I vaguely remember praying to God and silently asking him to end my suffering swiftly amidst the light breaths of Annabelle sleeping soundly beside me. I recall looking at the top of her blonde head with mild disgust, the contrast of her dark roots adding a tinge of nausea that I attributed to the memory of my mother’s own head. I could not help but let out a heavy sigh of regret.

Sex with Annabelle wasn’t particularly bad but it wasn’t particularly great either. Recently she had developed a tendency to curl her body like a fetus when I was fucking her from the side, accompanied by a whimper that perplexed me and made it difficult to climax. The first time I heard it, I thought she was crying, or perhaps on the verge, and that maybe I had been a little too rough with the handling of her body, which was soft and young but awkward and unrefined. When I stopped to ask what the matter was she simply requested that I continue. She had small breasts and too large of an ass for my liking, which I felt she could sense, so, in turn, she was timid in the application of it to my groin whenever she was on top or bent over. Subsequently, I was left feeling perpetually unsatisfied and her underappreciated. So when she would whimper as she often did, or curl into a ball, or refuse to let me penetrate her mouth or ass, I was almost always forced to close my eyes tightly and imagine any number of the petite Russian and Asian women I followed on Twitter who’s names formed from a lexicon of popular theoretical language. This night I pictured HauntologicalHoeRoseEmoji giving me a blowjob and was eventually able to come on Annabelle’s waist. I collapsed to the left of her and rolled onto my back as she rolled over to face me. I would not look at her but could hear and feel her adjust the sheet and place her head in the crook of my armpit. We did not exchange a word before she drifted into sleep and I felt that was appropriate.

In my head, this peculiar sound rang like a bell that signaled the festering of a great albatross or perhaps more simply the end to what was genuinely an easygoing relationship, consisting mainly of sporadic noncommittal fucking and conversational lunches inside her Brooklyn studio, where large abstract canvases lined the walls and projected something she consistently referred to as the result of her immutable dissapointment with the limitations of this reality. Her outward pessimism and general callousness was one of the main reasons I became attracted to her in the first place, as it left little room for unnecessary emotional displays or the possibility of any real attachment, but I had never cared enough for her paintings to engage with her intellectually beyond common politeness and patient listening. In my experience, especially with artists who weren’t already neutered and beaten into submission by the established order, it was too much of a liability spiritually to speak with anyone in their twenties about art in a frank way, and it was best to avoid criticism or any pointedness when it came to women’s work. Besides, I was already established and neutered and beaten, and I hardly possessed the cruelty to tell her she was never going to get what she thought she wanted out of art. I wasn’t evil enough to tell her the world she was so eager to enter would eventually destroy her, leaving her ragged and disenchanted beyond reproach, especially given her predisposition toward melancholy and anorexia. Her body would suffer from years of alcohol abuse and disorder, her large ass would eventually sag and wither away, leaving little to the imagination of would be gallerists, collectors and men at dive bars, and she would most likely end up teaching art or continental philosophy at a public college outside the city if she didn’t manage to kill herself before that happened (an idea she brought up more than once with a casualness that indicated she was more than serious about it if life ever became truly unbearable). Although she had probably already anticipated this outcome every day since graduating at the top of her class and being hailed by her professors as the next big thing. Her fears were quickly verified the moment she fell into a category of painters who were most generally dismissed as trendy opportunists of global dismay in a widely circulated review in Art Forum following her first major group show in New York, but I didn’t have the energy nor the incentive to coach her through it at even the laziest capacity.

While contemporaries of her generation were gingerly taking advantage of and indulging in the nihilistic void being brought forth in the coagulating transmutation of neoliberalism as it careened into an all encompassing authoritarian regime, a shift that came to a head within the reconfiguration of the global market as the population succumbed to the second wave of coronavirus in 2021 (the same crisis that ushered in the reelection of Donald Trump a year before with a stunning landslide victory attributed to his introduction of the “Great New Deal”, a bill that saved many major industries and indebted workers with large advances of taxable cash payments in exchange for labor promises) leaving one astute critic weary of artists exploiting the newly purged landscape by asserting their non objective work as exclusively about collective trauma (worst of all work with a self prescribed sense of omnipotent irony and pretentious misapplication of Marxist text), Annabelle found herself burdened and unable to break through the very aspect of her work people had obtusely misidentified but consequently made her successful out of the gate. I had long since my earlier days struggling as a writer been bestowed the cardinal information required to reach what I considered an ultimate truth: that the pursuit of art in its purest sense was merely an elongated process of reconciling an absolute and crushing defeat.

