devour the flesh

a year dancing with rage

In the sterile womb of Jersey City, if you sit and watch a while, you can bear witness to the beating heart of corporate America. Here, along the waterfront, where banks and commercial entities alike feign importance, you can watch this organ function in all its pulsating, bloody, slimy glory: senior managers in starchy button-downs, shouldering duffel bags, talking about frenetic nothings on the phone; junior analysts, hiding happy hour hangovers with oat lattes and Chill Mint nicotine gum; women wearing ballet flats and cropped fit Zara blazers; men disguising receding hairlines with gelled crew cuts, swaggering in and out of glass buildings with their artfully hidden secrets. Everyone has been reduced to the same amount of nothing—no more than cells delivering oxygen to the vascular organ, ciphers turning around and around in revolving doors. Everyone is equally insignificant in the face of A Business Plan. They coagulate into a viscous soup, being pulled through aortas that channel them from the train station to the office door. The line for Just Salad in the adjoining mall wraps around the floor during lunch. They have a system so you won’t ever have to wait more than fifteen minutes for your Crispy Chicken Poblano.

There is a strong idea of fraternity here, not because of a shared commonality between individuals, but rather the compulsion that you are nothings beating within the same fleshy walls, so there must be inherent community within it. It must be true. The men sitting atop this system, who hide their sexual hunger and bloodthirst and baldness, spread their pink legs wide across leather seats and rhapsodize about how everyone here is part of a family, a community, a team. They wax lyrical about it like they are preparing to make everyone jerk off over a cookie. Of course, they have no qualms about turning on these idealisms in the face of a dangling carrot. Money is the siren’s call; greed, a Hydra. True sustenance is slim. They want people who are hungry, they say. They want people who are insatiable.

I do not think fondly of the limited time I spent on the waterfront in Jersey City last year. I think about the months I felt disrespected, belittled, objectified. I think about the Mexican restaurant where blazered ciphers would gather for company tab margaritas and I felt a self-disgust so deep in my bones I thought I might be having some kind of deathly allergic reaction to cotija cheese. I think about the route I would take along the water in the moments I had alone, walking past the starchy shirts, the hungover interns, the brassy highlights and misshapen executives, staring at my hollowing reflection in the Hudson River, wondering if it would please get eaten by the water: Drown drown drown drown drown.

All throughout my life, I have been told that I must learn to keep these thoughts to myself. I have been called, no less than a dozen times by the same genre of crystal-wearing brunette woman: callous, rude, vulgar, brusque. Teachers said I must learn to think before I speak. Guidance counselors said, over and over: rise above and keep rage at bay, leave it as some gnarled, rotted thing that must be treated and sedated. I get why you’re mad, but you have to learn to channel it into something else. Rage is, they said, the thing that will cost you jobs and love and other people’s respect. Of course. The world is most unkind to young girls—no one wants a young girl who is unkind back. As you get older, you hear endless adages from any number of “professional development” resources about how ugliness and success live in separate universes. Life is tough, I was told. If you are angry about it, no one will admire you. No one will believe you. No one will listen to you. No one will love you.

When I began the year without dictation of job or money or general life direction once again, I told myself that time-worn mantra: my rage will get me nowhere. If you’re angry, no one will take you seriously, I told myself in a voice that sounded like an echo. Nobody wants to hear about how angry you are. But I’d never felt so much rage at once before. It spilled from me, like syrup dribbling through my orifices, so delicious and tempting to taste. I would spend mornings vibrating in a red haze, repeating mantras in my head as I pulled myself from bed: Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. Drown the bad and everything with it. I wrote down lists of shit I hated: Zionists, polyester fabric, ChatGPT, industry lobbyists, weak-willed people. Jersey City. Jersey City. The friends who chose it over me. The people who said they cared but didn’t. Liberty Mutual ads. “Pilates body.” French bistros. The profession of consulting. Vodka waters. Pronouncing it “ah-loo-min-um.”

