DEAR DIARY
12.25.2025 On Magdalen Bridge
Maybe compulsion is the result of desire whose epicenter lies outside the body12.18.2025 OXF to LON MYB, 12:11pm
Watching raindrops flee, spermatically, across train window12.17.2025
This past Friday I went for a walk. At a curve in the swollen river I found a woman who was planning to enter the water and exit everything else. Her bulky coat, she said, would carry her down to the bottom, away from a world that no longer had a place for her. It was black, her coat. I told this to the police later. She was also wearing a scarf, but, looking back, I can’t remember its colour. She did not mention whether the scarf would play a role in her sinking. I assume it was there for warmth.Would you please call an ambulance?
Yes. I’m calling now. What should I tell them?
Tell them I want to kill myself.
999 asked me for the patient’s name, address, and DOB. I did not know these facts. The woman reached out. I handed her my phone. She gave the man her information and handed it back.
I do not feel comfortable writing details of the experience for anyone other than myself because the details were hers, not mine. I had to hand her my phone because her facts — name, address, date of birth, reason for 999 call — were hers to share, not mine.
999 could not give me any sort of time estimate.
We spent over two hours together, holding hands, waiting for an ambulance that, in the end, never came.
12.13.2025
There are some people almost capable of using words to describe things. For example, of writing love that tastes like love. Or tragedy that is tragedy. Or trees so real their leaves get powdery mildew, which is really a fungal disease and can be treated with copper solution in a spray bottle.These writers, like Frobelian teachers, gift us shapes and structures we can rearrange to better understand our own lives. Lives without narrative intervention tend to wobble around the edges. It is helpful, when living, to have ideas of character arc, plot twist, and third act. That way, when we reach a blind curve in the river, we recognize it as a navigable pivot from a “was” to a “will be”. We round the bend and continue.
Emily Dickinson instructed us to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
Some truths must also be received slant.
Intubation is a matter of flexibility. Allowing give and resistance to guide you over tracheal ridges.
I admire the direct lines engendered, perhaps necessitated, by scientific knowledge acquisition. But it is a mistake to treat literal and precise as synonyms. Poetry is, at its best, searingly precise. Sometimes I feel like an idiot for analyzing a poem, for asking what does this mean? Obviously it means exactly what it says. If it could be expressed in other words, other words would have been used.
Yesterday I was not doing my best. I went for a walk in Christ Church Meadow. I found a woman.
12.11.2025 Lamb and Flag
Working in pub I am suddenly struck by a wave of sick love. So hard in the sternum it has made me freeze. And long to somehow capture. I don’t want to lose any of it. For "it" read: experience? Or ...I love, all of a sudden, the dull sour smell of old beer. I love the hovering scent of hot cheese, bread, truffle from the pizzas ordered by the cluster of preppy American students by the fireplace. I love their highlighted hair and their chirpy accents. Their accents annoy me; I love being annoyed. I love the comforting pressure of headphone against ear, nothing playing, just enough to dull the singer-songwriter music drifting in through the speakers (I love the singer-songwriter music and want to hold onto it forever, want to kiss each track). I love the older man in his homemade-looking olive green sweater, knit all nubbly, chevron scarf, beanie pulled tight to half-cover lengthening earlobes. I love the deep rich brown of his 1pm half-pint, the occasional crunch of a crisp. I love more than anything his small dog, black, leashed, curly-haired, sniffing around for crumbs and then settling down under the wooden table. I love the thick foam-soled Nikes of the man sitting at the table up against the Christmas tree, the sort of shoes marketed to provide not only comfort but also proper alignment while walking distances, taking pressure off knees, shins, hips, improving posture – like walking on air. I love the Christmas tree behind him, in the window, flashing lights made brighter by low UV outside. I love his pint and his pizza! I love the girl, markers, plastic Tesco bag, open laptop, mouth turning and twisting baked Walkers, the eye contact as she sees me watching. I love crooked lampshades, wood panelling, residual glow, residual chatter from men behind bar.
