My most commonly googled phrase is ‘Disney Channel Original Movies from the 1990s and 2000s’ (A Love Story)

 

I would like to rub dirt all over your face and then lick it off

I would take fistfuls of your hair and put them in my mouth

I would tie you to the bed using garbage ties

I would wrap us both up in a wet, muddy tarp

I want to peel you like a banana.

 

I want to look at you in the eye while eating this banana and discussing Deleuze

I want to look at you in the eye while picking my nose

I want to look at you in the eye while I wipe my butt after doing a really great poop

I want to show you how my body is a Möbius strip, how it has neither an inside nor an outside, that its front is its back, that you could trace the entirety of me and return back to where you started without lifting your finger.

 

 

When you look at me I want you to see my flesh and my blocked pores and the discharge that occasionally leaks out and my heart that beats faster because I perceive a non-existent threat, a heartbeat which quickens because of my anxious mind and a body that shakes because of a nervous heart and the sweat between my breasts that I will wipe on my shirt, and the bubbles I pop between my knuckles, and my tongue, all white because I don’t drink enough water.

 

I want you to see that we could have a good conversation and that I might make you laugh and that I’m about to cry.

 

 

My skin will soon grow into the dirty sheet beneath me, and then into the dirty mattress beneath that, stained with blood and cum and sweat, rabbit piss, nail polish and coffee.

 

I will become a part of my mattress and someone new will sleep upon me, or I will be thrown upon the street.

 

If you choose to take me home I will watch as you cover me with biscuit crumbs, step on me with dirty soles, and lay on me, crying, because sometimes crying feels good.

 

I am ok now because I have turned into a mattress and can only feel mattress feelings, which at present is only either damp or cold.

 

I would try to hug you but you know I am only a mattress so I cannot move but if I could think anything more than my mattress thoughts, I promise I would want to. I don’t know if I would always wish to feel your body’s weight sagging upon me, or hope you would have something other to do than be in bed.

 

 

Have you ever cried while watching The Cheetah Girls? Or The Wizards of Waverly Place?

It’s like opening up a door to a parallel universe of your life.

 

The door is small but you can squeeze through and when you’re on the other side all you can think is ‘what the fuck am i doing? I don’t think this is cool’ and you turn around but the door has closed and is flashing a neon sign with ‘TOO LATE MOTHA FUCKA’ or ‘ur stuck here 4 lyf’, so you turn back to either an episode of Lizzie McGuire or the movie version and slouch into a beanbag with a box of pizza shapes and try to forget that life you had before, because you will probably be happy here with the live-studio-audience-pre-recorded-applause-tape romantic relationships that resolve happily,

 

and you’re okay with that because in your world everyone dies but here they only get cancelled.

 

Emma has recently completed her creative honours thesis titled ‘Topology of Abject Bodies’, she is interested in holes and surfaces and things moving through holes to reach surfaces.

 

You can follow her on:

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