This year, I’m getting rid of everything that doesn’t serve me. E.g. after I graduated, I chucked all my shit into this big polyester bag then burnt it on the beach in Coolangatta, my hand chewing at a Hello Kitty lighter. I was choosing the generations-long path of upper-middle class audacity: I didn’t check if an uncontrolled burn was legal, etc, etc. Later that night, @violenttradwife (Instagram) will post a photo of a deer, subtitled: i love warmth / i was cold for so long. Its Arial letters are cool and sharp against a blue-toned phone screen. It’s ridiculous to like it, to engage with this at all, I know — the way I’m about to externalise my, quote, girlhood — ‘that’s so real’.

—

I’m seventeen, obsessed with the Anna Karina fringe, my (perceived) sex appeal. I’ve called the suicide line twice this year, only to punish — myself, or them, or both of us. I can’t stand the Disney-PR-trained way in which they talk about it, this tenuous it, their allusions to a general and disembodied suffering. I don’t mean anything by it anyway. Tragicomically, I try everything for my writer’s block and nothing works — until the boy who said he loved me two years ago tells everyone at school about how I like being fucked and then I’m back to writing. I love The Smiths.

—

Unlike what everyone thinks, I haven’t had that much sex. I mean, I was taking the IB, I wanted a good romance, etc. I don’t even understand the whole angry-coquette/tradcath/Lana-Del-Rey thing until a string of particularly bad situationships-qua-rebounds, until he says he loves me on the day I give him my edtwt Ultimate Goal Weight, tell him I’ll starve for him or w/e post-Omegle men are into these days. 

—

To @violenttradwife and other mostly-ironic femcel-adjacents, the domestic is inherently profound. This is perhaps best illustrated by a desaturated photo of an old Garfield plush captioned “to be loved is to be changed”. Hollywood-ugly truths reified as something common yet inexplicably spiritual, e.g. pomegranates or rosaries. Like, here, everyone wants to be loved, but no one wants to be loved. What they don’t say is, no one wants to fall to the rank of Old Garfield Plush. Hence, preventative botox, hence, anti-aging cream, Snapchat, disappearing messages. At the end of the day, you gotta face it — to be loved is to be Old Garfield Plush, man.

—

Dennis Cooper writes of one of his more lifeless characters: “He felt as though his whole life had been a series of dissolves”. I’m in some hidden room in a university being called a dirty broad by some boy I barely know. He wears a cross. I would fuck you just to feel the texture of it. Texture and then cut. 

Dissolve.

R is driving me home from school, I’m talking about how I need to pick up some saltines, I’m talking about this Gabriel Garcia-Marquez book. 

Dissolve. 

There’s a photo of baby me on the shelf. I pick it up, stare at it searching for the ghost of my childhood, much the way my younger self had once, lying supine against fallow field, traced over the muggy outline of my future being. Filmed over top of this scene, an image of rough sex, not mine though, just the act I mean, just 

—

In an earlier poem, I wrote about myself as “hollow in chest and character”. Later, T read it. He said it scared him, the violence with which I talked about sex, how I portray myself.

 “It’s great. Your work just feels quite alien to you.” 

—

I get a call on the bus, the man who wants to fuck me (for now is telling me to fuck off, keeps repeating the phrase “lacanian fuckwhore”. It’s autumn, 2023. He’s threatening me, I think. I’m plastered, I’ve had six pints, I send him the pictures, then go home.

—

In Peanut Butter, Eileen Myles writes of themself; “I am always hungry & always wanting to have sex”. I didn’t get what they meant by this; I failed to contend that hunger is sometimes more than just the mind’s refusal to say “yes” to the body, the vowel hanging from the mouth like chewed fat. How the words for food and words for fucking are the same. Consummation and consumption. Eating something, or someone, out. Sex-starved. Emptiness and sharpness go together too well for me. A wound is just as much defined by the absence of skin as it is the knife that cuts it. 

You can write that down, post it, framed against a photo of an old doll, or a cat, or a martini glass.

—

The moral of this is that there were many things I could have been hungry for, didn’t realise I wanted. For years, I had online profiles on apps made to send me through sex, teach me the act of seeking it. I was sixteen, I wanted a lover, I wanted warmth. I settled for the next best thing, I settled for Omegle, the bread knife, Body Dysmorphic Disorder.

