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Fuck, I was wrong about everything.
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My name is Autumn Christian. This is the story of how a soft disease tried to become a human being.
All sickness wishes to be human, despite their protests, because it is our soft bodies they inhabit to live. Because humanity does not mimic the virus, it’s the virus, the unliving space, that mimics what it’s like to be human. I am a 28 year old woman, a dark fiction writer, a mother of dogs, a broken toy, a midnight monster, a broken egg-yolk, a stalk of angry vine that grows twisted in the night, an alien enthusiast, an amateur cook. I write because I find life confusing, and words are one of the few ways I can cogently categorize the whirlwind of molecules that dance around me constantly. I don’t want to be immortal, but I do want to be famous. I want to write books that people find enjoyable, but I also want to become entrenched in the white noise of the constant flow of living inside those books so that I never feel the need to talk to another human being again.
This is the story about how I’m wrong about everything, and nothing I believed was true. And this is the story of how I continue to be wrong but maybe sometimes I am less wrong.
This is the my second memoir and God helps us all, let’s hope it never gets published.
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Let’s start from the beginning, by which I mean the middle, because I will skip the inception of the universe, evolution, and my birth.
Irrelevant statistics: I have bleach blonde hair, and chipped nails, and I am currently a size 4 but I wish I weighed about ten pounds less because I’m vain. I am short at 5’2, and I have a strong face and big, pouty lips that seem to remind people of a variety of strange, “unconventional” actresses like Christian Ricci and Helena Bonham Carter. I was flattered when someone said I looked like Scarlett Johansson, but I knew it was a lie. My favorite color is black, and most of my clothes are black, so I can never find what I’m looking for in the laundry. I hate feeling like a stereotype, but I really love the color black. I like to wear red eyeshadow because it makes me feel dangerous, and I used to have a choker but stopped wearing it after people kept asking me if I had a BDSM master. I have no gods, and no masters beyond my own pain. I am a masochist, but everyone already knew that. My favorite shoes are Doc Martens, and I often wear Iraqi combat boots. I think that I’m quite stylish in my own way when I want to be, but I still can’t draw my eyeliner in a straight line. My favorite genre of music is either trip-hop or dubstep but I’ve been really getting into white noise while I write this year.
I cook a lot more now than I used to several years ago. For many years the only foods I really knew how to make were chicken tacos and spaghetti, but now I can fettucine alfredo, bibimbap, breakfast tacos, Filipino style chicken, and a host of other things. I’d like to learn how to make sushi. I try to learn the culinary arts because it forces me out of my body and into reality. I cook so I know what goes in my food, and so I can heal myself from the anxiety of an eating disorder. My boyfriend says my macaroni & cheese is amazing. One of my favorite recent memories is of him coming home starving after a long day and I just happened to have macaroni waiting for him and I felt a splendid joy that I was able to please him unexpectedly. My favorite foods are currently sushi, poke (Which they did not have in Austin), macaroni & cheese, and cheetos puffs. I also like to drink a lot. I have been downing lots of wine with kratom recently. I also like dirty gin & tonics.
I have 3 dogs now. I did not have any dogs when I wrote my last memoir. They are teaching me how to be a better human being. Their names are The Kid, Pris, and Sunshine. We go to the beach or take a walk together nearly every day, and I want to learn from their ever-presence and their simple joy.
I moved to San Diego with my boyfriend earlier this year. My boyfriend Robert works as a senior producer at Daybreak, the videogame company, and he makes enough money so that I don’t have to work a conventional job. I stay at home and write and try to learn how to be human, cook dinner, meditate, play videogames, and take my dogs to the beach. I am working on my third novel, The Edgar Allan Poe Simulator, and it is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. Not only because I am writing in an unknown territory, but because my whole life is currently an unknown territory. I am having to relearn the way that I breathe and sometimes, it means that my writing suffers and it stretches as it changes shape. Some days I feel like I am very old, and some days like I am very young, and I become astonished by the way that my feet touch the ground or that I’ve never truly noticed a sunset until now.
But more about that later.
