Notice of Intent Not to Participate

I watched Death Becomes Her for the first time at twenty-seven and my boyfriend joked he thought I would drink the potion of eternal youth if I was offered it, but he’s wrong because I never wanted eternal youth, I just wanted some more time. I stopped going to yoga. I deactivated my TikTok and disabled all push notifications from my news apps. I sent FOIA requests for my own records to a bunch of government agencies and when they sent me the data I replied with “pls delete” which turned out not to be a legitimate and binding deletion request in the eyes of the law. I put off opening a HYSA for two years and by that time inflation had eaten most of my savings. I deleted the foot pictures I had taken in a bout of optimism and never posted. I joined the antinatalist movement in solidarity with the defenseless babies, and marched with indignation, screeching at the top of my lungs, outraged at the injustice of being nonconsensually birthed. I stopped masturbating to pleasant things, like expensive Persian rugs and the idea of being handed a wad of cash in a smoky bar in exchange for a handful of heart-wrenching poems I had scribbled on the napkins, and started masturbating to things I felt I deserved, like messages from my ex-girlfriend informing me that she found my drag persona derivative. I also masturbated to the thought of abstaining from paying taxes as a form of protest and going to prison. In some of my fantasies I went happily because I was standing up for my beliefs, and in some of them I went miserably, because I understood that I had squandered my whole life up until that point even though I had every freedom in the world. I thought about how I would get so, so, so good at writing in prison. I stopped drinking water and replaced it with Diet Coke, which I hated. I tried to trick myself by pretending I was one of those women going “a Ceasar salad and a crispy Diet Coke, yum!!!” I somehow overheard all the time. I thought about how nice it would be to get a mean butch girlfriend in prison, and how I would feign resistance, but I would actually be super into her the whole time. I stopped blowing my nose and just sucked my snot back up with loud, mucusy gasps. I burped in public and walked barefoot. I ate expired things on purpose – moldy bread, soft oranges, slimy spinach. I wondered if I could get arrested for pretending to have had an abortion. I followed the Instagram accounts of all the people I could think of who had better lives than me. I started handing over every idea I had to AI, like, here is something I think could be cool and help me stave off my constant despair and deathly anxiety if I ever spent any real time with it, now you make it.  I stopped checking when my coworkers were last logged in on Slack. I started flushing my mail down the toilet then I didn’t call my landlord when it overflowed then I didn’t let in the maintenance guy when my downstairs neighbors got flooded then I kind of just stood in the hallway when my door was eventually kicked down then I didn’t pack any of my things when I was evicted then I didn’t move when cars sped towards me or drunk men approached me and I didn’t try to find shelter when it got to subzero and I didn’t find the dumpsters with actual food in them and I didn’t try to go to a hospital when I first started to get dizzy and my limbs wouldn’t move right and I vomited blood that one time and slowly slowly slowly everything came out and off of me and I didn’t stop believing the entire time and slowly slowly slowly I was going exactly where I wanted to be or maybe I wasn’t going I just slid down the wall in the alleyway I don’t really remember that part but I was where I needed to be and I felt warmth and love all around me because I had done it and I had done it for myself and I had done it for all the babies that nobody else would do it for.