God is love. I do not love. God is love. I do not love.

I have to get rid of all my art directly after I make it these days; if I don't purge it I can't stop looking at it and it immediately falls apart. I give it to people and it's alleged to be my gift to them, my narcissism, and they thank me. Why do they thank me? They are taking my monsters and housing them in the cupboards of their viscera and their intentions and their vulnerabilities. Those things get locked in. Why do they thank me? I just lose respect for what hangs around too long.

I slept through ballet because I was up at four in the morning fretting and drinking wine and reading the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception; every once in a while I would encounter a phrase or two that would cause this high laugh to issue from the top of my throat, and I had the feeling of a gradual recovery of this thing I had in my heart at all times as a child, methodical now, reimbursed by my attempts to decide whether or not this thing I was reading could possibly be about science. And I was stretched out on this hardwood floor that never fails to give me splinters and I was knowing I was going to sleep through ballet and the train horns kept sounding through long sheets of rain, passing through the open windows or closed Venetian blinds, drops in the slits perpetuating themselves, polyethylene.

Last night I didn't think that aliens or cyberstalkers were going to come find me in my sleep; all superstitions were sleeping and I wasn't sleeping and I was stretched out across the hardwood floor feeling a hysterical silence awaken and reposition itself behind my eyes, perfect and sensible like a system of wires. I know that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance, and instead of a therapist and instead of humanism I just have this very old phenomenologist with blue eyes and white eyebrows like Santa Claus, an old man with a PhD whose job it is to tell me every Wednesday that I'm not mindful enough to be a philosopher. He yelled about Myspace and I deleted my account.

I slept through ballet because it isn't what I want, lying in the dark on the hardwood floors feeling that it is my duty and my privilege to be as feminine as is possible, friends with women who follow their boyfriends to New Haven. Jobless and hopeful women, pink subjugated bodies watching their men mill through the law programme at Yale. Women who wait to exhale, women who want to birth your children but not mine -- mine much too pure, undiscovered in peapods, in snow. What if my Freudian envy is not of the phallus but of possessing the love of another woman? Then the fault of Freud is not in his biology, and not in me, but in the very perpetuation of his idea. I slept through ballet because when I was younger I was a Tai Chi master, fasting and walking alone through forests and making effortless motions of knowledge in solitude.

I was never a woman. Nobody ever was. It has always been a lie, and nobody has clean hands. Nobody. And nobody is willing to discuss it for long, to lose blood or relearn old movements. And in the seeds of these images new answers are formulating, new answers to all those old questions about tigers, all those questions John Roewert asked me about phenomenology, on the staircase one night, doubtful and intrigued. When I find these answers unfurling themsleves they will all be running in a stampede across wet green fields, bodies oiled like Spartans, and I will run with them. We will adjust to changing air and the scent of paint and plants, and will retire to respective attics, at all times with the windows open allowing in all noise and ice. And I am going to exhale. I am going to exhale and white air will rush out.

Last night I grew desperate and teary and wanted to move in with my homophobic sexist racist Catholic capitalist Republican Grandparents in Tampa, because of the guarantee there that I would have health insurance for when breathing grows more difficult. I would have a private world and somebody would come in and order me to wake up every morning. Because I wanted to remain the product of that same old sad situation, stealing Xanax. Because I thought about how we ally ourselves with people who share values, sometimes whether they treat us well or not, because we want uniform ideologies, scarcity and necessity. Here it would arrogantly and falsely be about myself, about the sciences. But the real goal here is not myself. The real goal involves Sparta; has more to do with facticity and with overpainted walls in empty rooms, with clean strange basslines and sore sore bones. We are adapting despite fantasies and we are amalgamating disinterested vocabularies, and we are honing our intentions into the slackening threads that connect us to the world, slacken in wonder.