Nothing wrong w me except sometimes i get “feeling myself” by beyonce and nicki minaj stuck in my head but instead its “im killing myself, im killin myself, im killin my killin my killin myself”
I put off reading gideon the ninth for so long bc i just KNEW it would remind me of my exes writing and it did to such a startling degree i had to go make sure the author lived in new zealand and hadn’t published any earlier novels. Choosing to push through the suffering this causes and interpret this not as evidence that people find that writing style appealing but instead that my ex is not as brilliant and creative as i thought she was and that if she ever tries to publish everyone will compare her writing to ms nuir bc im bitter and horrible
Putting off doing my reading for my first class tomorrow bc im devastated by the idea that I’ll have to keep doing readings every week for the next fourteen weeks. Alongside other horrors
I go to tell my girlfriend I love her and the words become a flood of bees. I come home to hit my father up for money and I turn to tell him I love him but the walls become bees. We bury Shawn and the dirt poured onto his grave becomes bees. We bury Trenton and I try to walk up to see his body in the casket dressed in a suit he would never wear, but the casket becomes bees. Derrick dies and his mother cries when she hears the news, each of her tears becoming a hive of bees. The churches where I ask forgiveness for all of my misdeeds become bees once my prayers enter them, and so I am never forgiven. The bees won’t leave my apartment. I can’t afford to fix the muffler in my shitty car, and so every song I play in the shitty car stereo system is backed by a low buzz. I kiss a girl at a party and we pull long strands of honey from our tongues. I drive to some vague western landscape and the sand is littered with dead bees. My pal Brittany tells me a story about how bees don’t want to sting people. They don’t want to die, she tells me. They want to live as much as we do. And I think of all of the friends I’ve loved who didn’t want to live at all, and how I never told them I loved them enough when they were alive. How they chased something worth stinging until they finally found it.
— Hanif Abdurraqib, from “On the Performance of Softness,” in A Little Devil in America
