decaffeinated
i've become bitter.
so bitter that i swallow sugar in fistfuls
lest i burn a hole
in the ceramic mug i live to fill.
i only wish the sugar didn't dissolve so quickly.
i am the kind of bitter you'd much rather
watch disappear down the drain of the kitchen sink
than taste in your throat.
the kind of bitter that cramps your stomach
and leaves coffee stains on your sanity.
sip me and spit me out.
i want to be tasted,
and even more to decorate your walls.
When I close my eyes, I see ...
When I close my eyes, I see ...
*
A soft green meadow. The buzz of children playing, adults chatting. A harvest mouse scurries by, a litter of five in tow.
“Sorry,” he says, “No time to talk.”
The scent of hay and roses, the earthy smell of freshly rained upon soil and leaves. A murmuration of starlings; a red kite soaring in the cloudless azure sky. A robin’s playful tune.
A raven, tall and proud, descents from an ancient oak laden with acorns, and lands on the grass beside me.
“It has been a long time,” she says.
“It has,” I agree with Merlina, and ask, “How are the young ones?”
/
Concrete boxes: clusters of stacked, grey dens to house the last of humankind. Small windows, plastered with opaque, milky layers. The salty residue covers every surface and every person who ventures out. The sound of waves crashing into the three hundred feet tall, steel and concrete barrier that holds back the ocean. The water isn’t done with us yet. It is rising, expanding, reclaiming territory. Pushing us, to huddle closer on our withering grey islands. Driving the blue planet’s final land-dwelling species to extinction.
//
A brilliantly glowing atmosphere. A gentle lilac, laced with wisps of fleeting, pink and yellow ribbons. A Tuscan sun and two amber moons – nigh to conjoined – hover over the horizon. In my garden, a crop of ... how shall I describe it ... pea-sized orange Brussels sprouts.
My neighbour waves at me. Haranta is a pretonian from Lactona, a planet six million lightyears from here. ‘Here’ is Robolea, home planet to the zeliae (a birdlike species with short legs and red and pink mottled wings), only five lightyears from Earth. It was the first interspecies planet we were invited to share, when the alliance made contact.
///
Barren soil, scorched trees, a graveyard of the constructs of a species which had the potential to be great. At my feet a Geiger counter rattles, its needle tapping the tiny rod of what was once considered the upper limit. Not long now, then this final gadget will expire too. Something moves. I startle. A scorpion exits a soot crusted shelter. It pauses, and – am I imagining it? – looks upon me with a mixture of pity and disdain.
////
“And the sixth?”
Her pupils vied for her attention; this was an easy one.
“Prrty?”
“Holocene. A thousand years ago. It was the result of human activity, unchecked population growth and overexploitation of natural resources. Millions of species vanished from Earth or were brought to the brink of extinction. Humans were the final group to disappear. It was the beginning of the Corvidian age.” Her blue eyes glistening, the young two-foot-tall Corvus corone returned to her branch.
*
When I close my eyes, I fantasise about the future. A tomorrow I, and most of us – regretfully or thankfully –, will never experience.
It is a world, though, that we create today, for generations to come. A life, our children will thank or curse us for.
Elisa in La La Land
When I was 21, I was murdered and dumped in a hotel water tank on Skid Row. It wasn’t the first time I died, but it would be the last. And I know what you’re thinking, most people only die once. Then again, most people don’t get murdered either.
What can I say, I always knew I was special.
#
When I was a kid, I dreamed of becoming a writer. Of traveling to faraway places and writing about my experiences, people hanging on my every word, anxiously awaiting tales from my latest adventures like the next episode of their favorite reality TV show. The only problem was that I was the child of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and all the money they made went back into the restaurant they owned. So the only adventures I was going on were the ones inside my head. And, who knows, maybe that was the beginning of it all. Because it turns out that it’s true what they say – the mind can be a dangerous place. The whole time I was alive, mine was trying to kill me.
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was ten years old. And not only that, but I hit the jackpot with bipolar 1, which comes complete with all the usual bipolar symptoms – extreme mood swings from mania to depression – but with the added bonus of psychosis. We’re talking hallucinations, delusions and generally bizarre behavior as far as other functioning human beings were concerned.
