parasite itch
entries from journals, the notes app, etc. from may 27th to may 30th.
Entry titled “Magdalene”, 5/27/2025, 9:42 a.m. In a journal.
I started doing pushups. I don’t know why. Of all the times in the world to start something, why a random Tuesday in the middle of May? Where’s the symmetry or clear-cut catch in that? But I did them anyway. It was ten pushups in the mid-morning, on my knees to make it easier, shaking like a dog. The next morning, I experimented with the ache. Any time I extended my arms, a ribbon stretching from my chest to my wrists suddenly became taut. I could flex my hands and feel it in my shoulders. All movement made a movement in a different, unmoving place. I didn’t particularly like it or dislike it. And the next morning I did it again, and then again the morning after that, adding new movements— wall sits and crunches and planks.
Yeah, okay. It’s been over a week of pushups, now, and the soreness is gone. So is the novelty. I make it happen to myself when I get bored. Many such cases, really— sometimes I feel like a monkey hitting the shock button over and over just for something to do. I like to make things happen to myself; I liked Hell, I liked to go there alone, etcetera. How does that poem end? “I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come. / Then nothing did, and no one.”
Yeah. Yeah, alright.
Entry titled “Sill”, 5/28/2025, 11:29 p.m. In a journal.
I walked today— up and down and over the hills, through the woods, around the lake and then back again. I searched for some sort of grotto to hide in and, when I found one, I hid in it. The heat was almost unbearable. I watched the scummy lake water roll itself onto the shore and wished that it was clean enough for me to take my shoes off and dip my feet. I should have found a way to not go home, but I didn’t, so I just went home and regretted it. I’d like to have somewhere else to go that isn’t this house; wouldn’t that be nice? A place just for me? As if I haven’t restructured the inside of my self to keep everything un-me out.
I didn’t do a thing this afternoon except lay on top of my sheets in my underwear. The air was dense and moving made me feel like a fly caught in a web. Once the sun went down, I walked the dog, listening to hymns and stepping on as many cracks as I could. It was stupid and I was feeling petty. I thought that if my mother would break her back, she would have to stay in one place and wouldn’t be able to reach me. And I know that my plan would’ve backfired— a broken back solves nothing— and that stepping on cracks won’t do anything, but I still did it. Maybe that’s why I did it, you know? If I stepped on enough cracks with enough intent, maybe it would’ve been just powerful enough that something would happen. I would’ve taken anything. I came home to an unbroken back and a hot room and that’s where I am now. I’ve got lemon tea and an Andrés Segovia cassette in the player. All is fine and dandy.
Picture me draped over my windowsill, arms outstretched and my face down between them. It’s less of a scene and more of a position born from necessity— I’m trying to escape the heat of the room. I’m also incidentally in a perfect place to see the sidewalk below. At this time of night, this typically isn’t a concern, but it is right now, because there’s a crying girl down there. I only lift my head because of the noise she’s making. It’s not a pretty cry; she’s hunching in on herself, mouth simultaneously open and frowning. She’s older than me, but not by much. I watch her slouch forward and listen to her try to hide the sobs.
I’m not really thinking anything about it. It seems like she was dropped out of the sky onto the sidewalk, like an angel or something, which is a bad path to go down. You can’t go around assuming strangers are angels because that’s how you end up drowning in a river— she still seems like an angel, regardless. This is also a bad path to go down because she’s a real human and something bad might’ve happened to her and she might’ve needed help, but instead, I watched her shuffle south like it was the only thing she had left. So I’ve got my lemon tea and my Segovia cassette and my hot bedroom— I looked at her and I thought of the bottom half of Solomon 8:1; if I found you outside, I would kiss you, and none would despise me— and now a ticket to Hell, probably, because I’m sitting here sucking up her emotions so I can wear them one day. My day leaned bad, but this is what a bad day looks like. I’m learning. Tomorrow, I’ll be you.
Oh, well. Perhaps we could’ve been free.
Untitled entry, 5/29/2025, 2:16 a.m. In the notes app.
- I wonder if the old world navigators ever felt trapped. Big blue cloche pinning them in place like bugs stuck on a dinner plate. Of course, they were trapped, but it was a different cage than they thought it was— this sometimes feels like freedom, though.
- Isolation as a punishment for loneliness— the adult version of being forced to sit at the dinner table until you finish your plate; you’ll be alone and you’ll goddamn like it. Lots of punishments function as useless exposure therapy.
- Desire for decisive clarity through thoughtful conclusions. The need to understand. Idea of holy transparency. Virtue of holy detachment. Fear of helplessness. Lack of meaningful interaction; felt exposed and defenseless in the face of intrusion. Walls up. Stinginess fixation. Passion for avarice. Need for mystery.
- Stop trying to figure out the heart. Consent to silence.
Entry titled “Verbiage”, 5/29/2025, 12:07 p.m. In a journal.
Yesterday, I watched a TED Talk on writing poetry because I thought I needed to, which I did. The speaker asked the audience to imagine someone they had lost. This is a lot of absent people who are now in the room— hundreds of dead relatives and lost friends hovering above the heads of the remembering, ghostly because a ghost is a kind of memory, waiting to come back somehow. He’s got his own person, a friend who committed suicide a decade ago. Hundreds of balloons to fill the air. Now all of us, in person and on the internet, and all of our bags are in the room. Okay. What now?
