An electric eel goes limp in his hand when he pulls it from a pan of shallow water, north: the passing between realms. The eyes of the eel look just like yours while you sleep, when I pull your lids up to see you while you’re dreaming. I’m sure you saw me see you but you never tell me if you did.

We are watching the acclaimed chef on TV. He is French, and is speaking in French, which you like, because you are trying to remember how to talk to your relatives. He is a butcher of sea creatures. You are not. His speciality is the eel.

The eel has little fins and a white belly with a small black dot in its middle: a belly button, its nombril!, you say, thrilled. A black smudge seen so quickly that maybe that’s not what it is—was. Chef holds the eel taut, and skewers it lengthwise, “to stop death.” He turns it over and slices horizontally along its underside, cutting it into pieces. This preparation of the eel is decorated with quick violin, painting a scene of human excellence: This is a chef with five Michelin stars. But I find myself stuck on the image of the belly button, an eel growing another eel within its uterus, then, upon birth, baby nestled in mama eel’s collarbone, the two of them bonding in their nakedness, cooing and crying before she gnaws at the umbilical cord and swallows the placenta. Nevermind though. The eel is quickly beheaded. Chef takes the skin off, folds it back, and pulls the muscle out pink. The music says forget about that, bon appetit, salope!

An electric fish does not feel its own shock. You communicate like this; I block my own bursts and feel yours. You feel mine and you cannot feel your own.

When he cuts the eel into pieces I imagine it is still feeling and that it is feeling this acutely and that it is feeling every part of the butchering. The shake of the chef’s hand like unblocked electric pain, for example. There is no more potential for reassurance. I am surprised the eel cannot vomit, even though it no longer has a head or body, depending upon how you look at it. I want to believe it is not unlike the way a lizard escaped your grasp, let itself run away while its tail flinched in your hand, which you then dropped to the pavement where it flailed in the noon Florida sun. But it was not at all the same feeling, I am sure, so I don’t mention it or the feeling growing beneath my collar bones—what nervous nausea I am storing in the back of my neck.

“Taste the eel for what she is. First without skin, then with skin. Next without fat, then with fat.” There’s an orchestra accompanying his instructions. It’s like it is time for vacation. The eel strips are lifted into the air above the table with little bits of eel skin still clinging. The chef knows how to do this as he has done this his whole life.

Fold the eel. Fold the muscle onto itself. Take me by the shoulder, the neck.

I love eel, you say over and over. “Don’t you?” you ask. You talk about the supple flavor and its crunchiness. I tell you that I am vegetarian, and you ask again if I eat fish. I don’t understand. Nevermind, you say, waving me off. You don’t look at me for the rest of the evening.

“Taste it with and without bones.” “Taste it in pieces.” “Grilled.” “Filleted.” Press it against blue heat, then hard plastic beneath a blade and explain further techniques. He steps aside to let the other chefs taste it, then passes it to his pastry chef for him to play with it next. On the heat, it is still moving. They are smiling, captivated.

Chef says you’ve gotta accept all the mis-steps and faults. I don’t know what will work, but it’s ok! Try the eel with butter, or garlic, or both, and salt. Try eel all kinds of ways, just keep trying. “Keep going and going.” Get another eel! “Keep tasting.” They all taste the same. All eels. Any difference depends on you. I have no point of reference. I think all eggs taste the same, and I hate them, but I eat them anyway because I know that they are good for me. Or maybe I am a bad chef. I do like poached eggs, and things with eggs cooked into them. I do expect milk to taste the same each time. If it does not, it has spoiled, and has to be thrown away. I am glad I do not expect to become a fillet but I wonder if I were if you would buy me. And at what cost? And how would you prepare me, and would you taste me along the way, and at what point would you enjoy me most? I wonder, too, if we would taste the same; if I would taste like you.

Over the summer we are in farm fields upstate and I burn daily. Together on the bunk in my shed I am peeling off the backs of my knees and you are saying stop or else. Or else what? I pull off another strip. It’s long and wide and translucent like rice paper and cathartic like loosened skin glue. I want you to insist you enjoy this, at least because I enjoy this. You take rice paper me from me, from my fingers, and put me in your mouth. You swallow me. That’s what, you say. I’ll keep eating you. This doesn’t really dissuade me: you tell me I taste good.

