after the end of the world

excerpt from m archive by alexis pauline gumbs

the question for the neuronationalists was how to wash out the trauma without wiping away the skills we had built around all that hurt, all that longing, all that loss. and when they figured that out. well you had no chance. but we still had to live with the consequences.

so they went in like the eternal sunshine movie, like our brains were video-game landscapes, and they hunted. they could chart the steady erosions of certain regions of our minds where we thought of you and what you had done. well not directly. the easiest thing was to find the places where the skills we had built to survive what you had done made hatch marks on our lobes. ruts, you might say. the depth of our resistance, the evidence of your erstwhile irrevocable presence.

during the time when we win no matter what. this is your last survival. how winning how we win still hurts from you.



it was no longer a matter of sex.

this new molecular relationship made distance and intimacy words
that tangled.
or to say it another way.
we were all close.
beyond close.

not knowing where one person ended and another began was no longer love-song advertising or evidence of codependency.

it was a real issue. so then identity (x = x) was no longer technically true. the previous energetic reality of how we are not whole and change each other and are not ourselves except in the most limited version of our imagination became impossible to ignore on the physical level.

so love was not about merging or finding exceptional moments when we could die enough to shrug off the pain of individuality. it was just a certain sound, a vibration, and when we achieved it, it was really all of us.