* I can't continue not to do myself as an artist, ] hope [
The morning she told me the truth, she was standing naked in the kitchen, dripping yesterday’s mascara into her stale coffee. The blinds were half cracked, casting prison-bar shadows across her ribcage while she rummaged through a drawer of half-broken knives. I watched the muscles twitch in her jaw as she spoke. Truth, she said, was just another fetish and like all fetishes, it needed a safe word.
I’d spent the night in her bed, drowning in cheap martinis and the smell of her something like burnt vanilla and impending doom. Her sheets were soaked in sweat, and the torn pages of Wired, a business profile book about the dawn of the internet, were scattered across the mattress like used condoms after a four-day bender in Tijuana. Her cat sat in the corner, licking blood off its paw from god knows where, purring like a broken clock keeping time with our breathing.
She slid the knife across the counter, not at me, not at herself, just… across. The metal squealed against the ceramic tile, making my molars vibrate. Her eyes flickered up from her coffee cup. “Truth,” she said, “is like meth cut with drain cleaner. It burns going in and it rots everything on the way out, but goddamn if it doesn’t keep you up all night thinking about the meaning of life.”
I didn’t argue. My mouth was full of the sour taste of regret and stale cigarettes. My head pulsed with the leftover beat of last night’s music, a brutal techno remix of Jesus and the Mary Chain's “Reverence” that shook the club walls like an earthquake. The sound still hummed in my temples, each vibration teasing my eyeballs from behind. She took a sip of her coffee and winced as if swallowing her bullshit.
We’d met three days earlier at a philosophy bar, the kind with overpriced mezcal flights and murals of Derrida painted on crumbling brick. She was lecturing a table of hedge fund interns about Foucault and BDSM consent while chain-smoking clove cigarettes. Her words flowed like absinthe, sweet and burning, hiding the wormwood underneath. I told her her lipstick was smeared. She told me my moral compass was too.
The first night she let me in, she carved a truth into my chest with her fingernails: “You don’t want honesty, you want validation.” Her breath smelled like gin and unresolved trauma. The sex was violent, all teeth and bones, and when we finished, she sat astride me reading excerpts from Discipline and Punish until I fell asleep with bruises blooming down my hips like fresh-cut violets.
By day two, we’d invented gods to blame for our brokenness. She poured salt in my wounds and called it purification. I slapped her so hard across the thighs and called it theology. The neighbors banged on the walls as we screamed ourselves raw with deconstructionist foreplay, stripping away meaning until all that was left was bone, spit, and the faint scent of iron in the dark.
Now, in her kitchen of knives and cold ceramic floors, she was finishing the lecture she started at the bar. “The nature of truth is that it’s a gangbang of perspectives,” she said, flicking ash into the sink. “Correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, relativistic, constructivist… it’s all semantic porn for academics who can’t get laid.” She smirked, running her tongue across her teeth like she was tasting me again.
My mouth was dry, my tongue thick with last night’s tequila and the acrid taste of confession. The room felt like it was breathing, each inhale making the cracked paint tremble with exhaustion. I watched her cut a grapefruit, her blade splitting the pink flesh open like a chest cavity. Juice sprayed across her collarbone and dripped between her breasts. She licked it off absentmindedly, eyes locked on mine, daring me to speak.
But I stayed silent. Because I knew then what truth was. It wasn’t a revelation or an orgasm or a philosophical monologue at 6 am while the sun rose over a city that hated both of us. The truth was her tongue sliding into my mouth after calling me a coward. The truth was the copper taste of blood on my lip after she bit down too hard. The truth was the smell of her thighs at 3 am when I thought I loved her.
She walked over, straddled me on the kitchen chair, and pressed her grapefruit-slick mouth to my ear. “You want to know the truth?” she whispered. Her voice burned down my spine. “The truth is, I love you. And the truth is, I’m lying.”
Then she kissed me so hard I could taste my own lies in her mouth.
And that, my friend, is the nature of truth. It fucks you harder than any lover ever will. And it never, ever calls you back.
Chapter II: The Nature of Her
The next time I saw her, she was wearing a man's Oxford shirt with blood-speckled cuffs and nothing underneath but skin scented with yesterday's sins. The morning light carved her silhouette into a living sculpture of hunger and indifference. She leaned against the cracked window, smoking a bent cigarette she’d fished out of an ashtray overflowing with spent truths and half-baked confessions.
“Truth,” she exhaled, swirling the smoke with a chipped turquoise ring, “is nothing but a safe word no one remembers to use.” She took a drag so long her lips burned crimson, leaving lipstick stains on the filter like claw marks on a lover’s back. I watched her chest rise and fall beneath the shirt, a faint tremor in her ribs with each breath, as though the honesty in her lungs threatened to burst her apart.
