i have these really fucking violent impulses about my body, my skin in particular, which i joke about because i don’t know what else to do. of course i liked the way getting tattooed felt—everyone does, right?—but it’s another thing to come to terms with the kinds of pain i like and want and need. he asked me: how do you like to be hurt? and i realized i couldn’t place it because i don’t get chances to experiment with pain much. there’s so much pain to be had! most of it i get in aches and existential dread, but what about the fun kinds? i don’t even mean just sexualized pain.

like also the addictive-compulsive kinds? i joke about ripping my face off not infrequently because i think gross stuff is funny, but also because that is how i conceive of my face when i’m feeling it for rough spots, for tender spots, for spots to break open. and really masochism is a convenient ideology with which i might work through something that’s seems to mostly be about something besides pain. i don’t know why i eat my cuticles, et cetera. it hasn’t subsided since i started smoking again. but it is the way i play with pain most often (every day, compulsively, in fact). and that bleeds into the other ways i deal with pain. he asked me: what’s the most painful thing you’ve ever felt? i had to go with copperhead bite, age nine, for the sake of conversation, but the truth is that i don’t know. maybe the flu. i don’t get hurt as bad as when i did when i was a kid, prone as i was to climbing on rocks and jumping off of shit. and i feel like i’m missing out.

and meantime i just think about how good it would feel to rip my all skin off. i wrote a poem once about someone scooping their own eyeballs out of their skull, which the workshop didn’t know what the fuck to do with. ended up with some goddamn ariadne metaphor. truth is i just wanted to say it because i can’t do it. something about writing and unwriting the body. i used the term “self-deconstruct” in the poem which no one seemed to understand. something about how terrifyingly far my feet are from my head. same as how i tend toward self-deprecation: i’d rather be in pain on my own terms, so long as i’m going to hurt, anyway, so long as others are going to hurt me.  something else the workshop didn’t get, something else i can’t say, or can only say.