Loving you makes somehow less sense than the time-travel device in Donnie Darko

Loving you is a time-travel so paradoxical
It can only be explained with the disclarity
Of a doomed romance in a doomed director’s
First feature-length film that makes no sense

Loving you is a child star
Having a brief renaissance in the early 2000s
Before disappearing again

Loving you is
My thighs rubbing together
And you are the heart-shaped chafing
In the place where they meet

Loving you is a pair of past-life lovers
Wanking furiously through time’s glory hole

Like Groundhog Day
And we are six consecutive groundhogs cast to play the same part
And I die before ever having seen your shadow

You are a spacecraft
And I am a late-joining member of a cult
Who didn’t get to drink the rapture-juice so now I have to wait
Another two thousand years for you to come back
Round
When I reincarnate
I won’t remember wanting you

How would you feel to be the voice of your generation
In an alternate universe which doesn’t really exist
The worst pain in the world being born into a family
With two parents who love you
Who don’t know how to express it and so you read in your room
Call your mum a bitch
And go to a therapist at two hundred dollars a pop
The second worst pain in the world is popping your cherry
But giving it all up because of something
A fucked up rabbit-man told you

But I’m not giving up that easy
We’ll take shelter under my parents’ roof
You’ll spoon me like I’m a naked jet engine
Spank me so hard my serial number rubs off
Time and space sucking and fucking like a
Back-cellar-door orgy (the two most beautiful
Words in the English language)
We fuck Frank the rabbit
We fuck Gretchen
We fuck Cherita
And she tells us all to shut up

I want to tell you why I came home drunk and sad at two am
And ate two pieces of toast and drank a cup of tea
And wanted to die while watching a movie about a teenager
Who also wants to die
But I don’t get to tell you things like that anymore

All I know is I’m ageing slower than I should
And faster than feels appropriate
Like the dickpic of dorian gray—
His tumescence a time-lapse in wonderland
Like benjamin button
Born fully old and tall
Tearing my mother’s cunt a new black hole

Let’s watch this world collapse
Light a cigarette on the burning bush of
My space-time continuum
Call it good shit
Even if it’s only a cigarette even if
Loving you shouldn’t have a past tense even if
I only miss you once you’re gone
 
 

Times when life is kind of like that song ‘Ironic’ by Alanis Morissette: not literally ironic but inconvenient, fucked or borderline cruel

It’s like ten thousand knives in your back
And all you need is to be spooned

It’s like ten thousand spoons
When you’ve never played knifey-spoony before

It’s like being a woman and having your ability to use words questioned
And when men use words inaccurately they get called jonathan franzen

It’s like being engaged to ryan reynolds for five years
And two months after you break up he’s married to scarlett johansson

It’s like your boss asking you to write an appreciation letter for all staff
And sending you that same letter without changing one word

It’s like getting an offer of ongoing employment
When you’ve already been told there’s no work for you here next year

It’s like reducing the dose of your medication because you’re starting to feel better
And then no longer feeling better

It’s like being broken up with because long-distance isn’t working
And then coming home to be broken up with again for . . . other reasons

It’s like getting the day off work to go and see your dying grandma
And getting the call to say she’s gone while your hands are on the steering wheel

It’s like loving your mother unconditionally
And resenting her permanently

It’s like your best friend stopped replying to your messages and you don’t know why
And she likes three photos on your instagram two years later and you still don’t know why

It’s like ahahahahaahaAHAHAHAHAH
And arrrrrghhhh

It’s like hell yeah
And jesus christ

It’s like lmao
And fml

It’s like desperately wanting to die
And being terrified of dying

It’s like marrying up in the world
Only to be pushed back down again

It’s like being a woman and marrying a man
Full-stop

It’s like forgetting to wear underwear to your grandma’s funeral
And getting turned on by a cool gust rushing through the graves

It’s like your parents knowing you at your most small and helpless
And then recoiling when you have to see them like that

It’s like being fucked so hard your brain melts
And loved so lightly it freezes again
 
 
 
Eloise Grills is a comics artist, writer, poetess, photographer, zine-maker person and editor living in Melbourne. Her work has been published in The Lifted Brow, CHART Collective, Scum Magazine, LOR Journal, The Age and VICE, among many others. In 2016 she was awarded a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship for Illustrators. She currently edits memoir for Scum Magazine, tweets and grams from @grillzoid and covers her arse with her Patreon, www.patreon.com/grillzoid/.