the body crushes the soul

I grew up thinking people like me are bad.
But the way society is set up.
There’s no way to be close to people.

I was terrified the first time.
Thought I was going to throw up.
It’s about getting in the right mental place.
Letting it build up.
Late at night.
Drugs help. But they can impair your judgment. You don’t want to lose track of time. Peripheral vision. Or you start to psyche yourself out. A little alcohol is fine for confidence. Too much and you fuck yourself over. Can’t get hard. Can’t keep track of time. Weed is out. Stimulants are better.

I drove really far.
Many cities over.
It’s less terrifying that way.
Many cities in the night, disposable and samelike.

Scrolling through Grindr.
All these forms and formats.
Is the way your body turns out, the type of person you are?
No soul, just your body.
And if there is a soul
it’s incredibly small and inconsequential
forced to endure the body.
The body crushes and deforms it
as it undergoes puberty
and with every year
of life.

In my black hoodie I don’t need a body. I’m not anyone. I have more of a soul that way, than you do, even though you’d call me horrible things. Not human.
If you want to talk about a soul, that’s what a soul is. It’s that thing coming for you at night.

Grindr really helped me come to terms with who I am. I’d never hurt anyone that way before. But looking at all the bodies, night after night, helped me calm down about it. There were just so many of them. And they were all so empty. I looked at each body and thought how I could take control of it. If they were too large and unwieldy to stop me. If they were too small and skinny to stop me. If they were too old to stop me. If they were too young to stop me. If they were too female to stop me. If they were too male to expect me.

I’ve been using the internet more
understanding the dynamics and impacts.
I don’t think what I do is that bad, comparatively.
I’m not trying to gender this violence.
There are a lot of disabled males that are very easy to position and hurt.
The only thing that would make it hard is if they don’t expect it.
Haven’t internalized it the way someone else might.
Which is their problem, not mine.

Scrolling. My xbox is broken. It still has the games I played ten years ago. My brother isn’t here anymore. He lives on the east coast. It feels like a signal. That we’ve turned into two different hemispheres. I’m on the left hand coast. He can take care of being good. I don’t think he’s as good as people say though. But I liked playing games with him, when it was games we were playing. FIFA. Call of Duty. Or the demos on the store. There are some pretty good puzzle games.

But games don’t work for me anymore. I thought I could be that person. Playing gacha or mmo til I die. But my income isn’t steady enough. It gets broken up. And the games aren’t that good. If they designed them better, they could have avoided all this.

It’s just not the real thing. You can’t go back after the real thing. I understand why people get caught. It’s a different reality. It’s not about being weak or addicted. Maybe it is. But it’s also about moving to a different time zone. In the night. I live there now. I barely remember what I do during the day. Or even a few hours before. 3AM is perfect. But it depends when the sun sets. Some days you can start magically early. Foggy nights are good too. Rain. People don’t expect it during the rain. But I don’t mind the cold. It doesn’t stay cold. It keeps me focused. And the rain muffles the noise.

A lot of people won’t fight back if you grab them fast enough. Fast and rough but with something firm and planned in it so you don’t just get animal panic. It’s about convincing their body. Because their body is the most unpredictable thing. It might yell really loud or do something crazy. They have to believe you won’t kill them. So you say something like, be quiet and I won’t kill you. Then you set a time. Just a minute. Just a little more. Anything can be bearable that way. People just want to know it can end.

I don’t want to kill them. I’m not a criminal mastermind. Disposing of a body sounds incredibly stressful. It’s easier to have them wash themselves at home, away from me.

Some people are so afraid they’re silent the whole time. I lay on top of them, keeping them pinned to the ground, while I jerk off into their clothes. I don’t penetrate. I’m one of the good ones. I will hurt people pretty bad to make them comply though. Bite the back of their neck like a dog. I realize this part makes me sound a little bad but in that situation, you’re trying to survive as much as they are.

The way they fell, they cut their chest on something. It wasn’t a deep cut. I took that person’s shirt. It was thin and feminine and tore off easily. In my head it was something like, remove the evidence. It doesn’t make sense.

I don’t have to worry about my cum. I wear a condom under my jeans.

