Self-Portrait Without Sense of Self
During a routine pass through New York City, I attend my requisite hang-out with the friend who saved my life in college. She doesn’t care about me anymore, and she shouldn’t. We sit in the back of a gay bar, the wallpaper tessellations of men penetrating each other, and I watch her stare past me.
Staring past my laptop at the reflection of the sunset fading in the adjacent skyscraper. Eli comes home to me sitting in the near dark. You like it better this way, don’t you? I don’t know how to agree. I don’t know how to tell him that I am the sunset but my body is the red reflection. That he is stuck being the sky.
The Red River Entertainment District becomes accessible by virtue of me having an episode there. Tuezgayz at Barbarella becomes a hospital by virtue of Gabbie and Eli taking care of me there. I don’t like me. I put down my tequila sunrise, watch one hand reach towards the dance floor. I watch my other hand grab it and pull back.
Pulling on my backpack after another skyscraper appointment, I cannot help but to still suspect dysfunction, hidden beneath the purposed necessity of a larger cure. I lay on the elevator floor. At home, the bottoms of all my mugs grow stained with myo-inositol powder, little white angels I do not trust but drink anyway as a gesture towards survival.
In a gesture towards survival, I decide I should tell my mother of the doctor’s refusal. I want her to say, Why is he punishing your body to cure your mind? Instead she says, Well, he was probably right not to trust you, don’t you think?
No thinking while I am in the shower, just wet and noise and drain. A fitness influencer’s TikTok loops endlessly from where I’ve left my phone by the sink: You just have to listen to your body instead of punishing it. Under the dribble of water, I listen to my body, then spit back at it: I don’t believe you.
I don’t believe I belong at the conference in Lisbon. Every morning, I put on Eli’s clothes first, then my own clothes over them. All day I am aware of the slight discomfort, the snag of my belt loops. Eating salt shrimp with Banu, I say, I feel nostalgic for the life I’m living right now. She says, I think that means you’re happy. I say, I think it means I’m sad.
At Sad Girl Saturdays, I watch the two very average, very white twinks start making out at the drop of Lady Gaga’s “Rain On Me,” both unaware of my staring. I spend another nine dollars on a vodka soda but dream of calamansi. When I walk into the lobby of the apartment building, Kevin and the coffee table quickly stop laughing and glance at me.
I glance at the selfie I have just taken, think, No. I stare at it, think, No. I come back to it later, think, If only I looked like that.
If only I looked better today, I think to myself at drag brunch, looking out at the sea of pale torsos in crop tops. Between lipsyncs, I tell Kevin that I am trying to learn to speak less as a way of speaking and more as a way of proving that I exist. Isn’t it all just noise, he offhands, staring at a man. The city hall bell tower clangs, the chimes random, counting no hour, making no sense.
Nonsense, I’m sorry for avoiding you at the party. When I moved to this city, I told myself I would go off-book, tell people about us. But still the pharmacist knows my name, says hi when I am only stopping in for chips. Still I function high without believing in it. I wake early, I hustle— forgive me this function.
Functionally, it’s free accommodaysh, I text Eli as I consider institutionalizing myself. No paying rent or buying groceries, free time to read, never forgetting to stop by the pharmacy. When we say someone has gone crazy, we must first ask why they wanted to go.
Don’t go, disorder. I remember when you used to be a sign of joy— Eli’s kitchen after a dinner party, or the canvas tote of groceries left spilling onto on the counter in the rush to get into bed, socks still on. You were not just this fear that I carry, a plastic bag cutting into my palm that I must not go home without.
I go home without groceries often. At 10:30pm I force myself to go to Wheatsville, creep through the health food aisle, unable to afford the right shape of konjac root that will convince me that I should be alive. So I palm the peaches. I thump the melons. I am thumping the melons. I am thumping the melons to keep from killing myself.
To keep from killing myself, I trek to a Filipino art show at a suburban community center. A still life painting of peach-flavored glucose tablets in a fruit bowl. A plaster cast of a bottle of metformin. A quilt stitched out of used compressions socks. None of the artists are charging more than $100 for their work. There is only one bench. One bench is enough.
Enough, Rob. Then, I’m sorry, I can’t stop, I can’t breathe. Then, This is one of those things you need to be able to say you’ve been through. The cursor shakes uncontrollably as I move it towards the Zoom link.
The subway zooming under Yonge, I read Tim Dlugos, listen to Chappell Roan— but I am not doing that. I am watching myself do that from above, impressed with my falseness, how I imitate a life. I have begun to count on things fading: the sound of the music as the lyrics empty into you, everything you remember from that one book, the train in its tunnel, that self-loathing feeling, the sun.
The sun is insane to never miss a morning. From the abandoned lifeguard chair, I stare directly at it. I must trust light to be good. Still, I am scared of the days, though they are the sole container of everything I love.
Empty containers of brown rice, coarse ground coffee, frozen berries, everything I try to love. I clean the kitchen in silence, gaze at myself in the dead glass of the induction burner, the dry skin and cracked eyes of a young cartographer convincing himself: someday someone will need these maps.
Maps I never use spill out of the glove compartment when the boy kneeling in front of me in the footwell knocks it open. Later, at the lake, I sit in my sweat, alone on the big rocks, wondering if I have chosen wrong, trying to have a moment, but I get distracted by my phone, and then it gets dark, and then it’s all over.
Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts and 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, he is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). The managing poetry editor at Foglifter, he lives on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires in what is commonly known as Chicago.
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