Once I was seeing this girl. She came on really strong, was the only reason I was seeing her. She came on with the snuffles, possibly brought on by cocaine. It was 2 or 3 a.m. in a late night goth club. I had received a text that said "help. eiunk." I called the next cab.
When I arrived, she was lurching out of the bathroom, having just vomited in the toilet. The vomiting had come from mixing alcohol and absinthe, she explained. Too much alcohol, was her reasoning.
Watery snot ran down her lip. She quickly snuffled it back up and into her nostrils, where it rested for a breath, then went running down again, as she told me she was Very Attracted to me, with a wobbly smile. I offered a Kleenex. She shook her head, snuffled long and hard.
The night we first attempted sex she had diarrhea several times before taking off her clothes. Nervous anticipation, she explained, only slightly mortified. She wanted it to go well. Soon she started crying, out of pain from her ravaged asshole. Mercy, mercy. I was being polite. The snot came down again. Laughing overhard at her lunacy, she pissed on herself, then, during our fucking, which I commenced in an attempt to distract her, ejaculated all over her bed.
She was so embarrassed by all of the liquids her body was expectorating, she started crying again, then laughing, and the cycle began anew.
It was like this for two months.
Twice during that time, she menstruated.
Artaud’s screaming body is the original, or maybe the original appropriated, or maybe the original applied, body without organs, screaming with suffering and the desire to end its suffering, though suffering is necessary for its survival.
The weeping body is similar, but not the same.
The weeping body is not important. What we have here is an erupting body. This girl had orifices that erupted as if on a lunar schedule. That is, when the moon was out, she erupted. Waxing and waning, no difference. Just eruption, and eruption, and eruption. Of the effects of cyclical time, she was exemplary.
Was the girl a trap? Would I fatally drown in her fluids? Is there a drowning that is not fatal? Why did she expel fluids whenever I was around?
These are questions I’ll never find answers for.
If I had answers, I would not be telling this story like a story, like this. Instead I’d develop a thesis.
Thesis: There is only me, the girl, and the girl’s erupting body.
Though I liked her violently, was fully and wholly in love, I didn’t know what to do with her, or with her body.
Though I also like violence, it was not a part of our relationship. The girl had a history of sexual abuse, which for her nipped sadomasochism in the bud, and for me softened my performed aggression into something gentle and weirdly maternal. I would say paternal but that would give you a different idea, even though paternal and maternal could mean the same thing.
In other words, the girl could not be contained, though I did my best to contain her. This is not the moral of the story, because the story is without moral. I started going to fetish parties and cheating on her.
Of course, I lived in a big city. If I hadn’t, I might have relieved my impulses in other, less accepted ways, like performing minor acts of violence upon strangers. Like stomping on your feet when I move to get off the train, like intentionally burning you with a cigarette. Like skipping, giddy, away.
The girl needed to be safe. I don’t know how she lived her life from day to day when she was not with me, because she never felt safe alone, or in the streets which wanted to fuck her, and did.
It’s like that guy who had the enormous mutated colon, which contained thirty buckets of shit when he died, from a brain aneurysm. How did he live? But he did.
The girl I was violently in love with erupted all day, every day, and yet was highly functioning. She left home three times a day. She was on a tightly controlled schedule.
As much as I loved the girl and appreciated her extreme differences from others in the world, which made it feel like we were unique and beautiful soldiers whose passion for one another was more intense and worthwhile than any other passion in the history of the world or universe, I could not explore my violent streak with a girl whose body constantly hurt. How could I explore it? Her eruptions were accusations of my selfishness. I never touched her like that, violently, I mean; and yet I always felt I had. I always felt guilty, as if the waves of fluid that erupted from her, that suffered her body, were my fault.
There is always blame in a world based on law.
The expectorating girl tried once to enter into violence with me. She told me she hadn't been entirely straightforward, that she had had a boyfriend all this time, then wrapped my fists in duct tape and told me to punch her in the face.
Role reversal. I started to cry.
I was to leave for Germany in a few days. We decided to break it off.
Megan Milks lives in Chicago. Her work has been anthologized in The &NOW Awards; Thirty Under Thirty; Wreckage of Reason; and Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire. Her work can also be found in Western Humanities Review, DIAGRAM, Sidebrow, Mad Hatters Review, Pocket Myths, Wigleaf, and The Wild. Her chapbook “Kill Marguerite” is available through Another New Calligraphy. She co-edits Mildred Pierce Magazine and co-hosts Uncalled-for Readings Chicago.
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