At the bakery after Obama won again I am glazing tiny loafs of bread. My boss has given me a plastic jug of some concoction of watered yolks and lemon and yeast maybe, for making their loaves glow and I text you to tell you it smells like you when you cum.

Back on TV, Chef’s kitchen is not well lit. They cook everything until it is brown. All vegetables, too. Lettuce, even. Once I ate a flourless chocolate cake on the floor while internally bleeding and everything tasted red.

Chef describes salmon as “genius, as far as fish go.” The next frame centers a pink slab squared and slapped between paper. He cuts it in half how you wouldn’t want to be cut in half. He cuts the muscle slowly, in layers. Everyone wants to know what makes the salmon smart, he says. I’ll show you, he says, looking at the camera, winking.

My heart rate is too high for the nurse to call in the doctor. If you don’t bring it down I can’t call her in. The nurse holds my shoulder and says calm down you’re fine, calm down. I think I am calming. The computer she. has attached to me says I’m not.

The salmon’s muscles are what makes the salmon smart. “A mathematical superstar,” Chef explains, showing the slab. It is declared that Chef gained his celebrity instantaneously for his clear demonstrations of instructions. It happened while he was on tv, wearing a white coat, balancing a tall white hat on his head, holding a red hot lobster in his bare hand. Watch, he says, as the lobster extends a claw out and over its head. A ballet. It waves. It suffocates. He smiles gently. It is quite simple, he says, and snaps the body open. It oozes white from the place of severance. The back legs flinch. Voila: fame.

Chef lives above the restaurant with his family. He has lived here forever. As a kid he played hide and seek in the wine cellar. No one could ever find me when I went down there, he says. “No one has ever found me, actually,” he laughs, saying he’s still in there somewhere. A piano plays. He breaks the fourth wall again to wink.

The cellar is shown in a zoom out: it is our chance to leave. A cave is either full of wine and jewels or bats and things with spindly legs and leftover life, petrified objects and rock formations. Somewhere new and well lit they pull plump loaves from a wood stove and chop cabbage for a vinegar bath. Butter beneath it. They slice everything with math. Mushrooms and hard boiled eggs, more salmon, sheets of green pasta. It seduced me, he says while looking down and sad-like at the table, you must taste this. I don’t know what he is talking about, but I think I would try anything he’d put in my mouth.

They spoon gray ovoids into tall jars and tap flour around a cake pan. Chef tells us about the world tour he took with his wife after college. He met great chefs. He learned a lot. His cooking improved. She was great company. Milk became his inspiration. He paints with it. “Simplicity makes a great dish,” he says. I think, of course: cereal and milk, coffee and milk, butter and salt. He truffles the milk, makes it look like a boil you can burst with a big waiting eye, and he bursts it like a surgeon with a slice. He likes the presentation. Look at this; black in the white, a slash, isn’t it merveilleux? Le monde me fascisme! The world fascinates me! Let me cut my food for you. Watch your fingers, here I goes!

His wife is older than him. She’s more brilliant than I am, he says. She’s a better chef. She shows up in a leather jacket and full make up and she isn’t known for her cooking anymore. This show is about him. He says he was never a mathematician, or a student, but he had a motorcycle, so. She worked harder, and yet. Because she was there, he got better. “Without her I would be nowhere.” And now, here she is, throwing leaves in the air, and twirling, arms outstretched, as they fall around her.

Late at night on another channel, a crowd gathers as an audience. Collectively, they cheer loudly for a funny British man to be brave and eat a brain. He is sweating and the brain is slipping down between the prongs of his fork. He slurps at it. He is laughing. The audience is gasping and squealing and cheering him on. He bites and swallows and takes another bite and spits it out. Then a sudden “thankssomuch for joining us!” to cheers and goodnight and cut to commercial.

