Bronson Gao

August 4 20XX

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SKULL SUGAR II

“Sick to the stomach again, there, sacrificed a wish to auto-cannibalism,” the first line reads. I opened the book at the top of the stack after twenty minutes of unconscious hesitance, convincing myself I just didn’t have the time right now, but knowing there was nothing else I could commit myself to. I face the twist of intention, and open Deadra Acosta’s diary, if that’s what this is.

The first paragraph ends with “And begins to smell like your mouth, the meat is in Your hands,” inducing a flashback of when she called me up, telling me about her purging. It was a bowl of mint chip ice cream. Why she specified this information precludes me. But the fact that it was unavoidably what it was must’ve manifested itself somehow as dire, all the way to the graphic imagery of it as an abject. She told me about that part, sobbing.

When I met her in English class, her chicken-scratch penmanship, oaken inflection, wardrobe like a suburban refugee all marked her untouchable. The mystery was alluring: this literate, morbid evergreen of a woman. She was a year older than me, I recall.

The fascination increases seeing her CD collection. I popped in her copy of Jagged Little Pill. Like her literature, the music is intimate—親しい— and simultaneously taunting, accusatory, sexily vengeful. “On the edge of my nails, I press into Your bitten touch,” Deadra writes, sinking her fingers into another's mass of attacked physical sensations.

In all truth, I don’t know what the writing is actually about, other than the imagery it force-feeds. It’s describing something, that’s its minimum obligation. The narration is directed repeatedly at “You,” “You” who is referred to as “cutie honey”—a stilted allusion, but also a pet name—who Deadra manifests as simultaneously worshipped and abhorred. And it could be her father.

“I crawl on Your spine like a scepter,” she writes. The scepter attaches an object of vulnerability or decay with the concept of royalty. That the spine may be alienated from separation with a body, no longer serving its original purpose and being rendered a grotesque, static object, leads to the perspective that Deadra attempts to reach regality by embracing this symbol: committing the four limbs to immersion into a sensory input of uncanny, banal decomposition.

A point of irony is found by understanding that the spine in its present form is obsolete to its original usage, yet retains absurd significance that she ascribes. Becoming an atomized symbol of death, Deadra says that her act is “like a slave’s suckling hunger for Your defecated death ritual,” drawing a bold contrast between diction of infantile helplessness and a morbid, excrement-caked tribalism that newborn fixation is aimed at.

Thus, the sentiment is conveyed that Deadra, knowing the humorless irony of her behavior, manifested in her mind primal, barbaric varieties of debauchery relative to mortality and vulgar physical processes—defecation, abjection of matter—as forms of status that she compulsively turns to for emotional nutrition in a helpless state.

As a consequence, “You” could also be herself, knowing the violation she regularly commits herself to, and lacking the agency to prevent it.

I sit here with my notepad, attempting to make sense of a person whose life I had no right to know this intimately. It’s to the point I’m getting a fluency for her handwriting, having spent too many hours absorbing the trivial events of high school all the way to the latest incision.

I think I can learn that no one who wants connection wants it to be like this. No one wants their existence known on other terms than the fiction of the interior self. Deadra had a variety of Deadra that she sold to me, and I now dissect the parts of that product from whatever the hell this is.

“Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines / Or when you think you’re gonna die? / Or did you long for the next distraction?” Alanis sang.

It was all a distraction, wasn’t it, I ask myself.