As a kid, my psychosis was often triggered by seemingly run-of-the-mill events. One time I spiraled after being grounded for not doing the dishes, and my sister found me crawling around my bedroom floor like the girl from The Ring, hair in my face, arms and legs jerking like I was a puppet on a string. I don’t remember what was going through my mind during that episode, but I’m certain that whatever it was, it was terrifying, because they always were. It’s a cruel irony that while I often behaved in ways that were scary to other people, inside my mind, I was the one being terrorized.
My most frequent delusion was that I was being watched, but not just in the general paranoia sense. To the contrary, I felt I was constantly being surveilled by a specific entity I named The Watcher. If The Watcher was able to look me in the eye, that meant she’d won the game, and I could either do what she said or die. She whispered the rules to her game in my ear the very first time I saw her standing in the mirror next to me. I saw her only as a reflection, a dark shadow at my side. But when I turned to look her in the face, she was gone.
It was a few weeks before she appeared to me again. This time, I woke up to find her looking at me from the glass of my bedside window. My eyes met hers, and though it was just for a moment, it felt as if that was all it took to hold me there in place, my limbs tied to my bedposts by invisible chains.
She whispered, “I won’t kill you if you kill them.”
Just then, a car horn blared, and I saw two homeless men outside waving their arms wildly at a passing driver. “Vile, filthy things” she hissed, as we watched them together. Strangely, I too felt a feeling of disgust, even though I’d never felt anything but sorry for the homeless around the neighborhood before. It was like I was absorbing her emotions and taking them on as my own.
“Who are you talking to?” My sister yelled from the other room. Her voice startled me, awakening me from whatever trance I was in. I blinked and tried to get my bearings, while The Watcher vanished once more.
In the days that followed, I told myself that if I could just hide from The Watcher, everything would be fine; I could do this. But each time she appeared, the longer she’d stay and the harder it became to avoid her gaze. It turns out the game was rigged from the beginning anyway.
For a time, I was able to keep her at bay with the right cocktail of medications. It took a lot of tinkering, weeks on end spent in bed, unable to face the world, my parents sometimes having to come into my room to pour soup in my mouth so I didn’t starve. Other weeks were spent riding the tremendous highs of my mania, going 48 hours straight without sleep, convinced I was creating some of the best writing of my life for my adoring fans on Tumblr. I told myself I would become the next Slyvia Plath, completely ignoring the whole head in the oven thing.
But at 19, the doctors finally found the right combination of pills to make me next to normal. Wellbutrin for the depression, Lamictal for the bipolar, Seroquel for the psychosis and Effexor for the paranoia. Even though they were just four tiny pills a day, the act of taking them felt heavy. I had to scrape them off my desk, my hands like paperweights, and force them down my throat one by one. I always struggled swallowing pills, so I couldn’t just toss them all back at once, which made the whole ordeal that much worse. It’s such a strange thing to think of all the big things you swallow in your life – literal and metaphorical – and yet, you can choke on pills the size of Tic Tacs.
During this time of relative calm, The Watcher never really went away. She just became more of a subtle presence – I could feel her like a cold draft from a creaky window or catch her out of the corner of my eye for just a moment. And while this still made me uneasy, I felt bolder with her presence diminished. Sometimes I’d talk to her or taunt her, even.
“I know you’re there, pervert! You’re the dirty one!”
And eventually, she just sort of faded into the background altogether. The thing is, I felt like I did too.
What I mean is, when you’re used to living your life between dizzying highs and extreme lows, existing somewhere in the middle feels less like being alive and more like being frozen while everything else just changes around you. I felt numb. The only thing that kept me going during that time was my family – I was happy to be only an occasional source of disappointment for them as opposed to a constant one – and also Tumblr. I felt like I could be myself on the Internet, saying how I really felt without fear of any real-life repercussions. And over time, I thought that my few followers may have genuinely become invested in what I was writing, which put me one step closer to realizing the dreams I’d had for myself.
