The state of what we call "abjection" is literally a "state of being cast off."
That which we push and expel from ourselves in order to keep living.
That which we can't help but gravitate towards, repelled and enamored. 

Fever

My mother loved me most when I was sick. Forehead glistening & soaked-armpits. Shaky hands. Grape Pedialyte puke on the carpet. When the chills swarmed, when I tried to writhe out of my snake-headed muscles, when the toilet could not be reached, she declared the cheapest, ugliest plastic bowl in the kitchen my "barf bowl." Her hands hovered over my head like a planchette over a Ouija board, struggling to communicate with the vicious temperature of my little body, its rhythms a legend, untraceable. My father, on the other hand, would try to make me go to school even if I had a fever of 102 degrees. Between them, my sweat and heaving seemed to reveal a barrier, each of them with their irreconcilable physics of pain and how to live with it, some fissure in their knowledges of care I could not yet see.

*

In the end of Paul Thomas Anderson's film Phantom Thread, Alma, the honey-voiced, cunning antiheroine, picks some wild mushrooms in the woods. She cooks up a steaming mushroom-omelette, and offers it to her husband for dinner. Their relationship—she a twenty-something, wobbly sliver of a muse, and her husband, Reynolds, a famous dress designer and impervious genius—breaks the form of romance, its prickliness, rage, distrust, unlevelings all far more interesting than any sugary romance. She has poisoned him into severe sickness before, into weeks of washing vomit from his hair, sitting bedside and spooning medicine down his throat, into frailty so rancid no one but she could stand to be around him. She has poisoned him before, but in secret, unbeknownst to him. Now, she presents the meal with a serene smile, and he smiles back, fully aware of its ingredients, before he begins to eat.

*

If your skin falls away, your muscles shine through like secret bloodshot rivers, and the world disassembles itself. I mean that you peel back the organ that renders you most visibly human and suddenly you start to miss your scarring, your acne, your dry-patches and eczema, your greasy spots, all of this unworshipped evidence that you're very much alive, incubating the world and its vileness in the very knitwork of your body. I mean that, when you are sick, "really" sick, the world disowns you of your own capacity for sensuality, for the iridescence in certain modes of repulsion, for the ecstatic movements of both terror and tenderness. You become a shelf for everyone to heap their cultural bullshit onto. You become a room that suddenly, apparently, is all-access to everyone but you. It is similar to the ways in which pregnant people are abruptly expected to be public property, to be open to strangers' hands and suggestions and unsolicited criticisms, but different, too. It is different in that your body is not carrying another living thing but rather is carrying something antithetical to what most people consider life—this rot, this decay, this inversion called sickness. As if you were inorganic. As if "disability" meant anything other than bodies the world has decided, forcefully, not to shape itself to. As if the body were the violation rather than the society that refuses to accommodate it. As if in your very bulging display of "wrongness" you are disposable, uncalled for, a wreckage of what "people" are supposed to be, rather than a person at all.

But then there is the nightmarish insistence of love.

The fact that I feel most loveable when I am helpless.

The fact that in every hospital visit, every invasion, every horror of an IV or a new prescription, I feel closest to the truth of what this body really means.

The fact that I learned intimacy as what manifests, furiously, ferociously, between people when their bodies leak fluids and pain saturates their every movement and the way a cold hand can smooth a forehead, the way someone angles you upright to eat when you can't do it yourself.

The fact that I know sickness is a cultural notion more than anything else, that Anne Boyer was/is right when she describes the "carcinogenosphere" wrought by capitalism and its insatiable cruelties. I know that certain bodies, most of all, are also constructed as the only legitimate ones. That certain ailments are only ailments in the most privileged and white. Which bodies elicit compassion, care; which bodies elicit judgement, revulsion.

The fact that none of this knowledge dissipates what I've learned love to be.

*

Alma is, at first, a waitress in a local restaurant. She waits on Reynolds, and when he watches her, she watches him back. He unfurls his interest in her the way he would a dress, slowly, with a calculated softness. He has done this before. He spots a young, unobtrusive woman and pinpoints his desire of the moment in her pale skin and sunken beauty. He lavishes attention on her for a few days, captivates and obsesses her ruthlessly, turning her into a muse for his designs before an abrupt dismissal, curt and cold. The women accumulate like dolls, poised until he unhinges them, disposes of their delicate frames in indifference. He takes these women apart.

