Is sex not just a rehearsal for death? The pleasurable role-play of becoming-body? During sex I want to override my person until I’m all sensation, all abandon, until I am my body to the fullest extent possible but also transcending my body by becoming another’s, a hybrid body, and even pushing towards a pleasure that exceeds all physical containers and extends into nothingness, total erasure, fusing my mortality with another’s mortality, their death with my own until we reach orgasm, petite mort, the temporary weakening or loss of consciousness that prefigures our deaths, the total expenditure of our life force, a moment in which we transcend our forms, pushing through the border of my condition as a living being to touch the nothingness beyond.

The young Italian I was with offered to smoke me up. He was already pretty tweaked himself. He put the pipe to my lips and held the lighter below it. I inhaled once, twice… In high school I kept a shoebox of newspaper articles, a combination of clippings about the school plays I was in and historic events like the capture of Saddam Hussein, the London bombing, Hurricane Katrina. When I rediscovered the box years later, I found, on the top of the pile, an article about a community production of Waiting for Godot I was in the summer before grade twelve. I turned the clipping over and began reading a partially cut-off article about a suicide attack in Lower Dir, Pakistan. Colonel Nadeem Mirza, Pakistani military operation commander for the region, told the interviewer: “Five of them detonated the explosives strapped to their bodies; however, one was missing till we discovered him hiding in the bushes. He was scared of killing himself because the effect of the drug had ended.” The drug Mirza was referring to was Pervitin, a chemical derivative of methamphetamine, otherwise commonly known as meth. Meth, he explained, induced paranoid psychosis, which amounted to a loss of contact with reality. A psychological severing of self from body. “Children who are trained as suicide bombers are injected with drugs to create an elated sense of the self,” Mirza said. “Once the effect of the drug wears off, the bomber is incapable of detonating himself.”