I managed to barely graduate college, much to my parents’ relief. But once that was done, I knew I had to follow through on all the posting I’d been doing about traveling to find myself. Not just for me to live a more authentic life, but for my readers too. I felt a duty to make them proud, to prove that even if you suffer from a mental illness, you can get through it and pursue your goals. So I saved every penny I’d made working at the local library until I had enough for an economy flight to California. And even though I’d felt The Watcher tugging at my arm for the first time in years, whispering something unintelligible in my ear as I chose my window seat online, I booked the trip anyway.
Everyone was counting on me.
My parents were terrified for me to fly from Vancouver to L.A.
“People there crazy. Lots of sex and drugs. Why you have to go there Lam Ho Yi?”
Years ago, I’d asked her to call me Elisa and to stop using the term “crazy” since I could very easily be labeled that way, but like most other parents of a different time and place, old habits die hard.
“Ma I need to get my own life,” I told her. Also, it didn’t much matter what she said because, ultimately, I was an adult and could do what I wanted. So, on a particularly cold and dreary January day in Canada, I set off for sunny Los Angeles to see what dreams were made of.
Too bad the only dreams I ended up having there were nightmares.
#
I know how illogical this sounds, but the problem for me when I got to L.A. was that I simply felt too good. I checked into the Stay on Main, which was a small, humble hostel for youth travelers. The walls were painted with a bright orange and the décor was chic and modern – large white sculptures of hands that doubled as chairs, standing lamps with fixtures that looked like glowing orbs of light. It had a general vibe of hipness, and for the low price, I couldn’t have asked for a better first-time-to-L.A. place to stay. I was sucked in by the bright and shiny newness, and I let my guard down.
I was only supposed to stay in California for two weeks, but when my checkout date came, I went to the front desk and asked to pay per night indefinitely. I’d come to find out that there were plenty of residents in the building that had been living there for decades. And though they weren’t the most upstanding people I’d ever seen – The Watcher would surely call them heathens – I didn’t mind. I convinced myself that this is what it took to live a bohemian life. To live life fully in ways that others could only dream of.
What I didn’t know then was that the fresh paint and artsy furniture were just slight-of-hand, an attempt to distract you from the demons that plagued the place. The floors above and below the hostel actually belonged to the Cecil Hotel which had dedicated low-income units and had become a known hang out for junkies, prostitutes and any and all other dregs of society. I swear that all the bad energy and dreadful history of that building began to seep into my pores the second I arrived. And soon, they’d travel to the neurons inside my brain, causing them to misfire an alarming rate.
#
Of course, my mother and father were devastated and confused by my decision to stay. How could I live there when I was not a U.S. citizen, when nearly all my belongings were still in Canada? I told them I’d get a work Visa and that my belongings were just that. “It’s just stuff, Ma” I yelled over her sobs. I knew I should feel something when her wailing bounced off my ear drums, but inside, I felt an overwhelming buzzing that drown out any other noise. A constant hum that shook my insides and told me I had to stay. Even a next to normal person would have realized there was something wrong with that. But at that point, I’d already been tapering off my meds and was on a quick descent into the real L.A. – into La La Land.
One night, after finishing the waitressing gig I’d snagged at The Peking Tavern a few blocks away from the hotel thanks to my previous experience and good Cantonese, I decided to take the long way home because the weather was perfect and I loved walking by The Last Bookstore at night. It’d quickly become my favorite place in L.A., with floor to ceiling shelves of used books that I’d spend hours looking through, hoping to find hidden messages written just for me within the pages of my favorite novels. But when I stopped in front of its massive windows on this particular night, I couldn’t see through and on to the walls of books. My view was blocked by a dark shadow. It was the shadow of The Watcher. After all this time, she’d returned.
“It’s time,” she said, but I ran.
