Creative Non-Fiction By Emily Kellogg

​Self Destruction


There’s a reason people self-destruct. It’s fun. People like to watch demolition derbies and action movies and wrestling matches because there’s nothing better than seeing things smash and bleed and burn. I liked bumper cars as a kid. I didn’t like hitting other people, but I loved smashing against the wall. I would find a corner and jostle back and forth again and again, whipping my head in every direction and laughing. Sometimes my brother would spot me and yell, trying to bait me into confrontation. But I barely noticed. I just kept smashing into the wall until burning rubber filled my lungs and I could no longer see straight.  

Despair drives people away, but self-destruction is different. When you’re in the middle of self-destructing, you don’t have to be alone. People are drawn to you because you are both the moth and the flame. My death wish makes me fearless. My death wish makes me free. But your audience is fickle. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between the people who have come to destroy themselves beside you, and those who have come to help break you up. Either way, they’ll leave eventually. They’ll either leave because they’ve grown tired of destroying themselves, or they’ll leave because they’re tired of destroying you. The trouble comes when there’s nothing left of you to destroy, when you’re all ash and rubble and hangover, and there’s nothing left of you to smash or bleed or burn.

I’ve never been very good at taking care of things that belong to me. At eleven I killed a cactus. At fifteen my mother yelled at me over a pile of crumpled clothes. You don’t deserve to have nice things. I worry she’s right. I haven’t treated my body well. I pump it full of toxic things. Sometimes when I look in the mirror I’m surprised to find my face round and full of colour. How do you do it? I ask. How do you keep on living without any help from me? But sometimes when I look in the mirror my face is crumpled and grey. And so I spend a lot of money on makeup. I’m a Sephora Insider. I smear Makeup Forever Matt Velvet Foundation in Porcelain deep into my pores and dab High Beam illuminator on my cheek and brow bones until I look like a real person. I stare at my reflection and think Do you see? Do you see what a good woman you can be?

If you can’t take care of your things, I’ll give them away to someone who can, my mother used to threaten. I’ve given my body away more than once. Perhaps if I belong to someone else, I thought, I won’t keep getting trampled. Perhaps I can finally get off the floor. I thought men might treat me better than I’d treated myself. They didn’t. I thought love might teach me how to nurture myself. It didn’t, but I must have learned how to photosynthesize cruelty because, unlike the cactus, there’s more left to me than a shriveled stub.




Chuck Bass’ Pet Monkey

Gossip Girl premiered while I was still in prep school, snorting a lot of Adderall in between panic attacks about my SAT scores. The show was based on a book series by Cecily von Ziegesar. In the books, bad-boy-hotel-heir Chuck Bass had a pet monkey. TV’s Chuck Bass didn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe the producers blew the monkey budget on sexy teen Serena van der Woodsen’s iconic blonde hair extensions or on diamond headbands for Chuck Bass’ girlfriend, sexy teen Blair Waldorf.

In real life, bad-boy-pop-star Justin Bieber had a pet monkey, but it was confiscated by German custom officials. That’s because in real life people shouldn’t have monkeys for pets and they certainly shouldn’t travel with them across international borders.

Monkeys can rip your face off if you’re not careful. Someone’s pet chimp ripped off a woman’s face in 2009. Her facial reconstructive surgery failed when her immune system rejected the transplanted skin.

If I’d written Gossip Girl Chuck Bass would keep a pet monkey in his penthouse hotel suite. After the episode when he sexually assaults little freshman, Jenny Humphrey, at the Kiss on the Lips party, he would have gone back to the hotel and gotten loaded on expensive scotch. And then later that night the monkey would have ripped his fucking face off. For the next few seasons of the show Chuck Bass would have to wear an iron mask to hide his monkey-fucked face while spending all of his money on botched facial reconstructive surgery.

If I’d written Gossip Girl, after my boyfriend cheated on me and later said But don’t we like to experiment, just like Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass? I wouldn’t have said Oh. I guess so. and thought Fuck. What’s wrong with me?

No.

I would have said Fuck you. and thought What’s wrong with him? Why is he talking about that guy with the monkey-fucked face?




I Treat My Depression with Gossip Girl

I start drinking NyQuil before bed because otherwise I won’t sleep. I keep it in a drawer next to my bed with empty packs of cigarettes, a mickey of vodka, and a few condoms that I don’t think I’ll ever use but don’t have the heart to throw away. After a few weeks even Nyquil won’t put me to sleep, so I spend hours streaming videos on my MacBook. Kristen Bell’s narration of Gossip Girl becomes a hypnotic fever dream. XOXO. In the mornings I make coffee and drink it at my kitchen table because it seems like something that a real person would do. I’m too anxious to be a real person, so I have to pretend. I’m too anxious to leave my apartment, so instead I read things other people have written until I am so full of the words of others that the ones in my head break down and become meaningless. I do this for days until I am numb and then I can finally sleep again. One night I dream that I wake up in my ex’s arms. We’re in Paris. I’m so happy. I wake up alone at 4am. I feel a pressure on my chest. I can’t breathe. I drink vodka on my fire escape and wake to the sound of screaming racoons. My legs are dangling into empty air. I go drink more vodka, and think about death while I watch the sun rise. My MacBook is falling apart. The battery is broken, and the keyboard only works half of the time. The mouse doesn’t work at all. But the computer still downloads and plays the new Spring TV lineup. The shows are glossy and stylized. The screen is smudged and dirty.




Venus in Furs

After my ex and I broke up for either the third or fourth time, I stole a couple of his books. I guess I felt like he owed me. I’ve lost or donated most of them over the years, but I still keep his copy of Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher on my shelf. It’s inscribed. April 2008, his handwriting is messy and cramped, If found please return. Please is underlined twice. Scribbled at the bottom of the page, almost as an afterthought, it says First book after turning 18. 18 is also underlined twice. Every couple of years I flip through the book. Sometimes, I laugh. But on some nights I flip to the wrong page and I feel sick.

Tonight I reread a random passage.

The moral is that woman, as Nature created her and as she is currently reared by man, is his enemy and can only be his slave or despot, but never his companion.

I feel sick.

On one of our mornings together drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, my ex told me about a dream. In the dream he was watching his own funeral, as from above. He observed his corpse lying in an open casket. His ex-girlfriends were all lined up, all hopeful to take a piece of his body home. I waited at the back of the line. I watched his ex-girlfriend rip out his embalmed heart.

His ex-girlfriend got his heart, and all I got was a scar on my inner thigh and this stupid fucking sadomasochistic book.

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Emily Kellogg’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Entropy Magazine, Hazlitt, and The Puritan. In 2017, her creative nonfiction work received an honourable mention in Room Magazine‘s CNF competition and was shortlisted for PRISM International‘s CNF prize. She was recently named one of three finalists for the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society's 2018 prize. A selection of her work is available on her website: https://www.emilykellogg.com/