I love every pizza that had ever been set before a man and every man who had ever sat before a pizza.
I love my own sick body, my nausea from eating shortbread, half a stollen bun, half a saffron bun (despite knowing it will make me feel sick), because the nausea is a reminder that I have ways of determining want and need, that I do not need to be told what to eat; that is, there is always a neutral presence available to tell me what to eat, and that is the body. The body can do the telling. The self needn’t get involved. My body can tell me things. Someday I might learn to listen to it, and to act accordingly. How can I not love this??
I love the guy serving pizza, who I might or might not recognize, who I might or might not be in the middle of a hinge conversation with right now. I love the pitted texture of wood under my fingertips, the deeply pitted but smooth-polished arms of the old bench, the scrubbed unfinished rough pitting of the old table, everything old, everything wood, everything worn, scrubbed, used, refinished. I love the 90s grunge rock on the stereo. I love the rich at-ease Hamptons casual polish of the group by the fireplace. I love the glaze-eyed 1:19pm white wine of the man at the round table. He is looking off at something, some distant horizon; I do not know what he sees. This is a tragedy, maybe THE tragedy. I love this tragedy, because it is everything.
I love the tourists walking in with their souvenir sweaters on and more souvenirs in plastic bags, which they will probably bring home to a somewhere else and give to various someone elses, spreading objects, moving the world through the world.
I am sick right now with love. Too full. Bloated. I love this fullness, because it is proof that I am a vessel, and so might one day be a vessel for something else. Maybe even for something good. Something better than an absorbent self. For mead, maybe, or for a midday pint. For light, for goodness. For nothing at all, poured out, hollow and waiting. For dairy milk or an americano. For filtered water. For impression. For grace.
12.10.2025 Mostro Coffee, back to window (body & screen exposed entirely to Cowley Rd), absorbing bright sunshine, with K- and A-, ordered and finished (free) large hot chocolate despite/pushing through seemingly now-chronic nausea
The world is miraculous, it is soupy and impossible to navigate. Sometimes it is sunny and you have to squint. Sometimes a bus rushes by and makes plate glass quiver ecstatically. Sometimes you pet a dog and there is this warm livingness you can feel through thick fur. Sometimes a man will wear a windbreaker such an intense shade of orange that there are really only two options: either he rides a bike and doesn't want to get hit by a car or he is Dutch. In all likelihood both are true. Maybe if you squint hard enough, or concentrate in the right way, you can look at a bike rider and tell if he's Dutch, you can see memories of a beautiful childhood in the Netherlands hovering milky behind a man's retinas as they zip by along with the rest of him.I'd like to think so.
I do not know what I want. I have not for many years now. This is concerning. I want to not be concerned, by this or by anything else that is just an ordinary matter of being a person. I am trying to be a person who can sit in front of a window, back exposed. I am trying to be a person. I am trying to be a self that extends beyond the self, instead of something circling and circling, incapable of picking up a sock and putting it with other socks. No -- when I see a sock, my instinct should be to put it with other socks. If dirty, with dirty. If clean, with clean.
I am writing this instead of my PhD proposal. I don't know if I will get them in, or if I want to. This is a foolish way for me to approach things; I know I'm being foolish about this, in a way that will alter (positively or negatively, but definitively) the path I take through the world. In practical terms I do not think it matters what I want. Given that my entire mechanism of want is broken, or, at least, temporarily out of order, it does not seem wise to wait for it to guide/inform my actions. No. No, I keep telling myself: begin with action and let intention follow. Start with gesture. Gesture freely but specifically. Clasp hands, bend knees, daven; faith will follow. But then I feel so so tired and bloated, too much so to raise my arms.
I shouldn't say this -- this sounds like a kvetch! A giving in! I am prone to kvetching, but (once I begin my quest) I want to leave the kvetchy bit of me behind in the lowlands, abandon it by the roadside like a sister's trousseau (beautifully embroidered linens but too heavy, weighing down the wagon, fatiguing the oxen).