Then I walked away and forgot where my car was. I must have been ashamed after I did it. Or scared. Being scared made me think I should have done more than jerk off on them. Like I should have penetrated or hurt them or worse. But I don’t like feeling pressured. It’s not a competition. Everyone is doing classic sexual assault every day. I have an image in my head and I want to complete it. There’s nothing wrong with that. The sexual assault part is wrong, but in a zoomed in context, people shouldn’t be shamed for being different.

I went to the top of the parking garage and looked down. But 3 stories isn’t enough. Maybe if you rolled, like on a die, your neck, or brain, in the right place. But it’s too risky. A really tall place would be even scarier but I knew a place with 12 stories that was 90 minutes away. I found my car and I drove in the night and the rain and didn’t even consider hydroplaning, that’s how out of it I was. There were some very good unmaintained roads that I went down, and all I did was automatically drive my best. You get into a flow when driving. Solving each small challenge. Kind of funny.

I got to the building and I was in the elevator when I realized the person I interacted with earlier, their shirt was in my car, and it had their blood on it. You can fall twelve stories or more and still end up paralyzed. I was reading about it on my phone on the way up. And if I ended up paralyzed, they would find out about me and I would be paralyzed and the police would be there. And everyone would be saying I was bad. That seemed like the worst possible outcome.

The elevator was taking forever so that helped me decide too. It occurred to me that they must make the elevators slow to discourage this exact thing. I got noided after that and thought I should get back to the car and keep driving. The coast was 60 minutes away and very foggy. So I took out the shirt with the blood on it and I smelled it and it smelled like the parking garage and their blood. I got hard again and tried jerking off but the wind from the ocean was cold and wet and stung me down there.

I went down until the tide was splashing my feet in the dark and I threw the shirt in the water and it seemed to disappear. I felt pretty good after that. Then the next morning I wished I hadn’t thrown it away

I tried other dating apps. People have their shit figured out. They go on walks and to events. Concerts and restaurants. They really have it figured out. With their activities. They have a steady income. They know what they want. Or think they do. I don’t like that.
I don’t want to be calm. I don’t want to figure it out.

I think criminals have a biological clock too. It’s obvious that criminals, or people like me who can be seen that way if you lack context, don’t have a conventional way to succeed. No one does. Even the middle class is crumbling. Dating apps are gutted and flipped. This is the closest I can get to another person. Maybe the closest anyone can.

Scrolling those apps
Year after year
Made me sick
With their standards.
I don’t have any friends, I don’t read or watch stuff, I didn’t know any of these terms
Any of these politics
Until I went on hookup apps
I learned the whole history of western society from people’s bios
you height demanding, race demanding, weight demanding, preferential, specifying, abbreviation addicted, sex negative, sex positive, asexual sluts.
This is real life
This is Walgreens
Do you know what year it is?
It’s Covid
People live with their parents
They have ulcers
No one has enough
Don’t be so fucking precious.
We’re lucky to have anything to stick it in.

What’s wrong with me? I’m a good choice, if you just think about it. I don’t spend time around other people. I work from home. I drive my car everywhere. I’m cleaner than your dates where you have to spend an hour listening to someone blast germs in your face in a crowded restaurant then you go home and mash your mouths on each other’s faces and you have to be nice and polite and trapped in each other’s space for hours, contaminating it, in your life, contaminating it.

The safest sex you can have is me breathing on the back of your neck through a face mask, jerking off into a condom wrapped around my cock pressed into your skirt.

I bless the rains down in Africa. Some guy is saying that on the radio. You’ve probably heard that song already. I don’t get around much. It seems like an old song. But it gets me pumped up. Like maybe I’m doing something right.

You should think about me waiting for you outside. Coming home or leaving it. Walking to the corner store or parking your car or just outside your front door. If we all do it to each other, it’s fine. My advice try to make it impersonal.

I’ve stopped hurting women. Some of them really give up and take it like nothing. But some of them are vicious. Fast with the pepper spray. I barely made it back to my car. I was cold for a week, just looking over my shoulder.

And women. Their voices carry. So high I got panicked, even if I could shut them up. It was like their voices were, what do people say in books? Ringing in the silence. I switched to crossdressers. Or that trans thing. If they’re drunk and tired and it’s really late, and it always is, their voices don’t carry as far.

I find one. New on the app. Just popped up. That’s good, maybe less paranoid.

I catfish them and when they tell me the meeting place is in a late night pizza place, I say okay. I don’t want to push too hard, especially this late.