Last night was still vibrating in my bones. She’d straddled me on the moth-eaten carpet while the radiator clanged out some mechanical death rattle. The sex was savage and ritualistic, an exorcism performed in a language only our bodies spoke. Her nails tore trails across my shoulders, spelling out syllables of pain that my tongue learned to pronounce before my mind could comprehend. I remember her pressing her forehead to mine as she came, whispering something in German, wahrheit, I think truth.
But in the silence afterward, when my pulse slowed to a dull, erotic ache, she pulled away, lit another cigarette, and blew the smoke straight into my eyes without blinking. Her gaze held mine like a fist around my throat.
“You think that was real?” she asked. “That was a performance, darling. Truth is what you do when no one’s watching.”
She didn’t kiss me after that. She just stood, naked and trembling with the aftershock of pleasure, and walked to the window to stare at the bruised neon bleeding from the liquor store across the street. The smell of her sweat, cigarettes, and sex clung to the sheets like guilt you can’t scrub out.
The Consumption of Truth
Later, she fed me truths like poison apples.
She cooked breakfast wearing only her bruises. Eggs and burnt toast with black coffee thick enough to stand a spoon in. Each bite tasted like regret and unsent love letters. She slid the plate across the table to me and smiled a raw, wounded smile, bright with something close to sadness.
“Eat up,” she said. “You’ll need your strength for tonight.”
I didn’t ask what was happening tonight. She loved to watch me squirm under the weight of her unspoken promises. Her hand reached across the table, fingertips still warm from the pan, and touched the corner of my mouth, wiping away a crumb with terrifying tenderness. The contact set off a riot of nerve endings in my chest, a panic of desire that burned down to my stomach.
“Tell me something true,” she said.
Then she leaned in and kissed me with a mouthful of black coffee, her tongue sliding over mine until I tasted every unspeakable secret hiding behind her teeth. I felt my pulse trip over itself, dizzy with caffeine and hunger for her. When she pulled back, my lips were trembling.
“The real truth,” she whispered against my mouth, “is that you’d let me cut you open just to see what I’d find inside.”
And the terrifying part was that she wasn’t wrong.
The Ritual of Deconstruction
That night, she took me to a warehouse on the edge of the city. An abandoned textile mill reeking of mold, piss, and broken promises. The walls were covered in shitty graffiti anarchist slogans, fragmented poetry, cartoon dicks spray-painted over philosophical quotes like some deranged footnote system for the damned.
Inside, candles flickered in broken glass jars, illuminating rusted machinery draped with black lace and red rope. People were watching from the shadows, faces half-hidden by masks, cigarettes glowing in the dark like angry fireflies.
She led me to the center of the room, unbuttoned her coat, and let it fall to the ground. Underneath, she wore nothing but thin strips of leather crisscrossing her body like a lattice for forbidden fruit. Her nipples were pierced with small gold bars that glinted in the candlelight. My mouth watered at the sight of her, the heat of shame blooming across my neck.
“Undress,” she ordered.
I hesitated, my hands trembling as I unbuttoned my shirt. The crowd shifted in the dark, their eyes stripping me before I could finish. The cold bit at my skin, but my cock throbbed with every humiliating second.
She circled me, her boots clicking against the concrete like punctuation marks in a sentence I hadn’t read yet. Then she pressed against my back, her hands sliding up my chest, nails grazing my nipples until I hissed through clenched teeth.
“Tonight,” she whispered, her breath hot against my ear, “we deconstruct everything you think you are. We dismantle your illusions. Strip you down to raw nerves and ugly truths.”
Her hand wrapped around my throat, squeezing just enough to make my vision shimmer at the edges. The crowd watched, silent and hungry, and then I bent her over a rusted metal table. The leather straps cut into her hips as I tied her down, each knot a syllable in my thesis.
I felt her press against me, the cool kiss of metal dragging down my spine, the blade of a knife or maybe just her ring. It didn’t matter. My body trembled with terror and desire, each breath a prayer to gods I didn’t believe in.
“Truth,” she murmured as I slid inside her, filling her with a savage, all-consuming pleasure-pain that ripped a scream from her chest, “is what you feel when everything else has been taken away.”
I came inside her then, shaking and broken open, a vessel for her gospel of desecration.
And in that moment, with her face pressed to the cold metal table, sweat stinging my eyes and cum dripping down her thigh, I understood her.
Truth isn’t a philosophy.
Truth is a cunt with sharp teeth, and it only loves you when you bleed.
- M y t h o s ] Artist of Wanton [