No: I am ready RIGHT NOW to begin my quest! I am ready to find the man (white bearded, I assume) who will teach me the necessary sequence of gestures. How to position hands. How and where to place fingers. How to establish pattern and rhythm. How to respond to changing circumstances.
But where to begin???
Any place seems, obviously, better than no place. That is, anything definite is better (in this instance) than everything indefinite.
Waterproof combat boots are on. Dog is at feet. Stomach is processing whole milk and rich chocolate. Hands are, for now, still firmly attached to wrists: I checked.
12.10 Pt 2 (still at Mostro, but sun has set entirely)
Speaking w/ K- about the mechanics of objectification, specifically within the context of the heterosexual relationship. Really a continuation of Sunday's conversation with G-.I exit my body. I know this. I slip easily into unreality. Or, maybe, it is only occasionally that I surface from it. Have attempted (in a half-assed way) to address this as a psychological problem, but unsure whether to focus for now (that is, until acquisition of Austrian analyst with archetypical couch, Persian carpet, book-lined walls, etc) on depersonalization as a linguistic crisis rather than a psychic one. That is, to question where I am going wrong with my subject/object designations, rather than attempting to climb, via worksheet, workbook, podcast, etc, towards self love, or even grounded self-neutrality. Or maybe I really should embrace the workbook as a grounding technology. Like a tested 3-pronged plug. The UK is a good place for that. For electrical sockets, that is. They're proud of their sockets here. And rightly so!
It is a good thing to be admired by a harsh critic. Not good as in morally good. Good as in warming. Good as in momentarily pleasant.
It is no comfort to be admired by someone with bad taste. You think I am pleasant to look at but I have seen the other art you like.
I avoid all critics, mostly, by establishing permanent residence in my own mind and in other people's feeds.
You, there, sir. With the ugly smirk. With your strong opinions on line, on brushstroke, on verbiage. Who finds certain swaths of Baudelaire beautiful but others "young," who watches films rather than movies and writes long reviews (not on Letterboxd, for the printed page) filled with references to other films, who really understands literary theory, even the French bits, who tries not to snort at other people's ill-formed comments. *Opens shirt, revealing breasts and innermost thoughts, a bit of visible intestine where the skin has been peeled back* "What do you think of THESE brushstrokes?"
12.10 Pt 2 (still at Mostro, now 5pm)
I have wayyyyyyy too much time I'm able to spend just sitting and thinking about myself. Fix this.12.09.2025
- Mostro Coffee, oat flat white. filled out card. next coffee free.- made chicken soup: chicken, parsnip, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, peppercorn, bay leaf, cold water
- feel sick exhausted. several days in a row have worked for maybe an hour, then spent rest of day heavy with gravitational fatigue, as if from rugged virile labour in hot sun rather than from writing 1 paragraph in local coffee shop-cum-record store (refer to july?aug? entry for feelings about "_____-cum-_____") while sipping a £3.60 oat flat white. slogging through mud. wading through gelled soup. soup thick from collagen; boiled bones, skin, gristle, leeching into their bathwater. scum drained. will skim fat tomorrow. all magic is really just a matter of transferred properties. telephone call with doctor on monday.
- scalp feels wrong, tender and raw. maybe I scratched at it with dirty fingernails one time too many and a foreign entity entered, and there it became fruitful and increased rapidly; it multiplied and became exceedingly numerous, so that the land was filled with it. i feel infe(s?c?)ted from horn to hoof. my mucous is right now probably teeming with specimens, like that drop of pond water you put under the microscope on an elementary school field trip to witness wriggling invertebrates and get told how much Life there really is. my intestines feel overpopulated; someone in there is probably right now organizing a renters' union - and all power to them! my calves feel like they might at any moment play a prank and take me by surprise.