At thirty-six and still on the steep incline of my long and venerable career, I was completely content to exterminate myself in a outlandishly grand and extravagant way, and was untethered from the obvious consequences of false ideation by virtue of my everlasting ascent as the preeminent writer of an apocalyptic style of romance that had at once become a ubiquitous and highly sought after genre in literature, and with the help of an incredibly successful string of novels that functioned only to vaguely describe the degradation of a culture wrapped up in the very decadence I was unironically striving for outside of the work, I was able to survive pleasantly on the belief that I was being totally honest with myself about what I wanted from the world (and the world seemed more than willing to provide time and time again) and that the problem with most people was that they were unable to face the nature of their illness and exploit it for every dollar it was worth—even if that’s exactly what they were doing behind the cover of a misleading academic cushioning or naive optimism. My situation, always contingent on the waxing illiteracy of the masses and their insatiable hunger for prophetic reflection through artistic means, was essentially the same as Annabelle’s, yet I was able to avoid the pitfalls she would encounter later by accepting from the get-go the world as it really appeared before me, rotten and utterly bankrupt, and the only way out was to be ever present to this irrevocable truth.

From the beginning it was clear to me she had come a fraction of a second too late in history to truly make an impact, to make paintings that were uniquely epochal in the time that she lived, and was more than likely doomed to a fate of misinterpretation and perpetual heartbreak based on the association of random and extraneous factors far beyond her control, like being classified as a member of an era defining collective of tricksters she didn’t truly belong to, or being too autistic to pick up on the sexual advances of middle aged perverts in positions of power vying to exchange paltry sums of status for an unenthusiastic handjob from a girl with eyes as deeply sharp and dark as Annabelle’s. Those giant saucers of tar with flecks of orange brown flung about their glassy surface without precaution, wrought with intellect and malaise, precluded any poetic description and were liable to shrink one’s dick if happy childhood memories were abound or the patchwork of one’s psyche still layed like a quilt devoid of tears or burns. Worst of all was the fact that she was bound to take this personally.

The many nights I spent absorbed in the post-coital silence had given me ample time to contemplate this; the way her life was so easily invaded by garden variety deviants who barely had the decency to muster a quiet sympathy for her predicament must have been in one part cathartic punishment for her vain assumption that she somehow made better the system she willingly participated in, and all parts confirmation that she was too weak to escape the slow corruption of her soul at the death grip of that great tentacular apparatus called capital. My soul on the other hand, from what I was able to discern, had been up for sale long before I was conscious of it, and I always slept well knowing it now went for an ever-increasing price.

When I was sure she was completely turned off I prepared to release the symphony of farts I had been courteous enough to hold for hours. My stomach had been in a fair amount of pain all night and I had been waiting for this moment since the second I ran into Annabelle at Clandestine. I raised my right knee up and gripped the white sheet. They did not make a noise but it did smell terribly, like a thousand deaths, some sort of mass grave filled with stomach bile and melting French cuisine rich and pungent, slathered in butter. Like most nights (when it was still financially viable and socially realistic for me to spend hundreds of dollars a week on dinner and wine at Lucian’s) I had indulged myself in plates of the duck liver mousse, grilled sardines, and escargots de bourgogne before filling the rest of my stomach with a magnificent hunk of filet mignon. The food always swam in a sarcophagus of Bordeaux or vodka martinis depending on who I was with and if I was trying to fuck them. I found that the swath of luxury brands such as Gucci or Balenciaga tended to employ models who preferred martinis, albeit with gin over vodka and the replacement of olives, which were excellent at Lucian’s, with a twist of orange or lemon. I personally considered this rather distasteful and antithetical to the essence of the drink itself, and felt that most undergraduate architecture students at Columbia made for much better dates and were much more interested in my pick of the French wine litter. The meal I had at Lucian’s the night prior (oysters, octopus, filet mignon, two bottles of Bordeaux) was now being forced out. Throughout my adult life I mostly saved eating for the night time, and survived the day on liquids (black coffee, soda, and beer) as well as my morning croissant from Cafe Gitane.

Although I detested exercise in all varieties and tried in earnest to make the point of letting myself go as much as possible in order to accurately signal my wealth and predilection for abject sexual dynamics, I remained in relatively normal and healthy shape. It was never any problem getting women to come back to my apartment and admire the intricate crown molding that lined the walls of the bedroom or the large crystal chandelier looming above the mattress. To see in their faces the alchemic fermentation of betwixment and terror and pleasure coalesce into a tangible expression of experience became harder to gain any satisfaction from as time went on and my tastes yearned for more troublesome complexities. However, given my good temperament and respect for the sanctity of life, none of these virulent daydreams ever fully developed or pressed me hard enough to take definitive action. I was too good looking and sophisticated to sully my hands with such commonplace gestures of evil like torture or rape, and I hardly contained the imagination required to turn murder into anything symbolic or meaningful.

