Again-off
by Misha Honcharenko
My quietude of meeting death stumbles, the chair I’m sitting on is simply the trustworthy way of not falling apart. What is shaped as an essay or a place to talk about the body is an authorization of concern, of lust that conquers desolated whim; of mid-sentence exploitative hate to self. Meaningless sex shields to uphold. Scraps of a hill. Conclusive gazes, precarious offspring. Is it so hard to ask for a distant yet immediate grip?
My hostel is a haunted house: cries, thunder, fucks, gasping, screaming, beating and total inadequacy. Moreover, those entities they’re expanding, making me anxious. What is it to be alone after having a period of caretaking? Abandoning my own thoughts, my own pleasure, my own breath. Body is an irregular python. To restart life after losing my knowledge of welfare. It’s my own ward where I still keep staring and fear grief. I remember a quote from Charlie Fox’s brilliant book, This Young Monster, where he writes:
Queering the straight world is a form of revenge which proves that homosexuals can have their wicked way with modes that so often ignore their existence.
In a correlation to my peeks, I believe in justice toward consolation. When do I start to unlearn? How do I not be so rapid, overwhelmed and exhausted by the happening? Apricity, that warmth of a frozen place. My own place to masturbate, emphasize on the year, sob, sleep with distraught.
Turning off any glare or signs of care, it makes me guilty. Those gatherings of people in hospitals; a hospice. I remember using all of me to love and to care which feeds anyone but me. Swerves of a wind, to put the effort to the next anatomy. It’s a sudden string of stinging. Words of people I used to know. Mother’s love is uncertain and opening — it’s a release. Born innocent.
There is no lie in hibernation. My sleep shocks to the point of not knowing when happiness was occurring last time. A small talk of crash. Undermining analysis amidst cannibalistic obscenity. My own words eat me up. It’s not scripted. Fingerprints that splatter along sheets of paper.
My mother loved to see me smiling, my wooden acting. A queue doesn’t lack curiosity. Aftermath drowns in piles of death. Chantal Akerman wishes to have those long and precise moments of stillness. Of escaping the narration. Licking pre-existed commitment. And throwing myself into a new closet.
My Chest was Full of Eels, one of the titles of the greatest DJ-mixes from Mark Fisher. To set a land. Barely-conscious. What is a hallmark of a liminal space for the lonely and the estranged? Love is a mother.
Officially, my story of love is to be a doppelgänger. A torture.
Misha Honcharenko is a Ukrainian queer artist and writer. He started his Instagram profile as a form of art diary, combining weirdness in context of objects and landscapes, exploring himself via photography for over a decade now. Skin of Nocturnal Apple is his first poetry collection published by Pilot Press in 2023. Trap Unfolds Me Greedily is his upcoming debut novel published by SISSY ANARCHY—a platform exploring trans and queer anarchism—and will be released at Housmans Bookshop in London on 27 June 2024. It’s a gruelling read, an anti-novel, with a narrator that succumbs to new forms of grief whilst navigating the complexities of the immigration system, his queerness, war crimes, violence, whilst grieving the slow passing of his mother. His work has been written about in i-D, Worms Magazine, minor literature[s], and has been featured in all issues of SISSY ANARCHY.
