Observed Dis(s)/Remembrance -The Real Story
Owning Your Shadow Work- unedited, complete with a study guide/authors notes!
This piece is a short story I submitted to a William Burroughs tribute being reprinted yet again for constantly changing reasons and with an upgraded TOC and different writers for reasons that are unimportant to me.
I originally submitted a confessional poem but the editor/publisher found it “hard to understand” and requested I unpack it into a short piece of “autofiction” so in two or three drafts, I did. I rewrote it until they understood it. My first draft was set up using the Camera cues and language of moviemaking because it plays out in the narrator’s memory to mirror the original poem.
We all know that memory cannot be trusted. The film reels in our heads always have beautiful filters, better costumes, makeup, and there’s a great soundtrack accompanying them, if we’re lucky. In my autofictions, my life is always a stranger one than my life in reality, I’m a poet and writer, I create worlds and populate them.
This is a work based on the lowest point of my adult life. This piece was difficult shadow work for me. I initially trusted the editor and publisher after meeting him late April. Until I quickly, realized I could not. Doing so, after noticing it being unhealthy and crossing boundaries I was uncomfortable with, I ultimately went no contact on July 3, 2024. Redacted screenshot provided in which I was confronted 6/4/2024. I did not respond. I’m No Contact.
I’ll not name him. He doesn’t deserve the free PR. My contract, names and presses redacted, does NOT state I must be FB friends with him. It states he may use my story and only use it for promotional materials for that book. I met all my contractual obligations. I received $48.50 in payment. I’d fulfilled my contract. I was then informed days later. he had dropped my story and deleted them from that book. I was sent proof. The contract was nullified and voided by him stating that on social media. Rights reverted in full to me. He cannot use my story to promote his book. I’m not in that book. The law and precedent is clear on this. It rotted in my documents.
When I went NC, a month later, he posted my story in an early draft form, in it’s entirety. Without my consent or approval. He took my Shadow Work and published it to promote a book that I was not going to be in because he dropped my story because I went NC.
That is breach of contract to share my story, without my consent or agreement by me, with edits he made after initial posting of it on his personal Substack for promotion of a story he dropped from a book. It was a violation of contract, respect, ethics, and abusive. It was not his to publish, even attributing copyright to me in edits added later, as he removed it from his book when I went NC. It was a violation- full stop.
Study Questions-
What are your limits? Where do you draw your lines? When is silence the appropriate response out of fear? How much is too much? Does your life, well-being, integrity and self-respect matter to you more than possible embarrassment? When does compassion and a sense of obligation and people pleasing turn into self destruction? Do you respect yourself and others? Do you stand up for your principles? Can you look back without anger?
So I’m giving the world my ugliest, shameful and healing story for free here.
This story is based in some truths but it’s also containing a very generous amount of fiction. Hence “autofiction” and not “non-fiction”. Here is the actual final draft I submitted to him, not the first draft of two, possibly three at most, I sent him. I just kept rewriting it until he understood it. Apparently he did not understand it. My partner in this literary piece, based on my last ex, hopefully last ex in my lifetime, and I were polyamorous. The poster made it sound much more complicated and unethical.
Polyamory has rules a couple decides and those rules can be broken. An open relationship of any sort draws some lines. We had a line at cheating. Polyamory is not cheating. We were not swingers either. I had a commited secondary relationship and that lovely person is still a platonic friend of over twelve years.
This is a story about cheating by a mentally ill polyamorous person, drug addiction, my depression and anxiety as my world imploded around me because of a bad living situation I was in, ableism, and ultimately, me saving myself, reclaiming my life, my boundaries and leaving all of that behind and surviving.
I was never very good in polyamory. Bad partners trigger my low self-esteem and insecurities. I am by nature monogamous. I am very happy in my healthy boring exclusive monogamous relationship, so much so I am going to break my vow to never remarry as I didn’t think I even deserved comittment. I was divorced in 2006. I am not good at polyamory. I tried. It wasn’t for me. You do you though! I’m just not wired for it and chose poor communicators previously.