I watch them in the car and wait for them to check their phone a bunch and finally realize they were ditched. Then I follow them home, which is only a few blocks away, in an apartment complex. I park on the street and cut across the foliage line in parallel with them. They’re walking down the apartment complex’s internal road, lined with those carports that look like open breadboxes.

Pink hair down to their waist, wearing sneakers, good, I hate the sound of high heels, I need my heart to be so loud I can’t hear anything else, louder and deafening and horrible, I need to hear that I am alive.

Short skirt and leather jacket and pink hair. It’s intimidating. But the sneakers keep it from seeming over the top. I like it to feel like they aren’t a complete image. That they need me to complete them.

I go fast through the rain and slam them into the ground, just inside the carport. Their purse falls on the ground and I kick it aside. They get up and I let them, just a little, so I can grab them by the jacket and pull them without dragging, pull them behind a car and push my knee into their back and get them down and now we’re hidden from every side.

I’m jerking off but I can’t cum
I can usually do this faster
Feeling how warm their ass is against my hips
And it isn’t a problem down there
Because their ass is really nice
And their skirt is short enough to get hiked up
So I can feel their skin directly
So what’s the problem?
It’s up here. In my brain. The other thing is, I need to smell their hair. Warm and perfumed and soft. I know it’s a cliche. But each person’s hair smells different. It shocks me. It puts me in their world. I can’t explain that smell. It’s better than pussy.
But this person’s hair is harsh and scratchy and has no real smell, just fake.
It’s a wig. I couldn’t see that before. I pull it off. They have blond hair underneath. Shorter than the wig. Dyed, I see dark roots coming out.
I sink my face into that dark-light zone and sniff and it smells like trapped sweat and some wig smell but most of all it smells like them.

Something wet fills my hands. I think I made them bleed then I realize their thong is still on. I wasn’t inside, I was just rubbing on the outside. It’s my cum. The condom fell off. Stuck between their thighs. I pull it out and put it in my pocket. But my cum is all over their ass. I wipe my fingers off on their jacket and now it’s on there.

I start panicking.

They try to crawl out from under me, try to turn around like they’re going to grab my face, and I punch them, pretty hard. A line of blood runs across the asphalt. It’s such a straight and perfect line I get distracted waiting to see how long it will run. It falls through a grate. That dark red line falling into the black grate.

I look down. They aren’t moving. I panic. I don’t want this to come off like a hate crime. I’m not like that. I wonder how I can make it appear more like a normal crime. Maybe if I wrote something down to explain—

They breathe through their bloody nose and it’s loud and now I can breathe too, breathe with them, rising and falling on their back, feeling their lungs under my legs.

I need to clean up. I pull off the jacket and their arms fall out of it, hitting the ground. They make a sound. I pull their skirt down and look around. It’s still dark. It’s still raining. I look at their ass. I tear the side of their thong and slip it off. They put their hand between their legs. I get off them.

“Go stand in the rain.”

“What?”

“Stand in the rain.”

They stand up, unsteady. They hold the pink wig in one hand, wispy ends trailing on the ground.

“I’m naked.”

“Pull your shirt down.”

It’s one of those long girly shirts so they can pull it down over their stuff. From here I can see the side that was hidden from me. Their front is coated in grime from the asphalt. Eyeliner runs down into their bloody nose, black to red.

I watch the rain pour down their body, soaking and sticking everything to them. The wig is like a pink tail. The rain gets in their eyes so I can look at their face without worrying about them looking back.

Then I get worried someone will see and think something weird is happening, and I pull them back inside, slowly enough that it doesn’t seem like an attack.

They seem a lot cleaner now. The rain is coming down very hard. Maybe my cum is cleaned off. And I have their underwear and skirt and jacket. All the contaminated things. And my face mask is still on. And my hoodie covers my hair. They can only see my eyes.

I fold their clothes into a bundle. Then I realize they’re looking at me. They look checked out from the adrenaline, but also something else. Is it disgust? It seems like kind of a mad look. I don’t like that. Their face makes me want to jerk off again. They’re kind of hot, in a real way, in a hard way to handle. I don’t usually see the faces. Just on the app. So when I’m jerking off, their perfect app faces are on the back of their hair which smells very good and it’s their face and hair at the same time, and I have their bodies the way I like it, with their faces the way I can stand it.

