Confessions piece 10/20 MELTDOWN

I’m just confessing in this booth because I had a meltdown

At the restaurant where I work, I was clearing a table, balancing a tray with four glasses on one hand and reaching precariously for the check on the table when the tray tipped and dumped water all over me. “Fuck” i maintained a straight face and collected myself, nothing broke but I was thrown by it. I ran to the back and deposited the glassware by the sink while the guys in the kitchen watched me. One of them, a Guatemalan who stood about my same height and laughed so loudly you could hear him from the sidewalk said “Chavelita, what happened?” The two of us would often imitate each other’s voices and whisper in broken english and Spanish through the window in the kitchen door. Grinning, he would always say “can I have your eyes?” And I would laugh “noo”

Perhaps this was the seed of my catastrophic action that day, and the fact that I did it in front of him was evil and cruel and there is no world in which he deserved to bear witness to that. I hope he has forgotten it easily, but I imagine he has not.

After setting down my tray and placing the glasses one at a time in the wash rack I took a clean serving spoon from the utensil caddy and plunged it into my left eye socket - levering out the eyeball was all in the wrist and it landed on the table next to the hole where all the uneaten food went. The head chef who castrated bulls and slit animal throats with ease on his farm in Puerto Rico looked at the eye through his coke-bottle glasses and said simply “fucking shit.” I have always wondered what happened to it, my little blue eye with the brown sun spot in it, but I do not know what can be done with a dead eye like that.

Afterward was the hospitalization, and the long months attempting to understand the inspiration for and the outcome of my life-changing impulse. I never worked again and moved away from the city. I spent my days posting tik tok videos with hashtags like #humankind and #beunique where I would pop prosthetic eyes in and out of my hole like some kind of Bangkok ping pong show. I had them specially made, I spent irreplaceably vast swaths of time wallowing in my digital footprint, and using the passable amount of money it farmed to curate a more visually striking wardrobe, video backdrop, and collection of glow-in-the-dark, and horror-themed eyeballs. Millions of eyes watching me and I thought sometimes about how I just had one. One real one, but what does it mean for something to be real?

When I made an only fans, my brain chemistry changed irrevocably. My jaw and my soul grew slack, there was absolutely no pleasure left in anything and all of my cheap belongings languished around me, shedding microplastics that filled the air and absorbed into my body. I missed New York City with its real people. My friends and lovers. In the clutches of my algorithms, my mind felt like a hunk of pink taffy being pulled and folded by a gyrating steel machine. Most days the unrelenting nausea prevented me from doing anything to help myself, so I just inserted my loose and worn-out brain into the metal claws and let them work it for several hours.

I started having dreams which took place in near-complete darkness, in some deep southern creek bed, a close-set wet forest by the highway, where a light, perhaps a lantern or flashlight passed between solid shadows. Moving away from me, my only point of reference, casting a warm glow on the closing trees.

I rinsed my eye socket with saline, and crawled into the shower. The water reminded me of my dreams and I saw the light moving away from me through the forest. I thought how rain could either be the kind that makes oil run through the streets and makes your bones sick, or the kind that scents the air and brings out the tiny singing frogs. I let the water fill my dry creek, the depressions on either side of my spine, the crannies in my collarbone, but I kept it out of my tender socket. I understood and respected that wound, that hole, if nothing else. It was something I gave myself. In my dreams the light was always moving away from me, making me run and scrape myself against branches in the dark, so I stayed very still during my waking hours, in front of my phone and computer, so that at night I could chase the light through the woods.