It wasn’t until 2021 in my cancer battle that I realized I deserve to be loved and respected the way I want and need to be loved and respected. This is a story about me making that empowering decision and it has been a good decision. This is a direct copy pasta from my files.
There is a and was a happy ending. I am living it -and I am grateful to be living it and I am grateful to my beloved beshert “doppelgänger” (M.G. Allen) and my friends.🖤
Observed Diss/Remembrance
By Pixie Bruner
How did they all pluck off her wings? Was it with forceps or with pointed words? Both equally sharp, pins and needles that fell behind her like grim breadcrumbs. But that girl, she wasn’t ever going Home again. It was 2016 when it seriously went pear-shaped, sideways and (not-her) tits-up.
Fae and her partner Sunshine were DJs. People think being a DJ means big money, but unless you are wearing an LED mouse head, a bucket with electrical tape or sexy European motorcycle helmets to remain anonymous and have crawled your way up to festival stages over dead bodies and via strategic alliances, your five or six EPs on niche labels aren’t going to make you a name or a dime ever. You’re grateful to be playing a “rave” in a rented paintball warehouse in Atlanta to a couple hundred people all roller skating and chewing gum or aggro on whatever bump was offered them on a key from a friends baggie of something. The Beatport genre release chart means jackshit but an ego boost and it gets old driving home to the Northern Metro suburbs as the sun rises over the city every weekend.
Always the designated driver, she was. Sober, with a car full of lost boys riding shotgun and in the backseat, still tripping balls, drunk, coming down from a few day’s meth binge seeing shadow people in the driveway or, weirder still, the one time Sunshine claimed he saw furries with torches doing a demonic ritual in the backyard.
The neighbor beyond the treeline had a back porch light on, and there were no torches in sight, nor any groups in fur suits. She’d have paid good money, the entire 100 bucks in cash from the club owners money laundering through the DJ payments, to have seen furries doing evil rituals. Of course, one night, an imaginary squirrel got trapped in Sunshine’s hair (it was really an imaginary squirrel inside his crazed skull on the Burrito’s special Sudafed derived made-in-the-bathtub-allegedly pop rocks) and he was flailing, screaming, tangling his waist-length tresses, threatening to find scissors and cut his gorgeous hair to free the invisible squirrel.
She calmly flew above this weekend routine craziness, tranquilized his punk ass with a few Phenergan from her emergency med kit (and the closest to Thorazine she had on hand) and put him down to sleep it off. When he crawled back into consciousness, Sunshine claimed the squirrel had been real. It was definitely one of the final straws and the harbinger of things to come.
She knew they were on borrowed time and that hand fasting six years before had been a very bad error in judgment. Hell, she’d made lists of pros and cons back after two years with him, and the cons were double the pros even then. This was no life for a college-educated woman in her mid-40’s.
One day, Sunshine said he had an old friend coming over.
Fae thought nothing of it. They both had extracurricular lovers and were polyamorous. She’d been over her respectable lovers that night before and came home to a fresh new hell. Bonnimort King Mikah Barry Maurice Robin Andy Gibb was there, their shiny late model SUV soccer-mom-bus in the drive. No, she was not acquainted with them or knew any backstory of the person, which changed hourly.
This person was sitting on the couch in the garage smoking area regaling Sunshine and the other village idjit with whom she lived with tales of trauma over a plate of chopped up Oxy from a kitchen salad plate. Seems Bonnimort was a “recovering heroin addict,” snorting Oxy in her house. That didn’t look like “recovering” to her. Her wings went up in defense.
Here are some facts she gleaned in a 15 minute conversation she had with Bonnimort while Sunshine left the room to “make snacks.”
The Village Idjit, merely a functioning alcoholic who had since lost his opiate tolerance of a tragic car wreck over a decade prior, stared off into space ignoring everything but his numbness.
