I’d gotten out of the clinic on a day pass, and Marie came to pick me up and drive me to her apartment. The sky looked more tired than I was, musty white. A sky like tangled sheets that needed to be bleached clean.
I wanted to have sex, we both did, it’d been so long—though I could feel that Marie was shoving me away like my paintings—and I wanted to punish her for it.
I’d made them in the clinic and given them to her, and she’d hung them, for a while, on her wall. Today I saw that she’d replaced them with horrible blue gray monstrosities—birds and daffodils and lilies, mass-fabricated for Airbnb’s and hotel rooms. So ugly and flat and tasteless. My paintings were in the closet, shoved into a corner, deemed too dark. I shielded my eyes from them, but even under my eyelids, those ugly painted birds were all I saw.
I made clown-devil faces on top of Marie, grinding my hips. My exaggerated ugliness another act. Inside us, nothing. She knew it too. I wanted to shame her, to make her feel sick. I told her to choke me then I told her she was doing it wrong. Press on the sides, not on the trachea, you’ll cut off my voice. Press on the sides harder, I said. I feel nothing, harder. Say you hate me. Tell me you hate me. —I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, she said finally. —I fucking hate you.
I woke from a series of dreams, not the clear ruins one starts from in the middle of the night, just some hazy visions—a complicated accident involving tramways suspended from wires, antenna-like appendages, large flying insects—and found myself alone in bed. Outside, Marie was raking the grass. Her back was turned toward me. I knew it was the last time I’d see her. You’re too mentally ill, she’d said. She wanted to be bleached clean like the sky. Bleached so thoroughly that she’d be transformed into a new being, brightly wrapped, like a package offered to the gods.