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It’s November 2016. Hillary has won the popular vote. Still, she does not win. Desperate, I call seventeen Republican electoral college representatives and none of them return my calls. New York’s favorite color of fabric is black. This is the case year round, but I am especially relieved it is so now. We wear it in our grief and mourning, to make the body look small, and fit in.

I can’t remember what is worth remembering, or why to remember anything.

I hear about a 23-year-old boy who decided to go swimming in a Yellowstone hot spring. When they try to pull him out he has already died. The following day there is a thunderstorm which means it is somehow unsafe to retrieve his body. When they returned the next day they said his remains had fully dissolved. All that remained of him was his shirt, shoes, and the Jesus necklace he had left behind on the shore.

At 103rd Street, the subway doors open to an unbothered man positioned squarely in the door frame with a Ben and Jerry’s cone in hand. It’s November. There is a sense that everything has slightly curdled overnight. The man looks, somehow, so empowered and chill and so choreographed. With his eyes fixed on mine, he takes one lick from his cone before taking six evenly spaced paces towards me, into the subway car. He is smooth reaching out to grasp the bar, smooth in spinning to his left and smooth while he continues mouthing the frozen milk. The doors close, the train engine picks up, and we never make eye contact again.

‍At the library, all the tables vibrate as though in hyperventilation. When I leave at 2AM, kids in motorcycle coats play frisbee on the narrow lawns. I feel as if I have been camping. The science building exhales the smell of my grandmother’s house, all mothballs and mice, the smell of her before she turned into a ghost. We buried her in her frilly coat and pink silk-flower cap but I still couldn’t look. I was told she looked unnatural: her makeup had been done by someone who had never seen her living. Someone had painted her toenails pink.

I dream about declogging drains.

Back home I fill a jug of tap water and refrigerate it for the fridge’s floral chloroform flavor.

I watched the results roll in online between the understuffed couch and a pot of mac and cheese, hitting refresh all night. When he won my phone started autocorrecting his name into all caps. Two days later in therapy my therapist’s makeup is running and she tells me how scared she is about the future. She tells me I shouldn’t forget we are not machines, she nor I, that we are beings with bodies and a body is only a body and it isn’t a mechanical thing, don’t you forget, and this too makes me want to cry, and she adds –I assume she is assuming I am unphased by the news– that everything is fine and suggests we talk about how I might fix my sleep schedule. You’re definitely overwhelmed, or were, she says, but you pulled out when you had to so that’s good, she says. I want to ask if she is mistaking me for someone else, but I’d rather not interrupt her stream of consciousness, so I affirm until it’s time.

I take a bath. A cello has drifted in through the window. Otherwise, the weeks feel muted. In the tub I have become my own bubble wrap and let myself pour from my face. Recalling the minutiae of recent days: some people drink soda for breakfast. Some students slurp spines in the cafeteria with their faces low to the table.

Late to classes the morning after I am wearing all black. I have slept not at all. I remember nothing from the night of the election except a house centipede crawling along my bedroom door frame when the numbers started leaning for him. I haven’t done my work and I am feeling terrible. I think it is raining and I’m unprepared.

I have to keep reminding myself that any of this matters. The other day I forgot what it is to have a memory, and, or, what the point is to remember anything at all. If we can already see it all going out the window, why bother? I burn my tongue a few times throughout the week. A bud of nerves turns white and bubbles big. I hold it between my teeth and pull. I try to tear it off but then I feel, and it hurts too much to rip tongue from tongue.

