Four things

I saw a TikTok.

There exists a section of TikTok that might be described as “healthy relationship porn”—not that it is pornographic; it’s porn in the sense people use it to describe things that are decidedly not porn, but indulgence—and I found myself there. I resent it, really. TikTok is nothing to me. I use it for the same reason that I use any social media these days. I crave sociality. I want someone to talk to me. The pandemic has ripped me into isolation, and I am not prepared to give up the part of my personhood that is social, that only exists when other people talk at it. Which is to say, I found myself on Healthy Relationship TikTok . Please, forgive me for this, as you, I hope, continue to read this article.

This TikTok was called “Four Things.” Or, it was about something called “Four Things.” TikToks, I suppose, are untitled. This is an inexact quote—I don’t care to find the video again—but it went something like:

“My Girlfriend and I want to check in, see how one another are feeling. To facilitate this, we ask each other to list four things we are thinking about. Sporadically throughout the day, we say ‘four things’ and the other obliges. ‘Four things,’ I will say, and my girlfriend will prostrate herself at my feet, empty herself out for me: supplicate the pocket of her mind to my whim. I am thinking about hunger, she will say. I am thinking about hunger. Ironic, isn’t it? That she empties herself like this, for me, turns herself inside out, so that I may know. That her hunger of body begets hunger of mind. ‘That is one of four,’ I tell her. ‘Four distinct thoughts. Are you telling me that you can’t dig into the roots of yourself to produce four distinct thoughts? Fetal, lying inchoate along the base of your self. Can you not give these to me too? Do you find yourself empty at hunger? Pathetic.’ ‘I need to email my boss to get tomorrow off,’ she will offer me, desperate that I might see that this thing, this thought, grew from her.”

Forgive the paraphrasing. My point in recounting this here to you is because of this little game caught in the back of my throat. I want to know myself better, too. I want to connect with my own feelings. My thoughts go unrealized without a kind, processing hand at their lower back, nudging them into articulation.

Before you, I hope, put your head down and continue forward into the semi-conscious proper body of this article, I offer you this: a game. A hunt. This article exists because I dreamt an article of the same name bearing a single line. I repeated that line to myself throughout the night until my waking memory took it up beneath its skirts. Somewhere, here, is that line; the rest is lie. I invite you to search with me through my subconscious. To plunge your dirty, viral hand into the folds of myself, revealed to you through this piece, and present my sleeping thoughts back to me, sealed in a legal envelope and clearly addressed to me, Beck Siegal, at 333 E Wonderview Ave, Estes Park, CO 80517, United States. Only by following these directions will you be eligible to win a hand-printed copy of my diary. Print this article. In a red pen, circle the line that I did not, could not, consciously conceive. Ensure that your return address is clearly marked. I will choose one lucky winner. Let the games begin.

Four Things: Head ache; Melting from your feet down into the earth until you are only hair; little buzzing like mosquitoes at the edges of my scalp; Sponge Paper Towel Phone Charger Toothbrush Tampon Dinner (these are six things, I know).

Four Things: I see from my Eye balls. From where do you see?; Big sticky frog; the color red; This line from Ulysses : “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain.”

Four Things: Need to call my doctor; Soap on my back; a small explosion like a popped blood vessel; the base of the earth popping under the weight of myself like an overripe berry

Four Things: The siren from Mrs. Dalloway ; moss growing on the webbing between my fingers; the taste of water, the smell of air; the texture of the universe is repulsively sticky

Four Things: my bones buckling and then breaking in on themselves like toothpicks, all at once or one at a time; the size of an alien; has this satisfied you? This article? Can you parse my sleeping rambles from my waking approximations? Nearly all of this has been crude simulacra. I hope you were wise to that. I hope you did not believe me when I said that I thought these things. I hope you held me in suspicion, as a liar. I hope you do not believe me, even now; the color grey pixelated into boxes of various sizes, like TV static. Grownups sit and watch that, you know. The grey. When they’re alone.