—

I’m crossfaded at a party and using the words sexual assault for the first time, watching it arrive slurred and paper-blank. J holds my hair back like a simulacrum of a bad porno. What does this make me?

—

In Happy Together, two men flee from themselves by moving to Argentina. There exists a second where Man #1 buys Man #2 cigarettes so he can’t leave the house anymore, destroys his passport so he can’t go home. Later, they play soccer in the hungover afternoon, the fallow fields like chess boards, the men no longer grieving the ache that comes with loneliness, but instead the novel emptiness in the space between two bodies. 

After the film ends L asks why are you doing this blah blah blah and I can’t find any reception, can’t find an answer, the streetlights in the distance turning on at the same time, I didn’t get it.

—

Self-proclaimed “seeker” @backfromtheborderline writes: “As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid that someone else will erase me by denying me love”. I screenshot this, then screenshot the screenshot. I smoke my last Double Happiness, then watch the Melbourne winter like a hollowed palimpsest of itself through the window.

—

K-Ming Chang, talking about visiting Taiwan again in Yilan: “I dream about being loved in another timezone”. It’s December, I’m taking the train to Manchester, visiting T tomorrow. I text him asking if he thinks I’m pretty AGAIN, I’m fucking anxious, etc. Then something about how I’m the love of his life, don’t you get it I LOVE YOU, Sharon, a picture of us together, :))). We look happy. I allow myself to be temporarily calmed by this, then open up a poem I never bothered submitting anywhere. Someone probably said it was ‘great’ at some point.

—

I have this kind of repeated dream where I’m in a car, fleeing from the kind of thing that Clementine Kruczynski manic-pixie-sex-dolls flee from, something stupidly tenuous and up for interpretation — I load my purple gumboots in the trunk, I load up the Toyota Yaris with Unleaded 91. On my dashboard,a copy of I Wished, Dennis Cooper, blah blah blah blah, I’m craning my neck like I’m being kissed, steering with one hand. In this dream, I own a manual car, and I drive on a tanned road next to the pastures, sky artificially blue and blocky like a video game, like I’m just someone’s Minecraft girlfriend, until the stop signs blend into each other, blurred and hazy against a too-cliche rural backdrop. 

When I wake up, I wonder what Lacan would think.

—

R buys a pack of cigarettes, then drives me to the fish and chip shop. I’m watching TikToks on my phone, she’s playing The Veronicas. She tells me this story about a guy who watches a movie while his girlfriend gives him head.

Shit, I say, not looking up from my screen.

Anyway, they break up in the end, so–

Right.

The sound of more Subway Surfers/Reddit stories, or something else apropos of nothing.

—

Photo of valley separated by a river captioned “love is when we sit in water together and go where the horses graze”, @moonflowerette, Instagram, October 2nd, 2022. 

—

In a chicken place in Manchester, freshly eighteen, freshly ironed Smiths graphic t-shirt on, holding hands with T. We’d had sex earlier that day, I’d joked about how long it took him to take off his shoes beforehand. Afterwards, he’d spent the afternoon watching me sleep, then finger-combing my hair as I blow-dried it post-shower. Nick Cave in the background as we’re dancing. By dancing I mean watching the rotation of the Earth, noticing how it doesn’t make me dizzy. Nothing else is that revolutionary.

—

I think I just wanted to earn something separate to myself. I’m thinking early summer, outside, drinking Strongbow with M, “voice memo + guitar 7 :)” playing over top. Him hitting a vape while we walk up a hill. Or maybe we were already on top, I’m not sure. The sun so yellow the grass looks like haloed lights. I’m not tall enough to see anything beyond the knoll. He asks about me, T, going to university. I answer in sentences of some kind. We walk until we’re damp, until the streetlight next to me turns on and so on. 

Listen, I know I wrote about it earlier and there must have been some kind of recollection along the way, but I swear, T, Tom, Tom, right then I couldn’t remember the last time I saw it happen, I guess that’s how it goes.

I watched it for a second, turned away, kept walking, I kept walking, I promise I did.

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Sharon Zhang is an author and poet from Melbourne, Australia. She writes on queer memory / your stupid situationship / English post-punk. Her works can be found in Voiceworks, Asian American Writers’ Workshop: The Margins, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Mother Bird, was published last year with Fifth Wheel Press. In 2022, she was selected by the Poetry Society of the UK as a Foyle Young Poet. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prizes, Best of the Net, and Best New Poetry. She is currently studying history at The University of Oxford.