So Sad Today - Melissa Broder Page 0,1

a titty so omniscient it could sate all my holes. The world was already not enough, and I, of course, was not enough either. They gave me a bottle.

As a result of all my sucking, I ended up in a higher weight percentile than my height percentile. This was problematic, because my mother had obese parents. She needed an object upon which to project her own anxieties. I was perfect for that! The religion of the household quickly became food: me not being allowed to have it and me sneaking it.

One of my favorite foods to sneak was me. In an attempt to be enough, I began to consume my own body parts. I ate my fingernails and toenails. I ate every single one. I liked to bite them off and play with them in my mouth, slide the delicious, calcium-rich half moons between my teeth until my gums bled. I tried to enjoy my own earwax, but earwax is an acquired taste. Later in life I became a connoisseur of my own vaginal secretions. The depth of range was astonishing. The vagina is always marinating something.

What I loved most, though, was to pick my nose and eat it. During story hour at school I created a “shield” with my left hand to cover my nose, so I could enjoy some private refreshment. Then I’d really get in there with the right hand. Some of my happiest childhood days were spent behind that handshield. I felt self-contained, satisfied, full on myself. The other kids knew what was up and they made fun of me, but I didn’t care. The bliss was too profound.

Unfortunately, the bliss was not going to last forever. Let’s be honest, the bliss was going to last four minutes or until my nose ran out of snot. But parents, if your kid is eating herself, you have to let her. Let your child devour herself whole. Even if she disappears completely, encourage her to vanish. Let your child eat the shit out of herself and then shit herself out. Let her eat that.

There aren’t that many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.

Love in the Time of Chakras

I’VE HAD SEX WITH A lot of gross people. I’ve had sex with enough gross people that I feel like I should have gotten paid for most of them. While I’ve never gotten paid for having sex with any gross people, I have been a sex worker of sorts.

My first office job was as the administrative assistant of a Tantric sex nonprofit, which we’ll call “Electric Yoni.” Such places exist, and they exist just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, through the rainbow tunnel, where McMansions meet divination on Highway 1, Marin County, California.

I arrived at the job fresh off four years of psychedelics, deep in woo-woo, talking about energy, the Tao, and telekinesis—believing that an outside fix, an amethyst crystal, the proper measurement of snake oil could save me from myself. Every day I commuted back and forth from my apartment overlooking a crack dealer who swung a golf club in the lower Tenderloin, San Francisco, over that bridge, feeling sort of blessed and sort of miserable.

I was lonely. I had fled the East Coast right after college in a number of back-and-forth trips, fancying myself as a kind of Jack Kerouac/Hunter S. Thompson/other widely fetishized dude-figure. I was running away from the love of my twenty-one-year-old life, who I broke up with weekly, and was trying to prove to everyone—mostly myself—that I was okay. The psychedelic period had ceased and I was now drinking every day so as not to have to feel what I felt.

Staying drunk seemed like a very practical solution to me. If you could drink yourself into happiness, why would you stay sad and sober? And if you could drink yourself into ultra-happiness, why would you settle for regular happiness?

The first time I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, my ex-love had just come to visit me