Bonnimort just “needed to get away for the day" and had been talking to Sunshine on social media (Probably True and a small red flag as Fae had never ever heard about this person before and Sunshine never shared this info previously).
They were close old friends (not exactly the truth).
They were trans and in the process of transitioning to a man. (No problem, they flew under the same flag as Fae overall, but also eventually discovered to be untrue).
They were married (red flag).
They were a recovering heroin addict and had OD’ed four times and been brought back to life by Narcan or quick-witted fellow junkies who’d not overdosed calling for the Wahmbulance. (Probably true and a huge red flag- football field scale red flag).
They preferred he/him pronouns and identified as a man. (No problem but they switched pronouns depending on whom they are talking to and it was inconsistent and easy to not know what they were that hour/minute- no pin switching).
They were a recovering bulimic (big red flag and proved to be untrue, they were not in recovery).
They were a recovering kleptomaniac. (Untrue in part, was present tense klepto, and another red flag).
They had multiple suicide attempts and had Borderline Personality Disorder (All flags- all red- seeing red) and had more triggers than a gun show or armory. (Red flags in spotlights!)
Now there is a Giant Red Flag on the scale of the Mar-A-Lago US Flag in play. This crazy person needs to not hang out here. Fae does not want him/her/them here now at her house. She is beyond uncomfortable. Bonnimort is dangerous and bad news and trouble. She/He/They (it kept changing as soon as Fae used one) is a threat.
So she goes upstairs to the kitchen and tells Sunshine her concerns.
She is calm, rational. She’s not snorting from that plate. But her going through the inventory of red flags, trigger warnings, danger, and stranger danger is ignored ignored ignored.
Somehow they have charmed the Lost Boys. They agree to let her/him/them stay overnight. She is overruled because House Rules, two against one- all equal on the lease.
She has to endure the houseguest for a night. The gaslighting has begun. So now this petty criminal, a Peter/Petra Pan, a kleptomaniac, has stole into her home and slid control of it into the hoodie kangaroo pocket with their packet of heroin they saved for that evening.
Oh boy that evening. Sunshine, is sitting between Bonnimort and his alleged so-called wife whose wings they are about to pluck off and torture.
Bonnimort is snuggled in under a blanket taking up an entire section of the couch with feet up over him. The wife is huddled in a defensive ball in the opposite corner of the sectional at the other end. Bonnimort nodded off early after smoking something.
They are squirming and smiling under the blanket. She watches them closely and as a brightly lit TV screen illuminates the room. She notices Sunshine has his hand under the blanket and in Bonnimort. She glares at him in rage, hazel eyes slits. He offers his wife a penitent orgasm with his left-hand- non-dominant. Denied. Fae places a baby aspirin between her knees and no speck of it ever falls again for him. No leftovers for her!
Again, Sunshine has decided that is better to ask forgiveness than permission for putting his parts in people she doesn’t know or approve of. Polyamorous couples can still have someone who cheats. She is so furious she’s confused. Sunshine is a dude. Plus, Bonnimort identifies as a transman, and Sunshine allegedly is strictly heterosexual.
Bonnimort is greedy. That’s what they are. Seems that Sunshine had gotten obsessed with Bonnimort 14 years ago before they began transitioning. When they were someone else entirely back then. No excuses accepted, no acceptable apology offered.
Triangulation begins. Divide and conquer. Sunshine goes over to their house with them to get their stuff the next day. They apparently have a five year old son, a pet dog they adore, and are a SAHJM- Stay at Home Junkie Mom. They have run away from home, abandoned their child, their doggie, are using hard drugs, bulimic, and are using her home and her dumbass naive partner as a orgasm donor.