Somehow, Alma takes him apart right back.

Reflux

They removed my appendix right before it could burst. They discharged me, expecting an easy recovery, and still that first night back in my bed pain splintered through me as it never had before; I hurled until I had nothing left to hurl, hurled even then, bile black and blood-thick, my pain distorted the room, brought me towards—

(That morning in English we'd read Emily Dickinson. My life had stood / a loaded gun—

The trail of a gun. What is a bullet if it is never shot? What is pain without culmination?)

—a loaded gun—and towards Dickinson, towards Woolf feverish, silent, in her bed, towards white women whose pain appeared to me cultivated, pale, delicate. The swell of blood in my throat, a claw in my gut, gas lighting every socket, nothing felt delicate. I looked less angel-in-the-house, more Veronica at the end of Heathers, more final girl, smoke-torn and bleary, a girl pried into another dimension by pain. You do not come out of a ravaging with the sweetness of a lilac plucked from the rain.

(What if the bullet decides to streak through the dark, later, after you've taken off your vest and softened your posture, what if when you are saying that was a close one the gun wants to disagree?)

Eleventh grade, a boy did acid in the school bathroom. Everyone found it incomprehensible and hardcore.

My acid never felt quite so interesting. After three emergency surgeries, weeks in the hospital and thirteen pounds lost, narcotics that taught me to fear how much I liked obliteration, I left, but the acid refused to. In the year after, I began to burp, my stomach and chest aflame whenever I ate, whenever I went to sleep. I regurgitated food, gagged on the burn of my breath. Tubes vined my throat, doctors tried to assemble a diagnosis, to unearth a line between my dissections and now, all the while I learned to hold my breath. To fear closeness. Reflux: everything returns, mashed and sticky. Unrecognizable.

You never really seem to have a crush on anyone, my mom remarked. She tried to understand the folds of my growing-up, to unwrap some electric kernel of the adolescent want she'd known so well. I took my prescriptions, cut out caffeine, carbonation, tomatoes. Stray into desire once in a while, she wanted to say, try to touch its glittering hand even if you cannot lean into it all at once. How to say my illness stole all banal joys, rites of passage crammed back into a jar, made hideous, unthinkable because of some lurking acidity in me.

(I still blame myself for the antics of my digestive system. For the crafty torture my body inflicts on itself. For the way anxiety crept in from the outside and made the fact inescapable: the stress "out there" relocated "in here." As if I had stretched the world to this point of combustion. As if I deserved all of its pain.)

Dickinson's reclusivity tends to be considered self-created. A requirement of her genius. To open her drawers, find the lovelornness swept and emaciated underneath the elegance of her poems, is to reach a clusterfuck no one wants to acknowledge in a woman. We can choose solitude and still resent it.  

Blood

From Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: "The abject is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence."

Once, I bled all over a boy's bed. Asleep and drooling. I woke up stickied and metallic, my abdomen twisting. He'd woken before me, looked at the blood, concerned for a nanosecond before he realized that he had a person with a uterus sleeping next to him, and he'd quietly moved to go get a towel. He hadn't nudged me awake. He hadn't said ew. A low bar, but still, knowing the learned fragility of cis men, I was surprised. I apologized despite myself and he shook his head, said, no, no, stop that. I explained the way scar tissue had built up and shrouded an organ, how I had periods so strikingly sharp they made the room go white.

In his hands I surfaced. I became warm glass, the sun sifting me into translucence, into a touchable, holdable clarity. His morning breath, sour and alive, his mouth sharpening mine. Nobody knows what will come from this: letting someone see the insides of your hurt. The ridges and hues of your pain. Usually I was all raw tissue and aching mass. Usually I felt most of all like an open wound. Sometimes touch just confirmed the maximum forms pain can take. But sometimes, this.

The I is obliterated, and the abject, the repulsive and self-excreting and bursting and overripe, glows, pearls into a shared grossness that feels like a sort of witchcraft, like a newborn element, like a monstrous and revelatory closeness. I am a new crucible, red and aflame, estranged from the emptied-house of my smoother self. In not slaughtering my own pain via repression, via sugarcoating and watering-down, I am not quite so afraid of what a body can become.