- Powered through The Hundred Brothers today. Finished a few minutes ago, sitting on uncomfortable dining room chair, A-- on couch, A---- on phone with E---. While reading had this feeling of being seen, and of treading known ground, that was almost punishingly unnerving. Need to think more about this later, but certain images, from this and from Elect Mr. Robinson, felt plucked directly from stories I tried and failed, nearly a decade ago, to write, and dreams I tried and failed, nearly a decade ago, to not dream. Not sure if there is meaning in this. Or maybe I'm just fabricating meaning because I want meaning. Or maybe lots of people think about the same things and generate similar thoughts. Maybe we all read the golden bough and the wasteland as teenagers, looking up now and then to observe sad middle aged men and cracked stucco houses, and that's all there is to it.
- made mistake just now of looking back at photos of self from august 2022. maybe that was my peak and I was too scared to do anything other than take a picture in a mirror and then climb back into my head and wait for the world to act upon me. one day I will learn how to properly grieve lost time; I am sure there is some designated series of ritual gestures. But to find it recorded somewhere, or to learn it from some clerical practitioner, I will need to search actively. Maybe even quest.
- really, I think that's all there is to it. I need to quest. I need to start a quest. Or at least see myself as a quester on a quest. which I guess is just the same thing.
- there are other things to record. feelings. impressions. but not here. and with what energy??
12.08.2025 Blackwell's, 3:25pm
There's this house in the middle of nowhere (in Derbyshire) with random stuff in it and various busts placed around to make it look posh, including, ironically, the bust of Lenin12.07.2025 in times like this fables can prove a guiding light
Back in a small town in the old country there was this butcher and his wife. They had some money, or at least more than most of their neighbours, and a good house with a roof that did not leak. They had love for one another and a different sort of love for their families and various people they knew. But they were not able to have a child. And they wanted a child more than anything.One day, the wife took a walk along the shallow edge of the forest. She knew the sun would set early – it was that time of year when days begin cutting themselves short, shrinking to fit between dark and dark – but she kept getting distracted. She wasn’t the type of person who usually got distracted. She was a practical woman. Dinner preparations did not unnerve her. If she had a chicken and potatoes and carrots she was capable of arranging hours, fires, and cooking pots. But today was different. She noticed odd, ordinary things: the waxy sheen on one side of a leaf, the deep notch in the trunk of a tree she walked past daily (had it always been there?), the insistent rustling that expands to fill the corners of silence.
Soon it was night. Exiting the treeline, expecting to find herself at the edge of Y--- Z-----‘s field, she was confronted by an unfamiliar view. There was a field, and it looked exactly like Y--- Z-----‘s field, but it was not. She could see the sloped cottage in the distance, a candle glowing warmly in one window. A woman who was not Mrs. Z-----, she thought, is right now making dinner by its light. In the sky, which was the wrong sky, the moon was round as a plate, round as an egg viewed top-down, round as a pupil. And blindingly white.
She trudged through the severed remnants of wheat stalks until she reached a muddy path. In moonlight it looked like a stream. She allowed it to carry her to a door that looked like her door. She knocked. Hearing nothing, she pushed it open gently. She crossed the threshold and was Home. She made dinner. When her husband returned from shul, they ate. He said it was good.
Their son was born with dark hair already on his head. He grew at the normal rate and was called good. A good boy. Kind and considerate. A fast learner. An eager helper. Old women did not need to ask him for a hand: his hands were theirs.
His troubles began with school. He was a devoted student, clever and eager. He would pore over pages of scripture, arguing about the weight of a phrase, the texture of a vital imperative. But on occasion he would refer, with confident precision, to a passage that was not there.
The first time this remembering happened, it disguised itself as a lie.
“Rabbi,” he said one day, raising his head from a cluster of schoolmates, “but what about the story of the mule in the river?”
“The mule in the river?”
The boy quoted at length.
“You have made this up yourself, or heard it somewhere.”
“No, it was in our reading this week.” His voice was defensive. He recalled where the story sat on the Talmudic page, with what scripture it conversed, which theologians had contested its meaning.
The teacher reddened. Punishment was swift and harsh.
After several similar occurrences, anger turned to confusion, then fear. The boy cited, with precision, pages that simply were not there. His personal exegesis included references to facts he could not know and stories he had not read. He was surprised and confused whenever a page could not be found or a rabbinic authority could not be located.