Apparently allegedly and never fully confirmed or denied, Sunshine had issues taking no for an answer for 14 years prior at a rave when they were in the backseat of a car together and Bonnimort, then a she and AFAB, fled Sunshine’s wandering hands. They were not violated and was a virgin at the time according to Bonnimort. Yet, they still showed up on his doorstep? Nothing added up. No one of any gender goes to a man’s house who once pressured you for sex to escape. They came to use, that was certain.
It should be mentioned, Sunshine doesn’t have a job. Not in over 3 years. He’s a kept man. She pays the bills, rent, car, phone, gas. She is the sugar mama. He has a cushy life on her money. He lacks nothing essential.
It’s getting old though. She’s mentioned a few times that Sunshine may want to consider getting a job of some sort. Even The Village Idjit has mentioned that Sunshine is lazy and sits with on his fat ass all day reading Reddit.
The Idjit is “self-employed”. He works 60+ hours a week as an Uber/Lyft/Gig Economy driver/courier to pay for a nice car, his separated green-card marrying and earned by marriage wife’s car, her townhouse, his daughters child support, to pay off the lawyer’s bill for the 2010 or 2011 DUI a slick lawyer got him off the hook for, and his African girlfriend who, though she claims to be a “good Christian woman”, is demanding the American girlfriend good life from a man with no potential because she is “too good a woman” for her “countrymen’s hood life” aspirations, but still is fucking a very-much still married man who can only claim he’s gonna put a ring on it eventually.
As the Village Idjit’s girlfriend is an actual homophobe, the resident woman doesn’t think Village Idjit mentioned Bonnimort is gay and trans to his girlfriend, who doesn’t come over much. He didn’t know Fae was queer as he never asked and doesn’t know she’s had committed relationships with women.
Secrets kept, like when the Village Idjit had his (just found out she was pregnant again) high school sweetie come over and they both got so drunk and wasted she peed and puked in his bed, which they shared. His roommates covered for him when his girlfriend wondered why he wasn’t answering his phone and finally contacted the lady of the house (Fae) to track her man down (he was busy cleaning piss from his mattress, sending his ex back to her husband and too hungover to lie all morning).
Weirdly, The Village Idjit still believes his second trophy girlfriend from another continent will be a successful supermodel and make it big, like Iman or Duckie Thot, a delulu of her looks giving them the Good Life, despite his girlfriend being in her early-mid 30’s. An Amazon, the African Queen. She will wait forever for him to divorce and wife her up, her biological clock snooze button getting hit forever until it stops being able to even ring and Idjit is shooting high likelihoods of mutants cause in his world “men don’t cause birth defects”, even though he’s already weeks away from 35. They want “beautiful mixed children” like his Eastern European child from the green card marriage he’s stuck in- his babies are either Aryan-perfect or going to be exotic-perfect.
A week later, Bonnimort is now a roommate and says when they get their disability benefits they’ll pay rent and contribute to expenses. They have a backpack of stuff in the guest room that shares a common wall with the bedroom of the lady of the house and her increasingly distant partner. They pack oddly light.
Fae is now funding and feeding all them and her partner. Her partner is desperate to fuck the new roommate, which breaks the “Don’t shit where we eat” rule and “No cohabitation “ rules of Fae and Sunshine’s open relationship.
The shopping list changes for Costco–-now there are special foods and meals only they requested, special orders, just for vomiting up by a not-quite-recovered bulimic. Boring food. Mild flavors as good coming up, as briefly put down. She asks them to contribute and is told “soon as my benefits are deposited” She’s getting hostile and rude to the guest/new temporary roommate.
She’s been observing carefully. She hasn’t missed anything. She’s witnessed it all. Sunshine spent an afternoon on the patio languidly carving on their forearm flesh with a knife for them to feel anything, Bonnimort claimed they got off on it, got something sexual from being cut. Anymore red added to the flags and it’s maroon.