And as I moved, my mind raced. What was she doing here now? I thought things had been going so well. That’s why I’d quit my meds altogether the week before. At first, I’d just started taking less of them, biting some in half or skipping a day or two or three. Then one day I looked out the window and the Sun told me that pills were for people ruled by the machine, and I was not a drone. She was right. I was a free spirit who didn’t only exist outside the construction of capitalism and government rule, I thrived in it. I wouldn’t take pills just to be kept in line by big brother because I decide my own destiny. So I thanked the Sun and her rays and tossed the bottles out the window. I also left notes for my roommates telling them they needed to move out because they were obviously soul-sucking spies. Instead, the hotel gave me a new room all to myself, which was even better. And in the days that followed I felt truly alive, coloring outside the lines of my life for the first time.
That is until this moment, until The Watcher returned.
The closer I got to The Cecil, the more crowded the streets became. Fires burning, people screaming, makeshift tents everywhere. I was running through the middle of Skid Row, my accommodations precariously located on its outskirts. I didn’t even know what Skid Row was when I first came to the U.S., but I quickly learned it was like the Wild West of L.A., only replace the cowboys with drug dealers. Basically, the city decided to try to contain all of its “problems” within a mere five city blocks, and the result was flooding of the streets with some 8,000 homeless people, making it near impossible to police. Virtually anything goes since the rest of the city just likes to pretend it doesn’t exist.
In my first few meds-free days, I’d envisioned it a perfect bohemia, the free state of La La Land. But now, as I ran along the blocks, The Watcher forced me to see the truth.
“Filth, disease, whores and drunks,” she hissed. “Destruction, chaos, rapists and murderers.”
I stopped at a red light and glanced in the window of the liquor store beside me. But instead of bottles of whiskey and neon Budweiser signs, I saw only The Watcher’s eyes, this time a glowing red. I froze in place, unable to move, all my synapses misfiring. Her shadow overlapped my own silhouette as she said, “It’s either you or them.”
I’d lingered in her stare for too long. The Watcher was me and I was The Watcher. I knew then that they had to die.
Every. Last. One.
#
I’m in a room that’s empty, save for a single chair with red tufted cushions that looks like it was stolen from an old movie theater. I am wearing a deliciously soft white night gown. “Hello?” I call. There is no response except my own echo. I assume I should sit, but as soon as I hit the seat, large metal shackles emerge from the recesses of the chair’s arms and legs, enclosing around my wrists and ankles so I can’t move. I’m being held captive.
“Where am I?! What is this?!” I yell and thrash, my echoes simply taunting me.
Eventually, when I exhaust myself and lay still, a large screen lowers down from the seemingly infinite white space above me. There are no strings or levers or pulleys, it just sort of emerges from the nothingness and floats down with the ease of a feather.
“First the movie theater chair, and now the movie theater screen?” I ask no one.
Just then the white light begins to slowly fade around me, replaced with a darkness so thick that I imagine you’d be unable to see your own hand waving in front of your face.
“Hello?” I call once more.
The screen comes to life, a projector whirs somewhere off in the distance.
A response.
“Welcome to P U R G A T O R Y.”
“What? What kind of stupid joke is this?”
Silence.
“Well?!”
“Please Understand Reality Gets A Tad Odd Reliving Yesterday.”
I think that I must’ve gone completely off the deep end now. Am I sitting somewhere catatonic in downtown L.A., imagining this? Why can’t I remember how I got here?
There’s more whirring behind me until an image appears on screen.
I look at myself standing on the street corner, where I swear I was just a minute ago, staring into the liquor store window, waiting for the light to turn. I see myself. I look for The Watcher, but there’s nothing on screen where her shadow should be. Only my own reflection. When the light shines green, I skip across the street like a school girl in a 50’s movie and then make a sharp right toward San Pedro. Once I reach the street, I just stand there for several minutes, shifting from one foot to the other, swaying to a tune that only I can seem to hear. An old homeless woman wearing a Twin Peaks t-shirt bumps into me. I abruptly turn and spit in her face.
What the hell is this?
Instinctively, I try to raise my hand to my mouth, but I’m met with the startling clang of the shackles and a stabbing pain in my wrists. I continue watching as the old woman begins to curse and gesticulate wildly. I watch myself reach into my coat pocket and with one swift movement, I slit the woman’s throat from ear-to-ear with pocket knife I never remember having and gleefully skip away.
