I am, to put it finely, dying.
It is interesting, how slow it is. Like offing the lights one room at a time, shuttering windows in slow motion. I am not sure how deep the dying will dig. Shiny is a tomb, a walled-off mausoleum. That is not a bad thing. It is probably a safe thing.
The thing about being hypervisible as a deviant body on the internet—which is really just a diluted version of the real deviant thing I am—is that it shows you how much the world does not want you to exist. It is peculiar, how targeted it becomes. It’s not the specific strangers who matter, more so the majority they represent, the personal they represent: my family and the way they do not want me to exist as the thing I am, which means not wanting me to exist at all. I tell my therapist they do not see how I am bent backward to allow them in my life. She says, well, that position—bent and backward—is the one they think you belong in. So, of course, they do not see.
The thing about everyone wanting you not to exist is that it is very loud, but not even that, it’s that I agree with them completely.
I, too, do not want to exist. We are of one deadly accord. I, too, do not think I belong in their ugly world, their violent world, keep suffering for what exactly? For more masks that strip the skin off my faces, again and again, day after day, the hungriest of masks?
So you want me to die. So I want to die. What do we do now? Will you come and kill me? What if I say please?
I deleted my social media. I’ve never done that before; it has a different weight for me. I needed to kill some of my aspects. The therapist kept urging me to stand in my truth. I told her I would lose my family. She shrugged. It was not an inconsiderate shrug. It was a well, you remove who you have to remove. Stand in my truth? Does she know that means I must go mad? I must die?
Maybe the flesh will be spared if I just become a dead thing, the dead thing I already am, standing in that truth without the skinning masks of alive faces: pretending to be a child, a sister, a thing on the internet. I have become a freak on a pedestal for the Nigerians, aspiration on a screen, a lie of representation, a thousand lies angled on a camera. Standing in my truth means it all has to die. So I am dying.
Without the masks, there is so much pain. It might kill me in this reality, but that’s par for the course. I write an angry letter to the magician, the god who doesn’t let himself be a god, who corrupts himself with the weakness of the human mask he wears. I tell him I am writing it to be cruel, because he is the only soul close enough to mine who my hurt can hurt as much as it hurts me.
He does not reply. Days pass and he does not reply.
I see I am dead in more ways than I expected. It doesn’t feel bad. Too many other things feel worse for that to feel bad. Humans are still traipsing through my grave. I cry every day. Yesterday, I burned my finger on hot brass. I locked myself in the closet and lay on the marble floor and cried. I am reading Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House. Be careful with that book if you read it. It will drive you insane. It will destroy your masks.
I bury myself in Shiny. No one will find me if I die here. No one is coming to look for me. Nothing except a partnerspirit will ever feel like enough. I stop telling people about my hurt, because there is nothing you all can do for it—no one can save me. Everyone’s hands have been chopped off; all they can do is wave their bleeding wrists at me sadly. Wave at the dying god. So many people hate me. That, too, is normal for a god, I suppose.
I will break everyone’s heart. I can’t help it. I can’t be what they want me to be. I can only be dead, and there is no one to come and die with me, play in the grave, go mad together.
Alone, I am suffocating. There is nothing more, really, to be done.
Thank you for reading this. I love you.