I have seen death more than i should. I became nourishment for my own decadence. Compulsion secretes into enzymatic ruins. I can still taste what i just buried. And the craving survives after the purpose is gone. There came a point, though I could not identify when precisely the shift had occurred, when I ceased to understand whether I was pursuing something or merely pursuing the sensation of pursuit itself, because desire had long ago detached from its object and continued independently with the stubbornness of an abandoned mechanism still trembling after impact, and I remember thinking, in those hours when sleep had become less a refuge than a temporary interruption of whatever process had already begun beneath the surface, that perhaps this had always been the arrangement from the beginning, that perhaps every appetite concealed within itself the blueprint for its own catastrophe, carrying in secret a patient and microscopic appetite directed inward, not toward satisfaction but toward gradual consumption, a hunger uninterested in being fed and interested only in persisting. And then I began to notice things, not externally, because the world outside had already become difficult to distinguish from repetition and weather and stale movement, but internally, subtle rearrangements, small sensations difficult to locate precisely, as though certain structures had begun loosening their loyalty to one another, as though my thoughts had ceased behaving like thoughts and instead had become fluids moving through me with obscure intentions, dissolving edges, softening distinctions, carrying pieces of myself from one dark interior place into another, and I found myself with the increasingly disturbing impression that I was no longer thinking about my own deterioration but participating in it, that observation itself had become a solvent. Because there is a terrible possibility hidden inside prolonged attention, namely that whatever remains under examination for too long eventually begins to lose its coherence, and I felt this occurring not metaphorically but almost physically, with the certainty of a body recognizing an injury before the mind has learned of it, and I wondered whether all this time I had mistaken self-awareness for clarity when it had actually been a much slower and more intimate process of decomposition, something enzymatic, something patient, because decay, unlike violence, never appears in a hurry, it merely waits for structures to grow tired of maintaining themselves. And desire remained there through all of it, strangely untouched, still pulsing, still insisting, stripped now of all recognizable purpose, wanting without knowing what it wanted, feeding itself upon its own continuation, and I understood then, with a kind of exhausted horror, that perhaps this was the final obscenity, not that I was being consumed, but that I had become the appetite doing the consuming, that I had become both the mouth and the dissolving tissue, both the question and the corrosion eating slowly through its answer.