“Vermin! Vermin! Vermin!” I yell with every step.
#
My first murder goes unnoticed and unpunished, because anything goes on Skid Row. The projector drones on and so do the killings. Whir. Whir. Whir.
#
I don’t know how long I sit there, watching my descent into madness from the outside. The place seemed to exist outside of time and space. I felt no hunger, no need to use the bathroom. I’m not sure I really even needed to breathe, but it was just something my body did out of habit, like a reflex.
I watched as I continued my slayings of the innocent homeless. Plagued by misfortune, addiction and mental illness, they often proved easy targets - men and women alike. I did not discriminate in what I seemed to think was my duty to “cleanse the streets of La La Land” – a desire I rambled on about incessantly in these memory movies, despite my having no recollection of it. Back in Canada, there were always a few homeless people wandering around the church grounds across the street from our house, but I don’t remember thinking much about them at the time.
For a while, I managed to keep my job at the restaurant and continued staying at The Cecil, where they easily turned a blind eye to my troubling behavior because troubling was the way you could describe nearly all of their clientele and their comings and goings. Eventually, however, as the months wore on, I became more and more dissociative and psychotic, picking fights at work and then missing shifts completely before they eventually fired me. Watching it back, I’m surprised I lasted as long as I did, but I guess it was hard to find anyone willing to work in the businesses that line Skid Row.
It turns out that I seized my firing as an opportunity to pursue what had brought me to the U.S. in the first place – travel. I booked a bus to San Diego and wrote online that I needed to get away from the filth of downtown. I quickly discovered that San Diego had its own homeless problem, though, from old bums peppering the shoreline at Pacific Beach to healthy-looking young men shaking coffee cups in front of the shops at Ocean Beach. Whatever their appearance, it didn’t seem to much matter to me. I felt the urge to kill there too. I knew I was compelled by The Watcher in every reflective surface, every shadow, even though I couldn’t see her.
One night, I encountered a man called Jon, arguing with a homeless guy in front of a store called Yogurt Haven II. Jon pushes the man into an alleyway between Yogurt Haven II and a Catholic church and I peak my head around the corner, curious as to how this will play out, when I see Jon take out a railroad spike he’d concealed within his denim jacket. I watch as he plunges it into the man’s eye socket and through his skull. I watch myself smile as if I’m watching my child do well in a school play. I take the fact that this occurred in sight of the church as a sign, convincing me of Jon’s pure and likeminded intentions. And for a little while, we “clean up” San Diego together until I feel the pull of the Cecil Hotel, calling me back where there is more work to be done. I leave him to carry on without me.
I go on killing for two more years. Word of deaths and disappearances spread among the homeless of La La Land. They call me the Skid Row Shadow. On my 24th birthday, I am killed in front of The Cecil Hotel when someone throws a brick out of their window that cracks my skull wide open. I’m the hotel’s 89th death, their third that year alone. I watch as the blood pools around my head and slowly seeps into the lobby hallway.
#
The lights rise, the screen fades to black and the projector whirs to a halt.
“At The Cecil Hotel, the veil is thin between this world and the next and the next. You see that your blood has been spilled at its gates. In exchange, you will be given the chance to set things on a different course.”
“You mean, I can live?” I ask.
“No.”
And with that, I am sucked out of my seat with the force of the world’s fastest roller coaster pummeling from the world’s steepest hill.
#
I feel strange. Queasy. Like my insides have been reshuffled and stuffed back into my gut with a reckless randomness. My vision is hazy. For the first few moments, I just see light and the semblance of shapes until the scene comes slowly into focus. I find myself in my childhood bedroom.
By the sight of my teddy bear collection, I wager it’s around the year 2000. Is this what the disembodied purgatory voice meant by things getting weird? I hadn’t assumed my “second chance” would involve reliving my adolescence. I didn’t want to live through it the first time around.
I step toward my dresser with the old 90s plastic mirror mounted above it. When I look in the reflection, I don’t see myself. Only a shadow. It’s hard to describe the way it feels when you look into a mirror and don’t see anything. It’s a scenario your brain simply cannot comprehend, and if I was still flesh and blood, I’dve probably passed out. But it turns out I’m no longer flesh and blood. I’m nothing.
