Anorexia Mirabilis

“Why is your friendship so fatal? … You have filled them with a madness for pleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You led them there. Yes: you led them there, and yet you can smile, as you are smiling now ... They say that you corrupt everyone with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house, for shame of some kind to follow after.”

—Oscar Wilde

Yo, swear I’m not on some creep type shit. But I think of you … like, a lot. Fr fr you been living on my mind rent free … taking up my headspace. The thought of your eyes, your devious smile. And tbh your sudden weight gain from the Celexa doesn’t even bother me … not even capping (how’s that one taco a day diet working out for you btw?). La neta. Real talk, sometimes I slip down the simp hole and sit there and think about that effervescent gaze. La mera mera … chingona eres, en velda’, velda’. Got me encabroneado over here por tus malditas pendejadas.

I thought Montezuma got his revenge on my caucasian ass (though I’m literally not a colonizer … my people were slaves for 400 years, and my other people tried it but failed after like 2 months of that shit) when I ate that paleta from a street vendor outside of the Guadalupe shrine in DF. Never knew amoebas could taste so sweet and refreshing. I was sick to my stomach and couldn’t eat. But his revenge came back for more. He pulled a Soraya on me like my ass was la maldita lisiada, como “todavía no estoy vengada.”

They told me to watch out for your kind. Told me about the games you play. Told me about your refusal to sympathize with the suffering you inflict on others because if you did, you’d be weak. You’d lose your power and be vulnerable. You’d be reminded that you’re not actually God, and that actually you need him to save you … diosito sabe como you couldn’t handle that.

You got me sick to my stomach, got me unable to eat … but on a whole other level. Made me wish I got dysentery again. No cap bruh, that shit was nothing compared to you.

I know fat people don’t like skinny fat people complaining about how fat they are. And how skinny/jacked people be like, “if you don’t wanna be skinny fat, then work out and eat right. Duh.” And I be like, “duh, me and food, tho. We on intimate terms … like, you don’t even understand.” Nah, bro. A non-negotiable. I dream about sugar when I wake up in the morning like, “can’t wait to get out of bed and scarf down some carbs rn.” Coaxing me out of bed like a dog with a treat being dangled in front of his nose. But for you, I be on my anorexia mirabilis type shit. I’d starve myself for you. I offer the agony of hunger for your salvation. I deny myself the joys of committing carbicide because the joyful pain of longing to talk to you is some other level type shit.

I can't help but demonstrate my Freudian fate ...

—Amy Winehouse

What can I say, güey. I’m a classic anxious-preoccupied. As in keeping a tally in my Notes app of how many times we each initiate text convos. As in making sure to wait at least an hour longer than you took to reply to my last text. To pass the time, I offer my agony for you. I implore Nuestra Señora to send you a rose, to save your putrid soul. I do my laundry, and offer it for you. I put the dishes back into the cabinet, and offer it for you. I light this bogie and sip on this decaf almond milk latte for you. I offer my annoyance at the heaux who cut me off on the Parkway for you. I cut my finger while attempting to grip the lat pull-down, and offer the swelling pouch of blood under my skin for you. Not even joking—100% serious … as serious as singing Aventura while crying in the shower like a lil bitch for you type shit. YOUR bitch, claro. Xq tú [siempre] eres la que manda.

Singing Salve Regina to the crescent blood moon with you after debating the veracity of the revelation to Muhammad (you lost, lol). Que No Salga La Luna. La Boda de Sangre. Serving Andalusian realness rn.

Oh Salvador Salvador Dalí, of the olive-colored voice!
I do not praise your halting adolescent brush
or your pigments that flirt with the pigment of your times,
but I laud your longing for eternity with limits.

—Federico García Lorca

Dali rejected all of Lorca’s advances. He was dumb for that tho … shoulda known better, gilipollas. Exposed for being the massive cuck that he is—legit cowering in a corner in tears as he watched su amorcito with horror, mounting a hot Andalusian tía. Giving hella Nietzschean ressentiment vibes rn … was also a lil bitch [like thou] fr fr. Like you when you sing Rosalia and start crying as you think about este tío q te hizo daño … como “no lo merecía yo! Fk dat hijueputa!” deflecting from the fact that the real hijue’ eres tú.

Dorian makes a career of ruining others. His moral obliviousness is shown by his dreamily casting his eyes downward, as in the Antinous sculptures and Donatello's David. His cruelty appears in the Sibyl Vane episode, where Dorian courts and brutally spurns a young actress, causing her suicide … the beautiful boy straying into the social world is a destroyer, serene in his Apollonian indifference to the suffering of others.