The villagers began to mutter behind cupped hands and closed doors about the strange boy with his head of nonsense. They no longer called him good.
As he aged, these memories became more and more plentiful. Fewer of the passages he quoted or the historical events he referenced could be found in books. Eventually, the boy stopped attending classes. Then he stopped reading altogether. Recollection took all of his time. He would sit at home for hours and hours lost in thought, while his father (now looked on with suspicion by his neighbours) worked and his mother kept house. He would emote fiercely, chuckling when he remembered a humorous line, crying when he reached the end of a tragedy, nodding in interested agreement at an argument made well.
His mother was frightened by this, but not always. She loved to hear him laugh. Sometimes he would quote lines of poetry that seemed to capture the essence of a marigold, or an arid desert – neither of them had ever encountered a marigold or a desert. Neither of them ever would. To see those shades of yellow in words was a small miracle.
The boy got older and older. His parents were older still than he was. One day, not long before the boy’s first grey hairs appeared, his mother looked over to where he sat at his little table, an empty bookshelf to his left, an empty table in front of him. She paused, paring knife in one hand, potato in the other.
“It is almost Shabbos,” she said. “I would like some flowers for the table. Would you go out and gather some for me? It is spring now – there are flowers at the edge of the woods.”
The man, who had never gathered flowers before, not as a man, at least, went to gather flowers. He trudged with unaccustomed legs along a muddy path, past a fresh ploughed field. The air was beginning to warm. It smelled of dirt. It kissed his mouth and he sucked it in; it caught oddly in his throat. He tried to remember what the scholars said about air, what stories there were about air, but his mind was empty. The horizon was so big it filled him up full and did not leave room for anything else. On the edge of the forest, in the dappled shade of the trees, were clusters of purple blossoms. He didn’t know their names.
12.02.2025
It was January 10th when the sophomore urban planning major who later came to be known as "Patient Zero" was admitted to Edward P. Grouseberg Memorial Hospital with the distinctive cluster symptoms that, within a few weeks, would restructure our world entirely, decimating the population and creating mass hysteria, although also (as optimists would point out) injecting new life into undertaking and those adjacent careers — professional mourning, funeral directing, mortuary cosmetology, floral wreath-making, cremation, alternative eco-burial, spiritualism, necromancy — that had not seen such creative and economic growth since their Victorian heyday.B--- P-----'s friends brought him to Urgent Care because he had started coughing blood. By the time they reached the hospital B--- was nonverbal. His friends answered the doctor's questions as best they could. He'd been sick for maybe two, three days. Yeah, it was Monday, probably, when he'd first complained about feeling weird. He'd had a fever on Tuesday and this gnarly rash. It started as a lacy red patch near his heart but quickly began snaking outwards, a starburst, pink eldritch tentacles. When the doctors cut away his clothes they found the striations had crept all the way down legs and arms, wrapping around extremities, holding his hands. The filaments were blood-blistered and pulsed gently. Several hours later, they burst, splattering the nurse on duty with blood and pus and vital bits of person.
Of course, within a month or two, when epidemiologists and public health experts and government panels had compiled massive troves of data (hospital health charts, phone calls to doctors offices, abnormal deaths, travel itineraries, etc) it was clear that the Illness had been spreading for at least a month before it hit Grouseberg Memorial. But by the time they released all those findings it was too late. Patient Zero was cemented in the public imagination. His body was a site. It was his curse that had corrupted the world. This mindset impacted the reputation of urban planning courses catastrophically.
Maybe it was because Grouseberg Memorial was in a college town that things spread so quickly. Young folks are always sharing drinks and putting bits of themselves in one another and spitting into people's mouths.
Soon there were bodies and bodies, sprawled, stacked, left in houses, rotting in the streets.