I look down and where I expect to see hands, I see a distortion. I can make out the outlines of my fingers, but its as if they are made of bubbles – shiny, translucent, hard to see with the naked eye depending on the lighting. The same goes for the rest of my body – I am there, but just barely. Like the dust that lingers in the air after a cartoon character makes a speedy exit from a scene.
“I thought I was supposed to do things over!” I yell. How can I do anything without a body?
I’m talking to myself. Not figuratively. Literally. But no sooner have I made this declaration do I hear footsteps and then, I see a young me, swinging my door open with such ferociousness that one has to wonder if I moved it simply by channeling the brute strength of my teenage angst.
“Hey! Hey! I’m here!” I yell.
I watch as the me in front of me turns her head, as if she maybe heard something, but isn’t sure.
“Yes! It’s me! What I mean is, I’m you! You’re me!” I should have thought this through further.
FSK me (future serial killer me) shakes her shoulders, as if she’s caught a chill. She reaches into her dresser drawer and pulls out a brush. Slowly and carefully, she begins to work through her silky black hair.
“I’m right here!” I scream. And then, I see her look in my direction in the reflection and gasp. It’s then that I realize it.
The Watcher is me. I am The Watcher.
#
Things start to move swiftly now. I am present only from memory to memory, which leaves little time for me to contemplate my existence as time loop. But I’ve watched enough movies to know that in order to break the loop, you have to make the ultimate sacrifice. The grand gesture that will “set things on a different course.” But what could I do to disrupt it all?
The more I try to connect with myself, the worse things seem to get. When I see her watching two homeless men in front of her local church, I speak softly and with tenderness.
“Everyone deserves to have a safe place to rest their head.”
“Vile, filthy things!” She says in response, and I realize I’ve heard this once before. I remember this time I had with The Watcher. But if The Watcher is me, then what can this mean? That FSK me had these thoughts all on her own? Is my presence alone responsible for her/my bipolar episodes worsening? I was a fool to think I could just appear before her without repercussion.
Once FSK enters into the fully medicated years, it of course becomes harder to set things right. Each time I try to show myself to her or speak, it is as if I am floating underwater or buried underground, my movements stifled, my sounds dampened. Until the day she books her flight to La La Land.
At that point, I knew time was running out. Once she arrived, it would only be a matter of weeks before she ditched the meds completely and ventured down the path of no return. But I just couldn’t think of any way to stop her, especially not in my weakened state. As she scrolled through Expedia looking for flights, I screamed. I tried to break and throw things to get her attention. But I could do little more than shift a pencil an inch and muster the sound of a whistling wind. When she searched for her seat on the flight, I laid across her arms and the keyboard, crying with fear, exhaustion and hopelessness. For just a brief moment, she paused before clicking Confirm.
#
Once FSK arrived in La La Land, time seemed to march forward faster than ever before, but I felt stronger too. Being at The Cecil was like finding solid ground after being tossed around by an ocean wave. I gained surer footing with every passing minute, and on February 2, the final day, I swear my lungs filled with air or something close to it.
Just the week before, I watched FSK toss the last of her pills out her fourth-floor window. She sang to the sun and we shared transcendant feelings of joy that transformed the gray concrete of downtown into a beautiful silver. The world suddenly shone before us in HD technicolor. And on her final day, I nudged her toward the little things – the rhythm of the moving traffic, the light reflecting off the metal street signs, creating tiny rainbows. We both savored the moments. A bittersweet first for her and second chance for me.
And as she headed toward the corner liquor store, I knew our time had come. I used all of the energy I had gained from The Cecil’s haunted bones to appear before her once more.
“Hello Elisa,” I said, waiting for her to turn and see me there, lit by the neon glow of the signs inside.
“It’s you.” The fear in her voice pained me.
“It’s me. And it’s time.” I said, as she took off running.