They bend down and take something out of their purse, which lays next to where the rain is coming down, close enough to have little dark spots on the material. They hold something short which I think is pepper spray, so I back up and shut my eyes. Then there’s a little sound which isn’t like pepper spray. It’s a fold-up knife and they’ve flipped it out.

I move a little and they move with me, so I stop. My legs hurt from kneeling on the hard ground jerking off. I should have gotten out faster. I got confused by the clothes and the problem with the condom. I try to remember where I parked the car. The apartment complex looks the same in every direction in the rain.

They back me into the wall with the knife. I think about wrestling them but a knife can go wrong fast, for anyone.

“I’m just going to walk away,” I say.

“Try it.”

I try it, because it seems like I should be able to get away.

Something hurts and I see blood come out of my arm. I squeeze it with my other hand. “Wait,” I say.

“Give me your wallet.”

I drive with my driver’s license, of course. But I put all my IDs in the glove compartment before going on foot. I don’t want to drop anything by accident. So my wallet won’t have anything this person can use to get me in trouble. They flip through it but only find money. They take three 20s out.

They still have a look.

“Give me your jeans.”

I don’t want to.

“I need something to walk in,” they say.

“I don’t want to be naked.” Sounds stupid but it’s the only way I can think to say it.

“Neither do I.”

My arm hurts. I hope it’s not bad. I look at the blood on their knife. This close I can see the rainbow iridescence in the metal.

They look back at the rain. Did they hear something?

Red light fills the puddles, the whole road is flooded with just enough water to send a ripple in front of the car coming. Red and blue ripples. I get scared, really scared. If I’d gotten away just a little before, I’d be in the dark, and I’d be safe. The carport is a dumb simple building, it doesn’t even have a little door. It’s like a box trap.

They walk toward the light so they can tell the cop about me. Something very bad is going to happen. I’m completely cold and completely panicking. I run at them and they turn around and their knife hits me and I fold over. I tried to run fast so they would do it without thinking. Now I’m hurt worse than they are. And they look a little crazy with the makeup running.

They look down at the knife, all dripping with blood and rain, coplight shining on their wet legs. They run behind the car and I run too, limping because my side hurts. I fall over next to them and curl up so nothing pokes out.

I’m right next to their sneakers. A little drop of blood is smeared into the white polyester. My brother loved sneakers. He had a wall of them. I always wanted to wear them. To feel them around my foot and smell them. They were just so nice, and he didn’t want anyone touching them. I think I went a little insane looking at those sneakers.

He didn’t talk to me after that.

I look under the car and see the cop cruiser, real and big and shiny in the rain. It’s very immediate and shocking, this proximity. They slow down and I feel like things are going to end here. Then I see they were slowing down because of the rain, or maybe going over a bump. And they keep going, and they’re gone.

The wig sticks to me with pink tendrils. One of them is dipped in blood, like it’s drinking from my side.

They look down at me and I say, sorry. I don’t want to get cut again.

They almost laugh.

“Am I going to die?”

They look at the cut on my arm. Then at the deeper one in my side, blood still coming through my fingers. “You might need that looked at.”

Okay. I need to get to the hospital. I need to cover this with something so the blood is inside. I have paper on the floor of the car. That would stick to it I think.

I walk to the edge of the carport and fall down. The rain is so steady.

They come over and wash their knife in the street, which is one big puddle.

“I don’t want to die,” I say.

They look at me, the center of their face bloody from the punched nose, blond hair grimy with asphalt soot and then dark at the roots, dark at both ends. It would probably look pretty bad for them if I died. “I’m an EMT.”

“Okay.”

“Was.”

“Okay.”

They fold up the knife and set it on the ground. “I’m going to apply direct pressure.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not very good at this, okay, I got fired.”

“Okay.” I guess it would look pretty bad for them if I died. I didn’t think this through, running into their knife. It’s like when you’re a kid and you hurt someone by accident so you say, you can hurt me back. Punch me. Hit me. Hurt me.

They find their skirt where I dropped it and wad it up and compress the cut in my side with it. As they do that, they look at the other cut. “Can you move the arm?”

I try. It hurts, but I can move it.

“Is it numb?”

“No.”

They’re silent for a bit. Then they say, “I don’t think you’re going to die.”

I start crying. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.”

They laugh, shaking into the compress, and it hurts and makes me make noises without control, but alive, all I can think about.