In pain. In disgust. On the threshold of love and oily, rabid hurt.

Have you ever worn someone else's socks? Have you ever borrowed a toothbrush, knowing it was once in their mouth? Have you ever held wadded-up tissues to someone's bleeding nose? Have you ever spent hours combing out lice from someone's scalp?

The word "gross" actually, in part, derives from the Latin "grossus" which means "thick" or "coarse, powerful, pregnant," amongst a whole mess of other definitions. We say gross but maybe what we often mean is that is too much body, too coarse, too powerful a feeling or sensation to look directly at. What is involved, in love, in invention, in desire anyways but a severity of feeling we often cannot quite bring down to a manageable, well-cleaned size? What is so much of our repugnance but a defensive response to the disorientation of our longing—longing that is, above all, often unflattering, unwieldy, a taloned, wailing monster.

Have you ever done something emphatically gross, by most people's standards, and somehow it was the most beloved you'd ever felt?

One story: the boy cleaned me off of his sheets.

The truth: I insisted on taking the sheets to the washing machine myself.

Have you ever recognized yourself as trembling on the precipice of such tenderness that it resembled something grotesque, infantile and unsophisticated, larval, even, and so, instead of leaning in, you, on instinct, backed away?

Too coarse, too big, too pregnant with mutual need for me. I am not yet there. The dance we do with ourselves to elude our own pleasure. These interior mechanics of shame, enmeshed in everyone gendered "girl" too early in the day, before you even knew what such a word would come to incite. The act of shrinking my own desire, my own capacity for fanged and unrelenting want, is much more familiar than giving in. Than admitting anything.

Kristeva again: "I am in the process of becoming another at the expense of my own death."

Sabotaging your appetite for touch, for linked-clammy-fingers and the push-pull of exchanged gasps in the dark, your appetite for someone's witnessing of your muck and gore and filth, is not easily unlearned. A language of wincing, of pulling-away; a language of self-denial, once learned, I mean, is hard to expunge.

But think. You woke up in the dark, didn't you, ribs caught in the branch of your own unanswerable question, this person beside you always an excruciating pause, a face you can study in the half-light and try to decipher but never quite reach. The terror of us: we were never asleep, or awake, really, at the same time. Perhaps that is why we wanted each other so much. Perhaps that is why the few instances of bloodrush and bitespitcrushkiss, those palmfuls of gorgeous tenderizing synchronicity, expanded somewhere I couldn't handle following. Why each time we peeled back the ease of cleanness, of neat bloodless smiles and chaste murmurs, we were too much emboldened.

I mean that we knew each other best when we were uneven, and anything to derail that lopsidedness looked too much like real intimacy to be survivable. Barthes says that love is, first and foremost, a "language of solitude." So maybe when we no longer have the sheer enormity of projection, when we are actually touching and not just looking, not just imagining, we lost the necessary absence, the gap between the corporeal and the hungered-for. I know that this kind of need, in its cleaved and misshapen forms, cannot be sustained. Shouldn't be, really. What kind of relationship—

Somehow the night never seems to end.

I'm no longer talking to you. You started as a "he," and to withhold you from myself via the narrative power-play of third-person was a trick of the light, a way to write about you without writing to you. But fuck that. Of course I'm writing to you.

The things we miss, the heirlooms we cannot preserve: those gross, explosive, quiet exchanges, not even the sexual but the way our smells mingled in the sweaters we shared, or the night you held my hair back after we got too drunk, or, of course, the bloody sheet I forced right into the water and soap, the one you didn't mind as much as I did.

How even when you had morning breath, even when you hadn't shaved, even when we had crusty eyes or congested sinuses, whatever, I couldn't pretend to want distance.

Imaginary as you may be now. As you may have always been.

There's a home in our abject. That's the scathing tilt of this whole dream.

I can't go back.

I can't come clean.

__

This piece emerged, slowly, from the embers of a larger memoir-project I'd worked on in a writing workshop pre-pandemic, led by the wonderful Beth Kephart. There was a lot of muck to be waded through, but the parts that really stuck begged to be shaped & sharpened into a new form. I'm a big horror fan, and I've long been obsessed with Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed, and all of those theorists of monstrosity & gender; the concept of abjection became a unifying motif/container for this essay.