#
That night I steered her back to the hotel lobby. Once she failed to turn on San Pedro like I had those years ago, I knew that my job was nearly done. She raced toward the elevator to try to escape me, but it was no use. With the loop broken, all the momentum of the shift in time was behind me now. I willed the doors to stay open. When the platform failed to move, she stepped outside to find me waiting.
“We need to go now,” I told her calmly.
She tried to lunge for me, her hands poised for my neck, but I forced her fingers backward. She screamed as they cracked and popped, and then, in her last desperate attempt to escape me, she turned for the stairs. When she reached the top floor, the only place left to go was the roof. She pushed open the fire exit door, and I quickly silenced the alarm so as not to alert hotel security. Outside, in the night air, we faced each other.
“Why won’t you leave me alone?!” she shouted.
Slowly and unwittingly, she backed away from me but toward one of the hotel’s water tanks. Back then, they weren’t well-regulated. There were no locks, no other safety measures to stop someone from tampering with them.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t. You’re dangerous.”
“Dangerous? You’re the one chasing me!” She turned around and scrambled up the tank’s rusty ladder. I watched her from afar for the last time.
“I know this doesn’t make much sense now, but I’m hoping – for the both of us – that isn’t the end. It’s just the start of another journey. You want to travel the world, right?”
“Yes, but…”
“But nothing. This world was never meant for us. So how about the next?”
I felt my legs leave the ground and within an instant, I was there with her at the ladder’s precipice – maybe I ran, maybe I flew. I’ll never know. But as soon as I reached her I pushed her off the ladder’s top rung and into the icy water of tank. As she flailed in the darkness below, I turned away, unable to watch her – me – in those final moments.
I eased myself in too, closing the lid behind us.
#
On February 19, 2013, a body was discovered in a water tank on top of the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. It was later identified as that of Elisa Lam, also known by her Cantonese name, Lam Ho Yi. Her death was the subject of much scutiny and intrigue, particularly with the release of bizarre elevator footage recorded shortly before her death. Three years later, a man named Jon David Guerrero would go on a killing spree, hunting homeless men with railroad spikes, setting two victims on fire and assaulting several others. In January 2020, he plead guilty 15 felonies, including four counts of murder. He was called the San Diego Homeless Killer. This work was inspired by their true stories.
christina
alone, i am not
of an easel like the
gibbons of mandevilla
i need not three legs
to stand.
this flightless heart flees
farther than that of those
spineless silver falcons.
winter craves upon those
rose hearts who become
so frail a branch in the silhouette
of a stopgap intimate.
they wither blue
beneath a deathless shade
ripped narrow in the game
of limbic double dutch.
a careless casualty
in the name of some
greying prayer.
red currant rinse, rosemary repeat: y ori
her spine craves rhythm and gushes cadence in some awry disjointed disco. she calls it a whalesong, a disgruntled rose-coated moan in the nest of his throat that bathes her innocence in julienne sliced shadows and minced morals. she is that of a seashell, a conch perhaps. floss white and empty. she pulls mulberry macaroon clouds from his dream tied tongue and laces them daisy and alabaster to wear round' the garden of her neck. she is antheia in a bloody mary ball gown at half past ten, courting your mirror like unripe plum boys in their evanescent prime. she puckers, places, misplaces her lips in a half-baked brown sugar pseudo pastry of love fermented flesh. huckleberry and home, she thrives only in sea foam and rented skin, threadbare springs and cala lily cacophony the soundtrack of her bones. she knows only the whipped cream winter of her ligaments, feels only the rhubarb crumble of last night's silk parfait pool at the linen of her feet. she'll bind grandma's fairytales in a systematic shuffle of denim and trade them for the sorbet ballet of two abstract tarpaulin echoes. she asks not that you stay, but that when you go, leave your shadow.
you owe her that at least.
Our Forever
As Anya lay in her stiff bed, about to doze off into permanent slumber, she thought back to her life, her marriage, her husband... David. The pain was almost bearable now. It was still there, of course, it never left, but Anya was just about medicated enough that it didn’t matter.
