I survived the warring factions of my family by withdrawing into myself. As a teenager my handwriting likened my stepfather’s elongated handwriting, my mother’s minute stark handwriting, and my loopy babysitter’s handwriting.
When the infighting was brutal my handwriting was illegible, it was my code that I only was able to read.
You don’t have to pretend to like what we say, my mother said when I was in my early twenties. My depression, rumination, and anxiety became a code like my handwriting, a consciousness within a consciousness.
What I disown in my meditation I reclaim with my writing.
I disown myself in my morning meditation on death and change.
I feel ashamed. Isn’t it pathological to obsess about death. Are the Buddhists I meditate with a cult of death? Didn’t the Christians reside in the catacombs in Rome? Was it the Rome catacomb that Y chased me in in my dream?
My teacher Heather snaps her bony fingers when she says that we are in a bus heading to death. I feel euphoric. I want to become her underling and learn how to break others down the way she reduces us to states of exquisite fear and lust.
When I place the garbage outside the warm Portland May night air feels like the warm California January night air when my mother died.
I obey like a soldier to survive myself.
It is an inane euphoric feeling to revere a human being like a God.
Y is inside my head. I want to die for him.
It makes me intensely happy to regress to a child like state, no barriers.
Heather speaks in to a microphone with her eyes half closed and a girly voice.
She has been assigned by her leader, the Noble one, to a flat rectangle temple on the side of a highway.
We all want to die for something.

Y has a friend J. Y never says much to him. J is young, in his early twenties. He
is on the quiet side. He changes with women and becomes intent and talkative.
Y thinks of him as a woman. He fucks him when he has no one else.
J never makes a sound when I’m in the room and J plugs his mouth and asshole with his prick. J bleeds like a fetid pig. He is mindless and agape.
I want to hurt J. I hate his stupid blond face. I control myself not to. I don’t want to be more complicit than I am. J worries me. I think he won’t be able to contain his self abuse that has no end and he isn’t dying anytime soon. His family will be alerted and we will end up in shit creek or kill his family which is something we won’t recover from.
It happens that Y is shy and needs J to introduce him to the young college women who are at odds with their parents. Y scares young women. J on the other hand has his way
with them. It is like he is one of them. He has their thoughts and desires.
J is a piece of shit. He has no loyalty. Im going to kill him with my bare hands.
Y is a menace. He has a weakness for effete blond haired young men. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do.

Y asked me if I needed money. He hurt my pride.
I have money saved, I said.
Y grinned.
J can lend you some money Y said.
I don’t want his money, I said.
Y gave me a white envelope with a thousand dollars. I held onto it and said nothing.
J turned on the small portable Radio Shack radio to Latin Jazz. The lively
music turned off. The batteries went dead. He plugged the radio into the socket and left it off. He sat in a yellow chair and arched his blond head back.
I was mute. I think J preferred it that way. He kicked the radio and it turned on. He danced around the glass table with its sharp corners.