I think I remember them saying we’re all a bunch of babies, and don’t we just all feel so ashamed of ourselves, blocking traffic for so many hours to stand in the street to yell at the wall of their apartment building? I wear a winter cap and wrap my face in a wool scarf. My shouting is muffled, and my identity is blurred digitally this way. Too, it buffers my breathing, my eyes, in case of pressurized, vaporized hot peppers. It’s crowded. It’s late. I’m anticipating imminent eruptions of chaos, police slamming anyone into anything, batons going wild, arrests of anyone upset. We are standing so close together. There isn’t really anywhere to go. I can’t find anyone I had planned to meet. I’ve been here for hours. I talk with a man named Jeff for twenty minutes. I see Colin from grade school in the crowd and we hug and talk for a minute until we both vanish. I speak with a man who lends me electricity, who asks me my last name. I decline to tell. He wants to post my face on the internet but it feels like the time for all that is over. He stands beside me for fifteen minutes, looking quiet at the ground and eventually asks me to save some juice for someone else and I say thanks and resume shouting. For so many moments this feels like all that I can imagine wanting to do. For so many moments I feel so pathetic expecting the doors to the wall to open and to see Cheeto walking out to listen to us and surrender. I keep expecting Orange to cry, to make their humanity obvious. Or fuzz to offer common sense. Or acknowledgement of reality, (which shouldn’t be this,) or real, heartfelt logic. (Why did my high school ever bother to offer a class called “ethics”?) I extend both middle fingers up to the top of the building, still shouting. It feels like nothing and stupid, like this could offer a death sentence or a warrant for arrest.

A stacked couple behind me taps my shoulder and asks me to take their photo. They pose. They say cheese and smile and then they both shout something with fists up, posing again and again. I hold the button, the non-shutter, for a dozen frames. On top of each other they are taller than everyone else, and might get some press. Can’t see him from here, the higher one shouts down. There’s a helicopter coming up Fifth! See it? It stops to hover above us. Down the street there’s a billowy gray cloud. It moves slowly up, north, like an eel pulled up to the narrowing shallows of a pan of water. Someone tosses a can and shouts and the crowd redirects their focus onto them, hushing them to focus on the bigger issue here. I want everyone I know to be here. I try again and again to connect to the internet to offer live feed. I want you to be here. I don’t know how to ask you to read or listen to my words anymore. I worry I stay stuck in shitty summary.

And / but: who will see any of this? If we don’t need our memory anymore, why bother? I don’t know who will read post incinerations. I don’t think anyone speaks English in space.

They corral us around midnight. People get tired. We’re animals —not machines— after all. But the blue suits pick up metal half-walls angry and set up a maze quick. The crowd has shrunk a little, but among ourselves we still seem big. I find Holly on the sidewalk and we shout together with what little leverage the lip allows. We are both tall anyway. She explains the maze to me. She says she can’t believe this and says she is drunk. I say I can’t believe this either and I don’t remember how or why to get drunk. We are both more or less asleep, we agree, although who hasn’t been for the last 24 hours? See, look, they’re working on making arrests. Because of this? Over this? I shout at a stoic blue: don’t you care about the future?

No one likes me asking my questions; don’t you care about people? Of course I do, how dare you ask that? Numbers of digital friends decline.

I start working for a newspaper kind of company. Wednesday, the day after the election, is my third day in the office and it’s silent. It’s my first day with the editor-in-chief. I walk over to her desk to say hello and she is crying. The new print issue is due out in two days and it covers nothing relevant to today, yesterday, or any future day. The staff gather in small groups in a glass-walled room next to my desk. What’s the point? they whisper. At least we’ll make the deadline. But it takes encouragement to print what is now irrelevant. “This matters,” they reiterate flatly, “it really does.”

I am tasked with transcribing an interview about the party Hilary hosted for the win she didn’t have. “Think of it as the best party you’ve ever been to, and then think of the worst party you’ve ever been to, and multiply it by something like a million.” I don’t know whose voice I am listening to. “I can’t imagine anyone ever being as joyously hopeful as we all were that night,” the voice says. “The worst part of all is that I don’t know if we will ever feel that way again.”

The first day with Cheeto POTUS is Mom’s birthday and I tell her I’m sorry. I say I can’t think of any reason to celebrate, to do anything I love anymore. What’s the point of writing now? She tries to inspire me. When else wouldn’t you write? I think I should be doing anything else. Be anywhere but school. Be fighting. I am so tired. I can’t concentrate.

I keep thinking I see you sign off every message about all of this with “lol” or “haha” but there’s no reason to and there’s nothing to laugh at anymore and you aren’t laughing anyway. “Because this is the worst thing we have ever lived through.” “You can’t just imagine this.” “This is all of the bad shit history has ever offered us, wound up as one nugget for repeat consumption.”