Normally I would wake up around 1 or 2 PM depending on if my literary agent called or had set up an interview for me that day, and depending on if I could muster the resolve to actually show up. I prefered to sleep in and held the conviction that I had earned the right through years of eating shit and waiting tables at the fancy european restaurants I now enjoyed dining lavishly at, taking every opportunity to revel in the acquiescence of graveling social climbing scum that existed in the form of previously sadistic managers and owners desperately trying to perform fellatio on my newly anointed, princely penis. With this position of dominance came the expected bonuses; easy access to premiere tables, top shelf martinis and moderately expensive reds on the house as well as any dessert me and my companion(s) desired.

I would stumble out of bed, throw on a robe I had stolen from my time at the St. Regis hotel (a week I spent snorting ketamine and flying two young women out from New Zealand to stay with me, ending in total disaster when one of them decided they were in love with me and stabbed the other with a corkscrew. The police officer, a man of good sensibility, took both of them away and let me padder around the suite farting and snorting drugs for the rest of the night in peace. The pair was quickly deported after it was discovered they were both part of a militant leftist group online that frequently made death threats to officials of the DNC and their families. Annabelle found the whole affair rather abject but it was hardly her position to criticize me save for a small snide comment or two.) and graze past Mcnally Jackson to see if my book was still on the best seller shelf (they were always immediately sold out then, and the bookstores in Manhattan often had trouble keeping up with the sheer amount of placement orders), before sitting down at my favorite table outside the St. Patrick’s Cathedral, chatting up the waitresses, ordering my black coffee, and generally feeling like life was worth living for at least a little longer. I remember it was spring and stringy bouquets of white and lilac flowers were arranged and bloomed in the windows of quaint boutique shops, the renewing sun and clear sky resurrecting the dead insects from their winter graves and bringing the beautiful bohemians out from their red brick caverns.

When recalled, these moments in life now hit me with expanding profundity as they inched towards the recesses of my memory. Even Annabelle’s face, one that I remember to be constantly furrowed in seriousness but exceedingly beautiful and life affirming in its treatise on the subtle mutations of the Ashkenazi profile since the dawn of the 20th century, seemed distorted and fading like the aged celluloid surface of a film left to the whims of time. The distractors that had accumulated since that time, a sorry combination of degenerative physical ailments that deposed me of my queer lifestyle in Manhattan by the time I was rounding forty, obliterating my hairline to an unsightly cul-de-sac and crippling my knees with arthitus, now stared directly at me with the lilting eyes of a veiled corpse, and made me long for the days I spent blissful and enraptured in myopic self absorption.

Although it wouldn’t have mattered because I did not love her, I was thankful Annabelle did not wake up. I lightly flapped the sheet and dispersed the smell throughout her room.

I checked my phone for the time. 4:44 AM. I was still vividly drunk and my mouth was parched. For fear of waking her and continuing our ruinous conversation from earlier at Clandestine, on the nature of her love and my tepid objection to it, I did not get up but lay even more still in an attempt to fall asleep. I wished for death in this moment above all.

Having done ketamine lightly over the course of the night in the bathroom at both Lucian’s and Clandestine, time seemed abstract enough to ignore all together, but I hadn’t done enough to lose my sense of it entirely. I was very much aware of the fact that unless I finished the little of the drug I had left, or chose to flee Annabelle’s studio right now with my dignity intact, I was certainly fated to experience more inconvenience in the manner of avoidance I had grown apt at dealing with when confronted with the strange accumulation of sentimentality Annabelle had apparently contracted on her own volition and without my consent. I carefully leaned over the bed and fished the vial from my jacket hanging on the bedside desk chair. My subtle movements triggered a sleeping Annabelle to roll over and begin snoring loudly which I counted as a small miracle. The concept of God’s grace made an indelible impression on me from a young age, and I understood, like Weil, that only through the acceptance of his absence do we find a fathomless light. In one swift sequence I poured one large lump onto the nail of my thumb as it rested on my curled index and tossed it back as I sharply inhaled. I gently fell back and sunk into the tempurpedic surface with a feeling of holy renewal. With one final whisper from my anus I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply.

Love is an affliction I readily anticipated on the basis of a practically scientific method of analysis developed over years of successful dodging; I had observed in finite detail many times the collapse of restraint and will one became subjected to in letting this parasitic entity take hold, and the way people became sickly and died with a twistedness that proceeded a totally obliterated view of their being. It was best to avoid this. It was best to focus on any immediate task at hand, as to get on with death more efficiently. I had found out much to my disappointment that Annabelle did not feel the same.
Annabelle seemed to love me unconditionally for reasons I found indiscernible and juvenile, and after catching me off guard at Clandestine in the throws of a passionate groping with a crazed Russian model named Olya who I found terrorising the patrons of Lucian’s with a joyful song from her homeland, decided to lay it all on the line in the most extreme display of self annihilation I have ever witnessed.

