A short story
XTC
— (versión en Español aquí) —
- Stop trying to have sex with him!
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. My body remained on another plane; in this one, only my essence. In this one, him, now an omnipresent Buddha talking about himself, berated me.
- Every time you try, he remembers. He remembers all of this. He remembers who he is and that hurts him. It really hurts. He wants to forget. Leave him alone.
The pink echo transmuted itself and materialised dimly; first his afflicted face, then all of him, floating sitting; meditating
Disturbed and incredulous, I tried to get away from that place. I wanted to fall back, force myself out, but there was nowhere to go. No escape. No entrances and no exits. I didn’t remember how or why I landed there.
Months earlier, in a drunken haze, we unexpectedly had intercourse. Like wild animals. Like entities unknown to each other pushing the boundaries of consent. Confronted by it, I ignored his timid attempts to rekindle that flame the next morning. Neither him nor that brutal encounter fitted in my scheme.
The memory of that act remained backstage for a few months until the day we swallowed some X. In the darkness of his room he told me a secret, crying. I remained frozen, barely able to hold him on my lap and pat his head.
A thousand fantasies later, now things more calmed down, he whispered in my ear:
- Poor little you, so sad and lonely.
I cringed with discomfort and pain. As much as I wanted to run away, I couldn’t deny he was right. Although I was perplexed, I could not free myself there from the burning electricity of those words there and then. However, hours later, once I finally came out of the stupor I was able to dismiss images and words with a shake of my head, simply because they were so improbable. Nobody really hallucinates like that with such a happy drug, right?
“So sad and lonely.” Tormented, I didn’t realise that what thundered through my body were those words. They were the seeds that I nurtured for months with tears and flaming contemplations in front of the tube tracks.
I chased him a lot, just as the abyss of suicidal depression engulfed me. I concocted the perfect cocktail of alcohol, drugs and partying again and again just to have him and with him, the space of escape, of magic, of fantasies, of truths and discoveries, regardless of whether in the end I ended up making more tight knots to the rope that unnerved us.
We became entangled with that first , so like alienated parasites with limited possibilities for symbiosis.
In some of my many frantic attempts, we did manage to touch that sublime realm. Sometimes there, out of our minds, we also physically touched each other. But sex, although we tried many times, we couldn’t have.
“Stop trying to have sex with him!” Both flooded by yet more XTC and alcohol, and him reverberating that prayer asking me to stop.
His request, although firm and clear, did not permeate my memory. I didn’t even have to make the effort to forget about it. Though initially I felt confronted by his grief and even guilty, his words were a tad too late. I couldn’t stop anymore. I was already addicted to that insanity, to being outside of myself but with him.
Time passed and one night, already on the threshold exiting that suicidal depression, my body danced to the rhythm of an accordion. The clowncore that injected nostalgia into the dancers inside the abandoned warehouse led me to vomit the water I had just ingested to speed up the process of the crushed Mandy I had swallowed earlier on.
Finally, the high. Sensitised body. Euphoric mind.
Then the scene of his supplication stomped me so clearly. His pained face and the awareness that I had repeatedly ignored his plea.
I screamed into the void; I’m sorry I forgot about it.
This time when I left the rave I remembered his words, but I still couldn’t change anything. The addiction was that strong and I continued spiralling down for years. Love, hate, disgust, rage, disappointments, intrigues and machinations, violence, joy, downfall and we start all over again.
As would be expected, the thrilling adventure turned into an anxious nightmare.
Too much too much too much.
It got to the point I wanted to disentangle from him completely. However, despite wanting it out with all my might, I only managed to make laughable and unsuccessful efforts to break the bind that connected our beings. Always returning to the same location. Stretching and loosening of the chains that I gladly accepted at first and now, with great terror, I couldn’t fathom how to break.
Eventually, after a lot of tears, a lot of sleeplessness, a lot of discipline, a lot of rinse and repeat, fail, get up and keep going, I managed to get around the addiction. I had to set aside my insane ambition to do the impossible and remove every link that connected me to him. Instead, I simply geared my moves in this game towards unhooking only the ties that suffocated us. Little by little until we were far away and in different realities.
I finished what I started.
Over time I realised that what attracted me the most, almost to the edge of my sanity, was not him, nor even the space we entered.
It was the mirror. That was the magnet, because the person I got to see clearly was me. It was me, the one I was looking for and the one I desperately wanted to know and for her to know me. It was me who I always wanted to stay by her side. It was me. It’s me. Me. Me. Me. It was always me. I was the one I had to fall in love with.
I know it sounds super cheesy, but it’s true.
The process was horrible and fantastic at the same time; magical in all aspects. That pain, that tenderness, that longing, that rage, that anguish, that magic, that ecstasy and everything else had to be felt in order for me to be able to reach myself and be who I am today.
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