I tell myself I should stop eating cookies. All the apocalypse movies don’t include sugar. Your teacher tells you we should all join fight gyms. I want to joke about Fight Club but I haven’t seen the whole movie because I always got uncomfortable with the violence. Now self-defense programs aren’t only for women anymore. At the grocery store they used to sell baby pink canisters of pepper spray but now they also sell it in dark blue. They get their own cardboard cutout aisle interrupting displays. Two years ago I took a picture of the pink one to be critical. This year I consider the cost. I want to announce with a megaphone that we should stop eating dessert altogether because it’s time to fight, right? When I tell you this idea you laugh and say you just got insomnia cookies and I show you my two-pack of rainbow sprinkled pop-tarts. Despite all my intentions for getting seriously healthy and strong, I gain sugar weight. I take extra comfort in sweet tastes and warmth and start sleeping with you again.

The weekend before the election you pick me up from the train with a bag of takeout. We walk to the soccer field because it’s empty and neither of us see so much open space anymore. Look at all the sky. We walk through a graffitied Serra sculpture and play with sound waves. You ask me if I want to visit with the cats and we go back to your apartment and get in bed. On the way to get a next day brunch we are walking side by side. You have a lot to say about music and then we get to talking about the looming election and it gets short. I say it first. “I hope the apocalypse doesn’t happen.” “Me too,” you say, and then it’s two blocks of not saying anything at all. We walk close. We don’t hold hands.

The night of all red I stress shop cheap t-shirts and forget. A week and a half later fabric arrives in silver plastic. Four stupid tops adorned with weird allusions: doodles of a takeout bag, boobs, an alien, and a giraffe ceaselessly attempting to snack.

I stay with you for four nights before doom wearing the same clothes. We go to the grocery store and you take a picture of me holding a massive jackfruit like a baby. You load a shopping cart with things we’d have when we lived together and wanted romantic meals, but something other than romantic spaghetti: broccoli, tangerines, Boston lettuce, peppers, onions, expensive ravioli, a Japanese squash, vegan sausages, parmesan, strawberries, a bar of chocolate. You pick out a single can of trendy seltzer you suggest we try, and get the cats a special occasion type of cat food. We look for the only kind of coconut yogurt I won’t hive out to and can’t find it. We buy a different kind anyway, hopeful. I can’t eat it. You mislabel it over the phone weeks later as really good ice cream.

I am anxious the whole long weekend. I am crying all the time and can’t say why. Little things turn on faucets, like you touching my feet, you offering me half of your citrus, you sitting at your desk by the window, you asking me if I want tea and serving it in the mugs I bought, the cat sleeping on a cardboard box it has flattened on its own and the other one purring on my lap. In bed I am thinking about Pompeii and other places where they find bodies in embrace. I am thinking about New Jersey and the future.

Two weekends later you visit to split a dinner. I wear the boob shirt from the web and take off my sweater to show it while we split a frozen margarita. I don’t like how other customers ogle stupidly so I put my sweater back on and sweat. We corner the block afterwards and you buy a box of sugar for us to split at the foot of my bed.

My roommate buys milk with fish added to it, for extra vitamins! Is there music in space? I think it’s quiet at the end of it. Composers ask musicians to determine their own lengths of pause. “A long time,” for example. For a long time, I found it so easy to jump off varying levels of hard plastic playground with everyone else, under the guise that I was in a movie and fighting someone off with bolts of electricity shooting from my fingertips. I pretended, too, to be a princess alongside Colin, who always played my prince. Together we would zip through dense forests on hover bikes, crash into trees, and try again. Failure was so easy to undo. Death was as easy as to evade as a somersault: curling the spine and spinning away. It was so easy to walk to the edge of any future world and leap with my laser beam in hand. I never thought to bring even an imaginary shield. Asked then to consider what kind of animal I would choose to be if I was to be an animal at all, I would never say human. You say some people don’t get that title. I think maybe none of us should.