It became clear, fairly quickly, that there were two main forms of the Illness. Epidemiologists or CNN or somebody else began calling them "MP" and "MM," short for "Malady: Physical" and "Malady: Mental." The strains began with the same symptoms: intense malaise, followed quickly by a high fever. Within a day of the fever's onset, the symptoms diverged. MP tracked fairly consistently with Patient Zero's case. Malaise, fever, red rash in chest region that quickly spread in tendrils. Some ended in explosive gore, but many deaths were characterized by a quieter leakage. From onset to death was typically five to eight days. MM patients never developed the rash, or, if they did, it remained pale and local. However, their malaise ballooned to horrific proportions. Most MM patients found a way to end things (slash throat, jump off bridge, shotgun to head, etc etc) within three to four days of initial fever. There were no obvious signs to indicate which strain would bloom. Sometimes, Incident Responders would enter a house and find some bodies in beds, lying in pools of blood and mucosal foam, and others drained in red bathtubs or slumped besides empty pill bottles. Sometimes, there would be a survivor off in a corner somewhere, shaking and whimpering. We came to know them as the Annointed. They had been passed over.
Four months into the Crisis, Angela was still in relatively good health. She got her usual migraines, of course, and threw up if she ate gluten. She still got motion sick on trains (which, once transit infrastructure collapsed, really ceased to be a problem). But, as she attended funeral after funeral, and then, when funerals became a luxury, held private Mourning Ceremonies at home using the mail-order kits and Reddit guides, she remained untouched by the Illness.
Angela had seen horror films, so it was clear to her that it was her virginity that made her immune to supernatural evil. She was 25 and had never Done It. She had come close to vaginal penetration on several occasions, but something had always interrupted the act. Once, when she had gone back with that online date to his high rise bachelor pad, all chrome and glass and black leather, a seagull slammed into the plate glass window mid-fingering. A shockingly loud smack, then a squeak as the body slid down the UV-treated glass, briefly adhered by its own blood, before peeling away and falling 26 stories to the pavement below. It killed the mood. He removed his fingers. The date ended.
Then there was the time with the pink midwestern boy who studied economics. His roommates were away for the holidays so she had straddled him on the stained beige couch in their communal living room. The low coffee table was covered with detritus: brownly damp bongs, grease-soaked pizza boxes, lighters, empty packets of Newports, well-thumbed political histories, brutal short story collections by mid-century Americans. He had barely gone hard under her when the SWAT team showed up, sirens and loudspeakers blaring, to point automatic weapons at the house across the street until the guy in there agreed to come out with his hands on his head. A sniper had to be let into midwestern boy's unit because his roommate's window afforded a "good angle." In the end, the guy opened his front door waving a knife around everywhere and had to be fatally shot in the abdomen and thigh - not by the sniper but by a rookie on the ground. They found little Natalie King's body in his cellar.
Later, Angela bumped into midwestern boy at a grocery store.
"Does it feel weird to know she was across the street from you all that time?" she asked. "While they were searching?"
"I try not to think about it."
There was the guy from the kayaking interest group who broke his leg on his way to their hookup. And Matt Buckley, from middle school, who DM'd her while she was back visiting her parents and then DM'd her again a few hours later to apologize, explaining he'd experienced a gay awakening earlier that afternoon. And Polo Boy, as Sarah called him, who fell off his horse and got severely concussed in an accident so posh it felt less like tragedy than class commentary.
Now it was obvious that these seeming disappointments had been divine interventions. God had preserved her to preserve her. Religious devotion (which she had never previously experienced) flooded in. Angela began living by the monastic hours. She found an online guide to the requisite prayers and set her phone timer to go off at Nones, Matins, Vespers, etc. There were these Catholic websites where you could enter your time zone and they would generate tables that took into account your local sunrise and sunset.
At first, her sexual inexperience afforded her a sense of complete protection. Reports on the news spoke about Sodom and Gomorrah. People who had engaged in sex, marital or premarital, wept and begged forgiveness. Everywhere, hands were clasped. But even then there were rumors. For example, after Benjie Carmichael exploded with particularly gruesome force in the shopping mall's central atrium, nobody could really believe that he wasn't a virgin. He was seventeen and topographic with acne and once had to meet privately with the guidance counselor to discuss "personal hygiene," thanks to anonymous complaints about B.O. He would tell any captive audience these rambling stories about his girlfriend in Canada who was a circus acrobat. She could contort her body, he claimed, into all sorts of improbable positions. She enjoyed putting one leg like this (here he would raise an arm, letting out a gaseous whiff of pit sweat) and the other like this (here he raised the other, as if in an attempt at semaphore).
