Content Warning: Mention of eating disorder, sexual assault, suicidal thought

This year, I’m getting rid of everything that doesn’t serve me. E.g. after I graduated, I chucked all my shit into this big polyester bag then burnt it on the beach in Coolangatta, my hand chewing at a Hello Kitty lighter. I was choosing the generations-long path of upper-middle class audacity: I didn’t check if an uncontrolled burn was legal, etc, etc. Later that night, @violenttradwife (Instagram) will post a photo of a deer, subtitled: i love warmth / i was cold for so long. Its Arial letters are cool and sharp against a blue-toned phone screen. It’s ridiculous to like it, to engage with this at all, I know — the way I’m about to externalise my, quote, girlhood — ‘that’s so real’.
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I’m seventeen, obsessed with the Anna Karina fringe, my (perceived) sex appeal. I’ve called the suicide line twice this year, only to punish — myself, or them, or both of us. I can’t stand the Disney-PR-trained way in which they talk about it, this tenuous it, their allusions to a general and disembodied suffering. I don’t mean anything by it anyway. Tragicomically, I try everything for my writer’s block and nothing works — until the boy who said he loved me two years ago tells everyone at school about how I like being fucked and then I’m back to writing. I love The Smiths.
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Unlike what everyone thinks, I haven’t had that much sex. I mean, I was taking the IB, I wanted a good romance, etc. I don’t even understand the whole angry-coquette/tradcath/Lana-Del-Rey thing until a string of particularly bad situationships-qua-rebounds, until he says he loves me on the day I give him my edtwt Ultimate Goal Weight, tell him I’ll starve for him or w/e post-Omegle men are into these days. 
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To @violenttradwife and other mostly-ironic femcel-adjacents, the domestic is inherently profound. This is perhaps best illustrated by a desaturated photo of an old Garfield plush captioned “to be loved is to be changed”. Hollywood-ugly truths reified as something common yet inexplicably spiritual, e.g. pomegranates or rosaries. Like, here, everyone wants to be loved, but no one wants to be loved. What they don’t say is, no one wants to fall to the rank of Old Garfield Plush. Hence, preventative botox, hence, anti-aging cream, Snapchat, disappearing messages. At the end of the day, you gotta face it — to be loved is to be Old Garfield Plush, man.
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Dennis Cooper writes of one of his more lifeless characters: “He felt as though his whole life had been a series of dissolves”. I’m in some hidden room in a university being called a dirty broad by some boy I barely know. He wears a cross. I would fuck you just to feel the texture of it. Texture and then cut.
Dissolve.
R is driving me home from school, I’m talking about how I need to pick up some saltines, I’m talking about this Gabriel Garcia-Marquez book. 
Dissolve. 
There’s a photo of baby me on the shelf. I pick it up, stare at it searching for the ghost of my childhood, much the way my younger self had once, lying supine against fallow field, traced over the muggy outline of my future being. Filmed over top of this scene, an image of rough sex, not mine though, just the act I mean, just 
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In an earlier poem, I wrote about myself as “hollow in chest and character”. Later, T read it. He said it scared him, the violence with which I talked about sex, how I portray myself.
“It’s great. Your work just feels quite alien to you.” 
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I get a call on the bus, the man who wants to fuck me (for now is telling me to fuck off, keeps repeating the phrase “lacanian fuckwhore”. It’s autumn, 2023. He’s threatening me, I think. I’m plastered, I’ve had six pints, I send him the pictures, then go home.
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In Peanut Butter, Eileen Myles writes of themself; “I am always hungry & always wanting to have sex”. I didn’t get what they meant. I failed to contend that hunger is sometimes more than just the mind’s refusal to say “yes” to the body, the vowel hanging from the mouth like chewed fat. How the words for food and words for fucking are the same. Consummation and consumption. Eating something, or someone, out. Sex-starved. Emptiness and sharpness go together too well for me. A wound is just as much defined by the absence of skin as it is the knife that cuts it.

You can write that down, post it, framed against a photo of an old doll, or a cat, or a martini glass.
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The moral of this is that there were many things I could have been hungry for, didn’t realise I wanted. For years, I had online profiles on apps made to send me through sex, teach me the act of seeking it. I was sixteen, I wanted a lover, I wanted warmth. I settled for the next best thing, I settled for Omegle, the bread knife, Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
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I’m crossfaded at a party and using the words sexual assault for the first time, watching it arrive slurred and paper-blank. J holds my hair back like a simulacrum of a bad porno. What does this make me?