Relevant statistics: This is a memoir about what it’s like to be broken, after all, because I wake up in the middle of the night like I am simultaneously burning and freezing. I lie to myself often that my intentions are pure, when more often they are merely selfish. I have often confused the idea of love with other, less sacred ideas. I am lonely despite the large amount of people who seem to want to get to know me on a deeper level. Like most people, I often try to take big confusing concepts and simplify them with visual analogies which end up just making the concepts even more confusing. I have abandonment issues and because of that I continuously hurt people that I love. I am more like my mother than I ever want to admit. Last night I dreamed of being the lover of a boy who became a mass shooter - he shot me in the face when I tried to save a baby, because he thought I was betraying him. I remembered that his dick was incredibly tiny, and he was sensitive about it, and I woke up wondering what it says about me that I am willing to accept love from mass murderers who desire my complicit loyalty for their terrible acts.
I am terrified that I’m never going to finish my novel, and I often wake up with a gasp and startle myself awake. I can never quite seem to find the flow anymore when I write, because I am trying to retrain the ways in which I understand myself and thus the writing itself has become like I am - oscillating, distorted, fragmented, simultaneously juvenile and overly complex. Some days I write like escargot and truffle fries with parmesan. I write like escolar sushi. I write like bordeaux from the Chateau of Pessac Leognan Graves. Other days I want to be unhealthy, so I write like velveeta and bacon. I write like bland crackers. I don’t know who I am from one day to the next. I cling to the irrelevant statistics: My name is Autumn Christian, I am a writer, I like the color black, sometimes I drink too much...but I am too smart to imagine that my identity is tied up in things like my favorite color and whether or not I wear oud or lilac perfume. I know that my identity is a nearly undefinable, ineffable thing whose core cannot be summarized. I cannot write “Autumn Christian has strong cheekbones like an Indian, she is 5’2…” and hope that this will somehow dip down through the bones into the fronds of my soul and you will understand me, because I know that you won’t.
The thing that is “me” often feels dark and twisted, like broken roots that have grown into an abandoned well, through the musty cover, down into black water that tastes like dirt and licorice. And I cannot grab a hold of it, because it is slippery and distant.
There is another “me” though, the social media “icon”, the writer Autumn Christian, the girl in a slouchy cardigan and sunglasses. The girl in jeggings who is always guarded. I find her mildly hilarious I write dark fiction, but in real life I am ridiculous and enjoy silly, irreverent things. A lot of times I act a lot younger than I am. I like dark and pessimistic things. I criticize myself a lot on Twitter, but in a funny way. My anger is explosive and ineffectual and odd. I worry often that I am displaying my rotten spleen for everyone to see, but I am the only one not in on the joke. I don’t often feel like “me” is me, it is something that I built - but isn’t that what a personality is? A deep impression that surrounds the soul, which is where we really contain our consciousness, our self.
Let’s get back to the point: I am writing this memoir because I want to stop hurting in old ways, and I want to start hurting in new ways. I am 28 years old and I would like to be reborn as something beautiful.
I don’t know what this something beautiful looks like, but I imagine a dark night with a full moon, and a warmth like pressing my face into soft fur. I imagine a cave that overlooks a splendid sunset, dipping low into an ocean and filling it with bleeding colors. I imagine pressing my face into my boyfriend’s back and breathing in his smell and I do not feel my usual anxiety, only a little bit of pressure.
I imagine, I conceptualize, because it is like trying to imagine a city that you’ve never been to. No, it is like trying to imagine a city in which you’ve only heard second-hand impressions, but have never seen so much of a photograph of.
Years ago I wrote that I carried a dead seed next to my stomach, like I was holding something pregnant-like, despite it being useless and desiccated. I called the dead seed “hope,” and I wrote that this dead seed was the only thing keeping me alive. I carried it with me from Oklahoma, to Austin, to Seattle, and back. My bones warped around its fragments and it become a frayed part of me, fused to my skin. I carried it for so long that I forgot why I was carrying it, and I often questioned why I was alive.
I would want to die, to ease the suffering, and I’d be ready to end it all, but then I’d stop because suddenly an image would pop into my head. I’d think of living in Iceland, tending sheep underneath the aurora borealis, and I’d keep going. Or I’d think of publishing my novel, signing books and then going home to sip celebratory wine by myself on a balcony. I imagined that I was trudging along on a hill and I always had yet to crest it, but whatever was on the other side was something unimaginable. Something, dare I say, beautiful. I wasn’t living for that day, I was living for an imagined tomorrow. For the dream of the place in which I could finally unclasp my clenching, tight fists. But I couldn’t then. Not yet. So I kept going, clutching the seed in bloodied hands.
This is the story of how I planted the little seed, and began to grow a tree from which I would build my home.
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