I was afraid of how angry I was, too. Everything around me already felt like it was falling apart—I didn’t want to crumble internally, too. I sternly asked myself if I was going to sink or swim. Drown the bad and everything with it.

So I forced myself to answer emails instead of repeat mantras. I crossed out my rage lists with to-do ones instead. I told everyone I was fine. Doing well, even. I didn’t want to be caught out in my unbecoming wrath, exposed and vulnerable, all my unattractive dangly bits hanging out for anyone to see. It was better to be fine. So I carried on. I made a list of publications I wanted to write for and published article after article in a kind of possessed madness, neatly checking off each new byline I thought would really prove to everyone just how fine and great I was. The people who watched my life fall apart in real time let me know how impressed they were. They told me I was killing it and doing great. I willed it to be true. I hid the shameful secret of my anger. I called its suppression a success. As long as they thought I was treading above water, that’s all that really mattered.

To be fair, there were a handful of moments where I could step back and admire how much I achieved. Most days, though, I did not feel proud of myself. Instead, I danced somewhere between fear and entrancement of the locked rage inside me. It was impossible to rein her in. I felt her clawing at my insides, lashing out when I least expected it: walking past a salad bar, scrolling on Instagram, coming face-to-face with old coworkers. I don’t even think I realized how much it was weighing on me until CT looked at me under fluorescent lights and told me that I needed to take a break. “It’s okay to be angry, you know,” they said. “I think you’re exhausted from trying not to be.” I burst into tears on the 6 train.

The day I allowed myself to feast on my fury felt like I was gorging. I made myself a banana split sundae of rage, smothering hot fudge onto strawberry-vanilla ice cream and spraying snowy trees of whipped cream on top. I made myself a Crispy Chicken Poblano of anger, shoveling bitter chicken-kale-lettuce-avocado into my mouth, delighting in the sourness and creaminess of this hate that had been brewing inside me, letting the flavor coat the walls of my oesophagus. I licked the syrup from my eyes and poured it into hot tea. I wrote more lists. I started adding to my email templates with raw, hand-written notes about the growing list of shit I hated: the G train, the overblown military budget, misappropriation of taxes to pay for genocide overseas, Eric Adams’ stupid fucking bracelets. I stopped worrying about what would happen if I got found out in my unsightliness. I imagined that part of me sinking to the bottom of the Hudson River.

I welcomed the new intimate space between my rage and me. I appreciated the spaces she filled in my heart, the way she made me feel truly full for the first time in a long time. We watched the oppressive humidity of summer ebb into the tepid rain of autumn, gamboling through the seasons hand-in-hand, brushing each others’ hair, dancing under moonlight. I felt her sugar-spun silhouette against mine and realized we were the same. The brunette women were wrong! My rage has been protecting me all along. I realized I would like to protect her, too. One day, I swam to shore and found hope waiting inside a bed of forget-me-nots.

We have coalesced in a Hesperidian way, my rage and me. We sing sweet song together in Hera’s garden of golden apples that could start a war. My rage is the only thing that compels me to wake up and see another day, the only thing that comforts me through a world that would rather be indifferent than angry. Earlier this year a cipher told me that something didn’t deserve his anger—it was beneath him. I think I find that to be the pinnacle of arrogance and entirely ignorant. Everything deserves my rage. Everything deserves my joy. Everything deserves my care. I am above no one, after all. Only a fool could believe that they live in a world where extraction without consequence is forever possible. Only a liar could believe that deprivation from the self could lead to some kind of enlightenment.

They tell me I will have a short life this way, being so angry. But I would much rather live a short life feeling intensely rather than a long and cold one thinking I am above feeling at all. I’ll be an emotional glutton if it means I can be something. What’s composure to the bloody organ that demands your hunger?

“when i die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries
and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out
and a million maggots that had made up their brains
crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh
that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person
that i probably tried
to love” — Nikki Giovanni, “When I Die”