Meanwhile, Village Idjit is hustling to keep up his lifestyle . He’s working extra hours to make up for the days he was off in OxyWonderland. People begged to not even try to drive while just a few milligrams from nodding out. He’s crushing stimulant prescription meds he traded his off-app Uber/Lyft/Whatever App passenger regulars. Payment is personal, passed over in palms or baggies and immediately rerouted to nasal passages. It’s become a slow motion train wreck she’s a arms-length spectator to.
Two Lost Boys and their enabler, watching them burn out in processed poppy-immolation, plus daily visits from Crystal, Tina, and Xtine.
The insufflating Olympics is on. Cut short straws are accumulating in the basement. She smokes cigarettes out front on the porch rather than go downstairs where tiny baggies have accumulated, licked clean, cards licked, book covers licked, dollar bills licked back crisp into shape pressed flat over whatever is found by those three. Mirrors licked laid flat upon tables clean Two lapdogs and their handler,everyone but her clutching the short straw. Her life is out of control around her.
A “safe space” was declared to protect the sanctity of the shooting/snorting gallery. They didn’t feel safe around her anymore, so they formally separated the junkies/not junkies. A safe space policy abused to create a shooting gallery. Separate the Boy/bois from her open disgust.
Simmering rage is a bonus. Bonnimort is fully set up in the former guest room, starts to vote on house policy in week two. They’re gonna pay more in rent to make life easier on everyone. Allegedly.
But Bonnimort needs a bath drawn for them nightly, their legs shaved by someone, and Sunshine is up their ass. Requires to be “tucked in” some nights and it takes an hour to do so. They neglect or don’t care if the common wall between rooms carries sound, so she hears everything. She never heard a single “No” from Mr. Bonnimort. Bonnimort is “fucked in” .Sunshine is genderfucked for a fix. Now she knows that he “loves” Bonnimort and their only female parts. Why is the T they said they were on not working? It changes the body quickly. Now with the vivisection fully begun, the leasee is vomiting, but in self-disgust and grief in the hall bathroom.
To get their attention down in the “safe space”, she took three empty plant pots from the deck railing and knocked them over onto the floor a story below. The pots each had a maximum value of $12 and were mass produced ceramics made in China.
The Village Idjit thought this was property damage. Ultimately, the three summoned the only person not participating in the 24-7 party and told her she needed to go into therapy. She spoke sense despite their manipulation. No one listened to her. They refused to speak a word to her for five hours until she went to the local psychiatric hospital Bonnimort had been a frequent flyer at for an evaluation. Sunshine had even packed her bag for her with hospital approved items only, expecting inpatient. She’d be out of the way.
She came home after evaluation (major depression and anxiety) and said she was going to go into partial hospitalization. Eight hours a day away from the house. She bit her tongue, considered all options, took a weekend long vacation away from the house with her respectable lover of a decade, and set up her camp in the living room and began hot bunking in her bedroom to avoid Sunshine.
Her vetoes were ignored, so she revoked all privileges. No groceries, hid her stuff of value. Access to others was at pike-length minimums. The locked door to the other floor of the house became a portal never to cross ever, a reminder that only different locations are the best boundaries for self-preservation. That baby aspirin between her knees still. They have torn her apart and down if they dared find her on the floor of her room crying. Wings off, she’s depressed and grounded.
Bonnimort and the boys folded her whole life into that foil they somehow kept bringing in, and stole her life away. Her own home wasn’t safe for her. They took it all and got it wholesale, too. That bitch/bastard ruined her home, but some know to give away used toys to the less fortunate when they are done playing with them.
She was an origami crane made of cellophane lifted in iridescence, lidded in bruises, tortured by others first, then cutting her own arms as a cry for help. The psychiatrist donned the collar and took her confession, told her she needed to make “exit plans” but, “exit plans” has infinite subtext and meanings.
On week three and a half, 5 days into her Partial hospitalization, she found out more things. They wanted to come clean. Clean, not sober. Sunshine and Bonnimort had stolen her expired insulin syringes to shoot up the day before and had fucked while she was in therapy trying to plan an escape, take flight, and regain the sanity the house had lost the plot of entirely.
