Cycle I: Coming on Strong
The Hidden Voice
The Record · RFI Two (v2.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
VOICE ADVISORY: The speaking voice moves between personal confession and projected interiority. Contains themes of mental illness, romanticized damage, unhealthy attraction, self-harm imagery, explicit sexuality, and emotional volatility.
Being desired comes with privileges.
Attraction has its own vocabulary.
Which mostly consists of words that relate to love and genitals.
The facts stay the same. The words get sexier.
Someone troubled becomes complicated.
Someone unstable becomes intense.
Someone possessive becomes passionate.
Someone dangerous becomes exciting.
Someone I want can be a beautiful mess.
Someone I do not want can feel like a burden.
I can know something is bad for me and still fucking want it.
It’s a bullshit position on the face of it.
But attraction is not a moral argument.
It’s a preference dictated by exposure and lived experience.
I can hate that truth without being able to change it.
Wanting something and choosing it are not the same thing.
The failure is not in admitting that I can lust for something dangerous.
The failure would be pretending I don’t want it because I shouldn’t.
Even if what I desire can be poisonous.
When I was old enough to roam alone but still young enough to get looks for doing it, there was this shopping cart near the front of the local grocery store.
Inside were all the damaged goods most people would pass over unless they had been marked down to pennies.
I would stop at that cart nearly every time I went in, curious to see what mangled, dented, deformed can of soup was still held together enough not to be visibly leaking, but too fucked up to remain with the greater population of its kind.
I never bought anything from it.
At least I don’t remember doing so.
I assume the sickness and regret would have made it memorable.
I think about that cart a lot when it comes to the people I find attractive.
Like a motif to a refrain, I can’t stop shopping the broken people section of the population.
Apparently, I never learned to stay out of that aisle.
We are slaves to our culture and damned to live inside it.
I grew up at a time when being depressed wasn’t always treated like a mental health problem.
Sometimes it was treated like a lifestyle.
Goth.
Emo.
Scene.
Pretty fucked-up things were marketed back to us as attractive.
Sad was pretty.
Damage had an aesthetic.
Scars weren’t just marks.
They could be part of the appeal.
It was sexy as fuck.
To these bones, some of it still is.
Now, before you think this is going somewhere as simple as an attraction to a Hot Topic aesthetic, I’m going to make you question my ethics just a little bit more.
It’s not just a fashionable let’s get lost in a graveyard statement.
It’s not just the I’m sad because the world doesn’t get me attitude.
It’s not just the hyper-social, playful exterior hiding an I’m really dying inside disposition.
It’s all of that because, sure, why not?
But it’s much more real than that.
It’s not something you pull off a rack, try on for a few years, and throw in the back of the closet when it stops being trendy.
It can be something lived with in silence, no matter how the rest of us reframe it to feed our own thirst.
Not every broken thing looks broken.
You can look at me and think you know what you’re seeing.
Cut me open. Count the rings.
Read the label and decide what should be inside.
Then find out you were wrong.
The wounds are deeper than you expected.
You can love the idea of me and still choke on everything that comes with me.
I can make you feel more alive by being exactly what you think you want, right up until I become too much of it.
Maybe I don’t want your love.
Maybe I just want to feel someone else.
Stay close enough and eventually something gives.
Us.
You.
Me.
Maybe not in that order.
That should be enough to make me run.
It hasn’t yet.
I don’t want to fix any of it, baby doll.
I just want to fuck your body until your mind shuts up.
So mine will feel in control.
Darkness does not seek light.
Darkness seeks darkness.
It recognizes itself there.
Finds comfort in what should probably scare it.
Maybe that’s where you’ll find me, too.
Spend enough time with me and you’ll quickly find that I put the fun in funnel cakes.
Umm…
Fuck.
Let me try that again.
Wait, don’t go!
Companion Track: “Toxicity” — System of a Down
VOICE FEEDBACK: Proof of Projection — Eris Detected