—Camille Paglia

But fr tho do you ever even feel anything? Or has your dumbass Brideshead cosplay blinded you to the fact that you’re a flippant, callous huevón? Your ass is literally fake af. Like, I shouldn’t even have to be telling you this. You’re not dumb enough to be oblivious to what a heinous piece of shit you are. You’re obsessed with making people obsessed with you. You enjoy watching them grovel and suffer. For all your ranting about how neoliberal secular morals are fucked, you might want to take a look in a mirror for once—and not to check your hair or your (subpar, lower middle class, fake instamodel) fit. You and your punk ass … pinche mamahuevo starting Twitter fights from your anon account, holding your cigs like a 1930s trollop.

… emotionally undeveloped and self-contained to the point of autism. His senses are solipsistically sealed … he makes a career of ruining others … The narcissistic personality, like the psychotic, lives by its own laws. As Basil murmurs uneasily, “Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself.

—Camille Paglia

You hit me with that “lol I got a gf now … but lowkey tryna swoop in and steal la vaina del maldito pendejo aquello.” As if I don’t know what you’re up to. As if I don’t see through your childish idiocy. Como niñato caprichoso. The only ones you want are the ones who will stroke your ego … still classic “narcissism of the soul” type case. Mariconcillo eres, cabrón.

Got me wishing I could just go chill with the broskis. Get my mind off of you. Get into some tox-masc shit with da boys. Chug pre-workout and go all out full body—sicko mode type shit. Drink some beers and get into some deeply deplorable locker room talk. Grapple around like hooligans/neanderthals and call each other cancel-worthy epithets … as the thought of you sneaks in through my mind’s back door … and of the high key savage flirtation games your people play, which they seem to excel at better than how they play soccer.

Remember when you ever so coyly pulled down the waist of your swimsuit to show your pasty nalgota, just to prove that your natural skin tone doesn’t have that much melanin in it? Real slick, you Leonidas Trujillo self-hating one-drop racist ass mofo. Your classical education got you on that “Columbus was the Savior” type shit. But the only reason you think Columbus saved your “barbaric” ancestors by murdering them en masse was because this is what you yourself aspire to do. You’re a masochist who likes to watch people suffer. You praise the virtues of traditional masculine strength, yet you’re an unremarkable power hungry putica.

Tú sabes que no quiero perderte//Sabes que este amor es tan fuerte//Era envidiable lo de los dos//Es que esta noche volveré a tocarte//Cuando la luna deje de mirarte//Y me entregues todo tu cuerpo

—J. Balvin

Remember when you said you wanted to go see Balvin with me and were all like “yeah, dude it’s gonna be fkn sick!” Then you pull that, “shit … I’m hella caught up with shit rn. You should ask xyz if they’re around to go w u” ... the night before. Like fr bruh seriously? Do you not feel the moral pangs of being an epic flake? Or does your chronic weed smoking and your obsessive deeply oedipal vanity numb you to it all? Like gtfo of here with that fake ass shit, yo. Your stupid ass with that “let’s go to SoHo to take [type conventional] influencer pix against a generic brick wall with some design commissioned to some random IG graffiti artist on it,” so you can post it later and get off on all the likes and the biddies that will slide into your DMs like “hey lol ur cute … ” who you’ll never have anything with because you can’t commit to anything, not even to keeping a pic to your page for more than a week … gotta archive that shit like literally a week later bc you gotta maintain your “status” (gtfo w your 553 followers ass … “style influencer—content creator” my ass).

I love you as the torturer’s victim loves the knife that will put him out of his agony; as Saint Sebastian loves his arrows.

—Oscar Wilde

Lol at actually taking daddy seriously w/ that “be w/ whoever u want” BS. Dafuq? Ain’t nobody you want wants you back. And like, the instant they want you back the buzz gets killed … like “ew get tf away from me” type shit. Desire: a total repellent. The lie of late-phase capitalism: you can have it all. In actuality, you can want it all, but have none of it. And you’re the fool who fell for that dumb shit.

Thus deprived of the desire or even the capacity to think about the true meaning of things, and unable to perceive the loss, people will not merely be susceptible to manipulation by sentimental platitudes and sophistic arguments—‘People shouldn’t be discriminated against based on who they are or who they love’—they will be eager for it. For in the brave new world, ‘true’ is just another word for ‘feasible’ and freedom is learning to love what you’ve got to do anyway.

—Michael Hanby

You win. You get what you wanted, como siempre. My divine anorexia was no match for your demonic schemes … got me scarfing carbs again, smoking my 9th bogie of the day, as if to signal GAME OVER. I lose. Got me fked up like Romeo whining como perrita at the end of La Boda. Fked up like on my gotta-listen-to-Winehouse/ARTPOP-era-Gaga, break-out-Teresa-of-Avila’s-autobiography, Freudian-BPD-type flow rn yo.

¡Ay, quién podrá sanarme!//Acaba de entregarte ya de vero;//no quieras enviarme//de hoy más ya mensajero,//que no saben decirme lo que quiero.

—John of the Cross

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Stephen G. Adubato lives in New York and hosts the Cracks in Postmodernity blog and podcast.