Wrong Number – Lily Bix Daw

February 4, 2023

        My mother used to keep me alive in the bathtub dribbling little pieces of frozen orange juice off the corner of a rag into my mouth. I was always good at discerning shapes, less so at collecting fluids. Discernment necessarily involved a level of archiving. This is why I answered the ad when I saw it glowing on my screen.
        My instructions were simple and my experience even more so. I’m in a place I’ve never been before with people I wouldn’t expect to see in a place like this, and we’re doing things I’ve never done before but that you would expect people to do in a place like this.
        At exactly x:xx pm you will drive down to the water and park beneath the overpass, by the levy. You will wait in your car until the floodlights go out and only then will you approach the river. At half past an oil slick the size of a man will emerge from your left, passing silently downstream. You will wade into the water and collect its parts using only your body’s surface tension adhesion. Someone will find you and bring you home to await further instruction. Your car will be taken care of.
        When the sun sets, my life becomes beautiful
        The city lights glitter around me and remind me of a life
        I feel so loving. I trace little hearts on every surface I walk past.
        My body has changed like it does each night, but I’m scared of the dark. They said I’m scared of the dead and I’m scared of the bark. My body has changed, like it does each night- into something perfect like a votive for consumption. I’m always assisting it, since I was young and juice fed. Enabling the changes in ways that have themselves changed. I got those things in me that make you want a baby.
        Last night I dreamed that I gave birth to one too early on the driver’s seat of my car. I put it in a bucket of water, cut the umbilical, tied it off, breathed life into it. It grew into you and we walked around a city you knew better than I did.
        It’s an easy leash I wish for. I wish sometimes I could say something just rings a bell. The reason why I made you was to reckon with the shapes inside me. To create within me new ones, so that when I pulled them from me I could know who I was before anyone else did.
        I think that I won’t be scared when I die and I watch you to show myself what not to be in the next life we were promised.
        I’m at some sort of passage- I require an electrical shock to restart my system.
        I feel aware of certain things that go on inside of my body- like there are certain objects wedged between the organs and blood. wedged so tightly they must pull from one point in my body all the way through to a far more distant point. Some of the points seem closer than others to the surface of my skin. Sometimes I think it’s some sort of splinter that must be inside- the kinds that are jagged and seem rather to fester and promote necrosis than those to be yanked out. It may take some flesh on out with it, but I feel too full with it all rattling against my ligaments so. I need a pair of tweezers. I do realize that no one is going to pull them out but me. I keep seeing flickering out of the corner of my eye, the comings of my easy leash. Perhaps revelations occur and some embarrassment… definitely, daddy, were your first words. Definitely.
        I feel pleasantly serene, realizing that I am out of touch, and drifting. The shadow of the hand of the man beside me is shifting. I realize that this is the place that I must enter when you are gone, when I want to speak with you and be with you. It is an alternate place that is unexplainable for me right now, and will change over time until we are there together.
        It will be changing forever but that is the beauty of its nature. I’m in deep understanding of the need to hold tightly to its face but not ruin its features with my hands, and collect its fluids. Creating my entry and exit wound carefully from it each time will be important in the future, even more important than it is now, because a gaping hole can be dangerous.
        I could see the crown when it came but it was old gold, maybe fake even, and covered in little boys’ fingerprints. 

        I’ve always understood things as objects very separate from the context they exist in. Always perceived things in a very singular way- the object of perception separated from its context – this allows for a unique perception- the object is itself purely, but also abstracted from its material reality. I perceived you in this way.
        Like a divine apparition, something appearing out of context. But the divine has no context besides itself. 
        Many contextless singularities beautiful in and of themselves but unable to re-contextualize once perceived- flayed and the wind must hurt when the skin peeled off like that. Things are at their most beautiful when in this form.
        When I was lucky, the context would reunify with the percept to produce meaning and my life would become beautiful.
        I always want to show you something to make you change your mind. 
        I feel so loving. I trace little hearts on every surface I walk past.
        My body has changed like it does each night into something perfect like a votive for consumption, and I’m trying to map out or diagram imperceptible, almost unfathomably, complicated processes that are happening in me as I watch them put out the fire across the street. The process of changes, you don’t understand until you do, is a language.
        Some man always shuts down my beautiful life- what a challenge to feel both sorrow and fear at the same time.
        Once upon a time, in a world not so different from our own, there was a
        It’s dark now and the ladder has been unraveled below the opening of the trapdoor. I must create within me shapes, so that I may know who I am before anyone else does. They’re not like the kind that others talk about, they’re worse and full of worms. For the first time in years that I can remember who was standing next to me, in a dream. 

        I’m telling him what I had seen on the horizon, in my vision, but he just seems indifferent.
        some mysterious conviction is evading the conscious part of his brain capable of reaction. The dance between letting the unconscious work freely in a vacuum of sublimely infinite unknowns , and the equal beauty of crafting something with logic, reason, purpose, the result of which could be an intricate weblike map of purposeful ambiguity. He seemed dimly aware of my words and their meaning, but underlying the vacancy was a glimmer of pleasure in his eyes. 
        I feel so loving. I trace little hearts on every surface I walk past.
        My body has changed like it does each night into something perfect like a votive for consumption, and I’m trying to diagram imperceptible, almost unfathomably complicated processes that are happening in me as I watch them put out the fire across the street. The process of changes, you don’t understand until you do, is a language.
        I envy animals curling up in a way that biologically evolved to serve them positively. My little heartache pill becomes eroded and smooth and shines like glass in the sun. When the sun sets my life becomes more beautiful. Did you know the goal of hopscotch was always getting to Heaven in cruciform formation. He said nine easing up on the cross roads, beyond this is something impossible to witness. A silhouette on a sign is always x- rated, a silhouette on the wall is always an angel. This kind of knowledge is like a third kind of genital mutilation, a not so private private part on permanent display in the time sensitive exhibitionism of your life. Anyways whose number is this? 

You mustn’t be afraid to die. I am sad about dying but I am not afraid. You should prematurely grieve your own death, preferably in such a way that this is integrated into the Fabric of your waking material reality. Only then can the grief permeate your dreams. The mourning does not require a dispossessed depression, but that kind of character does help.
Mourning your own passing while you still walk the earth is the only truly free way to be a narcissist. And a narcissist is what we all become now, seconds after convulsing the slick hot birthing canal. The world bestows this like a new third kind of genital mutilation, except this private part will now become the first and most precious of artifacts on permanent display in the chronologically limited exhibit of your life
But I don’t want a mortal death
Like a müder in the back of a cab a rape in a motel room
If somehow b