She and David had the type of comfortable marriage that most people would have deemed pretty damn perfect. They rarely fought, there were no affairs, no jealous-ridden rows, no deep disagreements about finances, religion, or having children. It was, Anya dared say, a marriage out of a storybook. They perfectly complemented each other. David, the level-headed husband, Anya, the free-spirited, slightly eccentric wife. The stars aligned one day when they met at a birthday party for a mutual friend (neither of them could ever remember for sure which friend, funnily enough). Anya had spilled wine on David’s immaculately clean shirt (not on purpose, Anya was not that smooth) while she was goofily hopping around dancing to “Kiss with a Fist” by Florence and the Machine. Anya had been mortified, but David had laughed, apparently finding the whole thing adorable somehow, and the rest was history.
It was perfect, for a while.
But like all perfect things, it couldn’t last. Life is suffering, as they say, and Anya should have known to prepare for it. It truly was unfair. Anya was young, beautiful, and had her whole life ahead of her. Like a horrible cliche, it was all taken away in an instant. A car accident. A crushed spine. Months of therapy and an unbelievable amount of pain. It wasn’t long before Anya couldn’t function without a minimum of thirty milligrams of morphine in her system. With time, her wounds healed and her scars faded, but the pain remained. The addiction remained.
The thing about illness is that people only forgive the physical ones.
To his credit, David tried. He didn’t cut and run. He was there through the surgeries, the hospital stays, the doctor’s visits... the revolving door of rehab. Though at that point Anya could feel him slowly pulling away. She supposed it was too much to ask. How could she expect him to love someone so broken? So different from the girl he married?
The relapses were the hardest. After a few months of sobriety they would get lulled into thinking maybe... maybe this time it would last. Maybe they could finally go back to the way things were before, love each other like before. Then invariably Anya would slip back to square one all over again, and the hope they clung onto would once again become nothing but a cruel joke. Again. And again.
They say relapses are a normal part of recovery, but Anya couldn’t accept that. She couldn’t let her husband keep living through that. She knew that David inexplicably blamed himself for all of it, feeling that somehow it was his fault he wasn’t enough to save Anya from her demons. Knowing this only made Anya hurt just that much deeper, made her hate herself that much more.
The thing was that Anya really did love him. More than life itself. She loved him enough that all she wanted was to free him from this hell she had built around their lives. She was going to end it today. Finally, it would be over.
—
David wept throughout the entire service, silent tears dripping onto his lap, the world around him muted, gray, out of focus.
David wished he could tell his wife how wrong she was, for thinking she was a burden, for deciding for both of them that he would be better off. No, it wasn’t easy loving Anya, but loved her he did. She was one of a kind, his wife, his better half. He wished he could tell her how brave she was, for surviving, for enduring the pain, and for battling the demons that came with it.
After the accident David admired Anya’s determination to get better, how she would power through her therapy despite the setbacks, and how she would pick herself back up after each relapse. Yes, it was horrible sometimes, and there were dark moments... but there were good days too. David would miss Anya’s boisterous laugh, the way she furrowed her brow when she read her books, the way she always knew how to cheer him up when she could tell he needed it. Her mind was as sharp as they came, even when she was in pain, even when she was fully medicated.
How was it that somebody so intelligent could be so oblivious to the love that was ever present around her in abundance? Why couldn’t she see that she was his forever?
No, it wasn’t fair, the cards they were dealt, and things did change after the accident. But that was life, wasn’t it? It didn’t play fair. But if you only loved somebody when it was easy, then what did it all mean, in the end? God knows he wasn’t perfect, but if David could do one thing right in his life, it would be to fulfill his promise to Anya. But life was cruel in that way… he loved her, and he knows she loved him, but in the end, he still lost her.
David clenched his fists and wept harder. The worst part was that Anya never blamed him. The accident... it was his fault. He should not have been driving that night. He knew he was too sleep deprived, too tired, and yet he still got behind the wheel. He should have seen that other car coming. But not once, in the sordid years that came after, did she give him any indication that she resented him. Her ability to forgive him only made David appreciate the unbelievable strength his wife possessed even more. He only hoped that wherever Anya was now, she was finally at peace, and that his love for her reached even there.