They had raided the emergency meds kit and emptied leftover bottles and Vicodin. Systematically searched the house's rooms while she talked to therapists, participated in group therapy, ate bland nutritious lunches in the psych hospital cafeteria, walked the hospital campus labyrinth, made new pals in the smoking area, her calls home unanswered. The leftover morphine became a solution for injections—drugs as the solutions for everything. Both proudly asserted that Sunshine only got a skin pop as he was not quite ready to drive the spike in. The dumbass claiming he did it only out of empathy when torn into privately in the kitchen, a rare crossing of paths. Addiction was born from compassion, allegedly.
That last weekend, Bonnimort was a sad person. Flirting with women online for ego-food and validation and getting hours of oral and baths and tea service from Sunshine just wasn’t enough for them, and they went too far. They began a gradual accumulative overdose, and dozily called the mental health hotline from the guest room. When the crisis line worker asked for a responsible person to come to the phone, they summoned the leaseholding Fae into the guestroom in her own house and she demanded they send a fucking ambulance and police to her home.
As they sat on the front porch mid-overdose, another drawn-out-suicide stage production, before they were Narcan-ed and driven off in an ambulance to an area rehab psych facility with another bed they’d already slept in, already familiar to them, on first name basis with the staff, forbidden to try for their fifth passion play OD resurrection trick, Oh, and “the antibiotics cured my hepatitis” said Bonnimort. That’s a virus. Terror struck cold.
A sympathetic policeman’s arm was around the Fae during the negotiation and allegations of victimization from the OD-ing chatterbox, although it wasn’t their house they were trying to die in. It wasn’t their bathroom door that was broken down by police (because Bonnimort spitefully flashed a handful of her Vicodin to the queer cis-woman when they asked to go to the bathroom passing in the front doorway before continuing to talk to the police and going peacefully. They were gonna take five more pills stolen from her breakthrough pain meds. Enough to kill for sure.)
On the porch, Fae’s single line was the same as Anne Sexton’s- “Live or Die, but don’t poison everything.” No one dies on her watch in her home, not even them. More’s the pity, really. They were dragged up to their feet, poured into a gurney, loaded into the ambulance and taken away to detox and get help for the forty-millionth time.
A few days later she ran errands and she came back to the house. The SUV Bonnimort had arrived in was missing, allegedly picked up by their future-ex-husband and arranged by the Village Idjit to make more room in the driveway.
Her only regret was not destroying their journal of truths that contradicted all their purchases on her debit card lies. They had no money coming, hated them all, knew they were in a perfect situation for a lethal escape, admitted previous victims and stated they would not pay anyone back ever. Entitlement has privileges.
They didn’t even have a therapist, just a few drug dealers they called in emergencies. They were not in medical transition, were not on T, not living as a man, as claimed, nor were they a gay male, they were a straight male if trans. She threw out all their clothes, all womens clothes, their vibrators, and a letter from their dead mom wearing latex gloves. All the trash was outta that house, except for the Lost Boys.
She announced she was separated from Sunshine on social media. Eventually she got out of her lease, moved up and out, only regret was she left the evidence and catalog of crimes behind in the broken dryer that for some reason lived in that garage.
Her wings’ translucent black-edged threads crisped like torched cigarette pack over-wraps, and never fully grew back. She could flutter and drift short distances eventually, flying like a chicken for a few years. Sunshine’s synapses never recovered, he was involuntarily committed and ended in arson and bouncing in and out of county jails and psych wards. Bonnimort is living as a woman, married another man, graduated to anorexia and continued to collect the frequent flyer miles at rehabs and various 12-Step-paraphernalia and coins across the Southeastern United States. The Village Idjit and the African Queen are probably still discussing marriage and when he’ll get divorced. The Costco membership was not ever renewed.
It’s 2024. Now, she flies. New wings resplendent and beautiful, never to be dragged down again.