He’s annoying me, actually. He’s written the speech and you can tell— there’s an adjective before everything, unnecessarily complex language, structure in the way he’s telling us all to grieve better. His words are by the book and it’s boring and pseudo-hurtful, because I’m in a bad mood— someone walked over my grave, someone is walking over my grave, someone will walk over my grave— and I don’t like it when people are truer to the grammar of the sense than the sense itself. The speaker is a poetry professor. Instead of telling myself that it’s stupid to critique someone who obviously knows better than me, I blow a raspberry at the screen. Childish. Dumb.
He says to imagine someone you’ve lost and I’m thinking of my dog. My childhood dog, who was roughly eight years old when he started to rapidly lose his balance and vision and appetite, stumbling over to the stove so my mother could try to feed him hamburger meat. I’m thinking of my dog because everyone else in my life who died was never mine, so their death was a movement in a different direction rather than a loss, but the dog was mine. He was a dick and he hated the neighborhood boys and he was mine. I was seventeen years old when I sat on the couch and watched as he got euthanized. The vet tech calmly told us that if we saw him twitch, he wasn’t still alive, it was just that the body hadn’t caught up to death yet. And the family touched him and cried, except for me— I had left to go to the bathroom once the tech pulled the needle out. I wept once without noise; it was more of a watery face scrunch than a cry. When I came back, they were carrying his body out, and that was that. His things collected dust in a closet until we got a new dog.
Think of someone you lost, says the speaker. What sensations do you remember? I find that everything I knew about my dog has been overwritten by euthanization. Everything of his that I had now smells like formaldehyde and antiseptic and all of his movements are just the spasms that happened when the tech pushed the syringe’s plunger down. Memories are recollections of memories. Fur and plastic and the elasticity of skin. He had amber eyes and I remember them through photographs, instead of through my own eyes.
The speaker moves on from imagery to simile. He says that the microphone is a blank page, that the room lifts like a balloon, that the mind is a dam that stills the raging river of the world. Alright. I can do simile. He died like a dying dog. When I watched him die, something died, and what died was a dog. I don’t want to dodge it. He died like a dog and it shocked me because I thought he was better than that.
The talk was fine. It was fine, I’m just being a dick. It served its purpose, which was to be an introduction to writing simple poetry for people who don’t think about poetry that often. The comment section was full of poems that, in the brief time I spent scrolling through it, ranged from bad to not terrible. All of them had some sort of feeling behind them. That makes it better. And I really can’t say shit about it, because my issues are a matter of taste rather than genuine critique. I’m just conjugating verbs. Someone walked over my grave. Someone is walking over my grave. Someone will walk over my grave. Someone has been walking over my grave. Someone will be walking over my grave. On and on— most people can’t die like a dog, but I probably could— until I do die, just like a dog. I can do it because I know how. Many such cases.
Untitled entry, 5/30/2025, 6:45 p.m. On scrap paper.
“It is his love, rather than his hate, that destroys relationships. Fearing that his needs will weaken and exhaust the other, the [XXX] disowns these needs and moves to satisfy the needs of the other instead. The net result is a loss of ego within any relationship he enters, eventually kicking off an existential panic. Since love becomes equated with unsolicited obligation, persecution, and engulfment, the [XXX] defaults to self objects instead, consuming himself with love to avoid being consumed by the love of the other… while the [XXX] is outwardly withdrawn, aloof, having few close friends, impervious to others' emotions, and afraid of intimacy, secretly he is exquisitely sensitive, deeply curious about others, hungry for love, envious of others' spontaneity, and intensely needy of involvement with others. When in relationships, the [XXX] maintains a pattern of oscillating towards and away from intimacy, alternatively desiring, and being excited at the chance for contact, and becoming claustrophobic, smothered, choked, imprisoned and terrified of being devoured or smothered by the other. The [XXX] then must break free and recover independence.
“The [XXX] is also known for cultivating special relationships with others. By making the object feel special through their attunement and responsiveness, the [XXX] makes himself indispensable and beyond reproach. The [XXX]’s ease in adaptation to the environment and to picking up signals from the outside world are tools that allow the process of identification to take place… The concept of symbiotic omnipotence refers to a prolonged association between the [XXX] and another person characterized by enmeshment and lack of differentiation, from which the [XXX] comes to feel effective and in control. Symbiotic omnipotence precludes actual connectedness and harkens back to earliest childhood when mother and child are, of necessity, moving in unison… factors that characterize the phenomenon of symbiotic omnipotence [include] weak ego development, the failure to harness and use aggressive energy (anger), exaggerated awareness of the feelings of others, severe difficulty distinguishing the self from the other, and the feeling that responsiveness to others is a powerful talent. While gratifying for the moment, symbiotic omnipotence denies the [XXX] a chance for an authentic experience, and requires huge amounts of psychic energy.
“The experience of being alone while someone else is present.”1
PARASITIC