With a surge of impressive strength she ripped me from the clasp of that girl and dragged me out toward the door by my collar. I heard Olya’s song play again as I looked back to see her stand on the table and kick off the empty glasses, clapping her hands and squealing with delight as the sound of shattering cups rang throughout the crowded bar. I saw a group of eager young men with privileged hairlines and jockish chins cheer her on and quickly take the opportunity to swoop in on my prospect, glimpsing them huddle around her like ghoulish amateurs before I was thrust onto the sidewalk and whipped around like a ragdoll. I did not have the coordination to break free and run away although deep inside I knew it would have been cosmically wrong to do so and would have auctioned my soul to a deeper plateau in hell.

The tears came instantly and cascaded down onto the pavement. She shook me once by the shoulders before softly beating my chest with her fist. What burst from her lungs came like the creaking of a haunted house with wind rushing through the holes in the roof. Through her sobbing she told me she loved me more than anything in the world, and that she didn’t care if I fucked a thousand girls before the day that she died. She told me she could stand it so long as I loved her, but that she had known all along that it would never be so. She cursed the sky and the moon that she was so foolish, and that someone as miserable and irredeemable as me could make life so impossibly difficult to endure. She said she hated herself for loving me and that she doubted she would love anyone else ever again. I had ruined love for her forever and for that she would never forgive me. She finally leaned into my arms and cried, the snot running down her nose and lips and collecting on the shoulder of my grey blazer. I could do nothing but hold her and pet the back of her head gently with pity.

I do not remember how but we were then laying in bed, and I began to feel the gravity of what had transpired right as the ketamine took the shelf out from under my horizontal position and transported me into the light of unknowing. As I ascended I felt the interwoven meshing holding Annabelle and I together unravel and take on a strange atomized configuration. I flew past it at a great speed, unable to stay at the same vantage point from where I could see the landscape of ourselves undergoing their simultaneous geological transformation. Mountains dividing and creating vast chasms that opened up into wide rivers of municipal empathy. In a flash of divine synchronicity with the great tide swirling below my shadow, I at once understood the metaphysical fundament that had birthed these things and the codified laws implemented long ago to keep them out of my reach. I found myself unable to remember what justifications were used. It didn’t matter anymore. I glided up the walls of my mind as they danced with light and the fuzz of a transmission lost but now found, the dial, my body, at last tuning in to the truth. I became flooded with visions of Annabelle; our meeting and coming together, no longer coincidental or insignificant, was as essential as everything else that existed in the fabric of my life. All our commonalities came from the same place and were connected to the same being, drawing us together across linear time and space. My resistance to accept her gift seemed egregiously sinful, and a small wave of panic pulsated through my astral spirit – if I died now from an accidental overdose my soul was forfeit, and would surely be subjected to all kinds of unspeakable torture from fascistic demons resembling Pre-Raphaelite nymphs, who would woefully take turns peeling the skin of my cock with a hot knife before casting it to the void. Forgiveness was waiting, but where? The path needed to be unobstructed and clear. On my way to heaven I stopped short suddenly. There I saw what I recognized as Annabelle’s love materializing and condensing in the peripheral space above me, pure and whirling about. A sound permeated from it’s wet shimmering surface and echoed in the deepest part of my ears, filling my head with cathedral organs and the indistinguishable hymns of angels. I extended my hand out to touch it, needing to grasp onto something before I was unable to articulate anything at all. I became floored with it’s essence, but also aware of a jagged edge that extended out from my hand that felt weightless and at the same time heavy with emotion. For a long time it was there and I was not.

As my left arm fell and flopped onto bed I let out a heavy breath. I checked my phone for the time. It read 5:44 AM. My movements had been clunky and loud. Annabelle woke slowly. I put down my phone and lay still. In my head I still heard the hymns. She turned and spoke but one sentence, taking her time to select the words, not looking at me but distantly out the window. The sky was turning blue and I could better make out her figure underneath the sheet, the lace finishings of her pillow obstructing it partially from my gaze. I didn’t say anything back as I understood exactly what she meant. I climbed out of bed and gathered my things, putting back on my clothes and slowly heading for the door. I did not look back at her but caught a glimpse of her reflection in a prism of hallway mirrors, still laying upright and staring out into the void expanding and swallowing up everything in that room. The cloud dissipated and locked itself away behind a grand vaulted door.

I went back home and slept with great apprehension for how the rest of my life would unfold and if I was strong enough to endure another of this magnitude. I found myself weeping whenever I remembered Annabelle, even after the writing and the dinners at Lucian’s stopped all together, as if I sat in anticipation for nature to discard my life in exchange for the light of a new world, one that no longer needed the sounds of my soft whimpering to validate its existence or disdain for love and all pure things.