Now, after his grisly end, opinion was split. Some believed it was evidence that the girlfriend in Canada was real, her positions accurate. They took this as proof that Miracles Were Possible. It kissed an otherwise horrific tragedy with something like optimism. However, others shook their heads mournfully. This, to them, was God demonstrating that virgins were not safe.
Then the much-publicized death of Madeline Spezio changed everything.
Madeline Spezio was already well on her way to sainthood (as much as someone can be while alive) when the Illness struck her. When she was born in suburban New Jersey nineteen years before the tabloids had labelled her "the human Barbie." Once she was a teenager and her religious affinity became apparent, this nickname was derided as crass and misogynistic, symptomatic of media's perversely offensive recent past. Then they started calling her the "Turnpike Magdalena." She was born, of course, without any genitals at all. Her whole lower half was perfectly smooth. No openings to speak of. Surgeons attached a catheter directly to her immured bladder through her lower abdomen, and linked a colostomy bag to her small intestine.
Her survival, on its own, was considered a medical miracle. When reports came in that her first infant word was "Hallelu," the press went nuts. Shrines popped up everywhere. As a child, she devoted herself to biblical learning. When she was seventeen she read "Ancrene Wisse" in Latin translation and decided to follow the path of the anchoresses. Because of her medical needs, she consented to an accessible anchorhold (three sides bricked in but the fourth a door, so really just a small room). When the doctor came to check her catheter one day and noticed Lovecraftian tendrils curling around the entry port, all hell broke loose.
Most people, including medical experts, took this as hard evidence that even the most vestal of virgins were at risk. But theories abounded in the shadows. Men sneaking into the hermitage at night, doctors inserting themselves into one hole or another. Suddenly, everyone on the Internet was an expert on linguistics, and colostomy bags, and female anatomy. It was really disgusting. Misogynistic, of course.
All of a sudden, Angela was no longer sure of herself as someone destined to survive. She briefly tried to believe in the conspiracies, to set herself apart from that slutty fraud (or was she a victim??) but she could not really believe it. She had seen video interviews with the Magdalena and there was an earnest intensity to her mouth and eyes that made it easy to understand how she'd converted so many through her digital ministry. Virgins, it seemed, were not safe (even if impacted in significantly lower numbers).
The Illness spread and spread, killing some, sparing others, seemingly dodging this one random apartment block in a gentrifying part of Chinatown altogether. Once the deaths had slowed, and the Street Crews had been organized by neighborhood, and most of the initial crop of bodies had been cleared from the sidewalks, and most of the blood and tissue and other biological waste had been scrubbed from the better parts of town, we began going on walks and tentatively greeting one another. After all, the Illness did not seem to spread through human contact, or through sex, or through airborne particles, or through fomites, or through any other known medium, so why not? Staying home couldn't save you. Isolation couldn't save you. Those who had never had sex mostly remained celibate, although some accepted heightened risk in the name of Experience. Those who had already lost their virginity slept around, if that was their thing, or didn't.
The surviving members of city council voted to set aside funds for a memorial park. A local sculptor was chosen to make a monumental statue for the middle, two clasped copper hands. Nobody liked his proposal much (it was kind of on-the-nose, annoyingly figurative) but most of the better sculptors were dead. Besides, sometimes the most important thing is just gesturing to some sort of collective memory. And there would be plenty of benches in the park for survivors to sit on together and remember. The council chose sloped seats with a central divider (a classic embrace of anti-homeless architecture) but many of us in the community have written strongly worded complaints about this. Hopefully, the city council will switch to benches that reflect a spirit of warm hospitality. Every now and then a council member will grow sick and die violently, but it happens these days with less frequency. For this, we are all grateful.
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