance had made me skeptical, the cycles made me cynical. There’s a new term for the ailment of hating your body and yourself: brainrot.
A new affliction for which the decay is generalized. Not demented, not atrophied. Just rotted. I didn’t condone it but found substitutes, projecting my opinions onto anything I could like a wall-sized Rorschach test. Denouncing the torn strings of Cartesian dualism as though I were a puppeteer putting on a show for myself.
Then I watched. I saw the TV glow, I saw the space between me and it as some kind of limerent limelight. I saw it in a refraction in rainbows. I saw it when Jerry couldn't pass the reverse Bechdel test. I saw it in Bojack being representative of the four horsemen of a broken relationship, Duncan Trussell’s characters processing meat in a factory. The packaging of literal death as a manufactured process one must mechanically trudge themselves through. Rue saying she wanted to be kept alive by machines and orange juice boxes and Fleabag when she wanted to be told what to wear and what to eat when she woke up every day, her paying homage to Donne and the elusiveness of religion (only to ignore it when it was in her face).
It made me want to fall to a boy’s feet realizing how badly I wished I were one myself. I didn’t know how to inhabit a body that couldn’t show it. In order to do so I had to kill myself from the inside out. And if I could not escape myself, surely I would be able to find the vacuous space where I was allowed to be nobody and anyone at the same time.
Shifting states of consciousness didn’t cut it for me anymore. Hubris was a word I didn’t know sober, and my shyness never cared that I betrayed it no matter how much I wanted it to. I wished to act like a man and have the power and attention of one. It took me back to when those stupid, annoying, weird kids in school tried to be like the bullies and despite being a dumbass I could see through it, because all they ended up being were stupid, annoying, weird, and dickheads instead. It was pathetic.
Something was running from me and I was running from myself to change it.
I am craving clichés in a city where triteness is frowned on at all costs. I pray for an emergency study abroad to escape to a country where people can own themselves.
Si tu te perds. I have lost myself as opposed to I got lost.
It reminds me of a color of the rainbow I had seen or heard about just a few months before, or the bends of it. Or a song that existed on The Bends itself. Anyways in French you're apparently always doing it to yourself.
And then I wanted to run back. Holding all your emotions must mean you know what to do with them. I had lost my mind, my already flailing lungs on their last limbs.
There was nowhere to go.
I was lost in my own house as though I had been broke my whole life and never thought more than a room of my own could exist.
I vomited myself into the toilet to rid my insides, discombobulated and no longer using anything I owned for its intended purpose.
And then I wrote my reflection in the fogged mirror from the exhaust going off on my smoke, crystallizing an expired insect, freezing the still river, post-mortemizing it all because it's dead to me.
Tabula rasa.
I invite my friends over.
We play catch with a disco ball and it catches the light of the lamp on my bedside that feels like a socially acceptable night light for a teenager still scared of the dark.
We try out every Photobooth filter on my laptop until we forget what we look like, something that happens at least six times a day but is only funny at night with the audience of someone who knows and someone who doesn’t.
When my friends leave I’m scared of being alone again, allowing a fifteen-minute dance of the door closing and opening at a right, an obtuse, and finally an eclipsing acute angle.
I wonder if people fold into each other the way we did. Like nails one hand digging underneath the nail bed of another, gnawing until blood.
It’s bittersweet, reminds me of love served on a plate from my mom: the garam masala-tinged taste on fruit due to a knife that was used to chop chilies before an apple, but now I cut my fruit in the same manner out of negligence and not maternal care.
I go outside to eat, sit down where I feel bones and my ass is deflated from no longer metabolizing on any additional machine. The machine is me. I’ve heard God comes from it.
I buy myself a book about self-delusion so I can subconsciously tamper my thoughts like a runner to a kite.
I go to bed.
I make snow angels in it with my bedsheet wrapped around my outer calves as the friction, simply because the undersides of my prickly legs are itchy and I feel nasty using my hands to fix it.
I think lucid thoughts about how the sky is only clear because it’s dimpled, although we can’t say the same about skin. I consider the fact that Jupiter could blow up right now and we would never know because the light wouldn’t travel. I’m proud of not wasting five seconds on a thought that could be more catastrophic to myself.
I go back outside. This is my sin. The words I search for are at the tip of my tongue and they reroute me to deviancy. I gift it the butt of a cigarette and write down the binary feelings I can with 0 and 1. Ow for 0, and Or 1 for a joke I think to call head in the clouds.
I forgot who I was without hyperbole and euphemism. I forgot I am a phrase. Here in writing.
Every time I kill something with my words it just keeps it alive instead. I’ve heard it’s Sisyphean to mourn the same thing a million times before its dead.
And it’s a lot like Jupiter in the night sky: an end you can never see coming.
