SHADOW INTERCOURSE
Alexia Lewis is a polymathic poet, utilizing everything from performance to video, visual arts (including making watercolor paintings from the juice of overripe berries), Instagram stories, and writing as means to document and explore her experience. Her work melds unapologetic confrontation with vulnerability, all of it tempered with visual elegance and ease. What follows is a sketch that serves as a self-portrait through words.
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“Deep down, I have a twisted, lustful desire for men who can’t or won’t show up for me. Yet I never even loved those. I do love [redacted]. I will never judge or question my feelings for him. Not ever again.”
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Another day. Day x out of xx. She had already let go of any grand visions she had for her so-called future, and she feels delicious for it. Nothing to do except twiddle her thumbs, binge on “Westworld”, scroll endlessly, and sext with her ex ’cause she’s messy like that.
She’s a sucker for self-improvement, and all the classes and content are free or damn near so. She makes purchases of inner work with her parents’ money. That live webinar by Carolyn Elliot Ph.D. was pret-ty bomb, hitting all the right notes, really making her dig deep on what she always said she believes. Alchemize success by getting comfortable being adored and resented at the same damn time? Know that you are one with Universal Spirit, and embrace the shadow of you? That’s her type shit. Let’s get the book!
April 7th, 2020
“My love for twisting myself in knots to conform to mediocrity knows no bounds. My glory and riches come from my intensity, my burning like a white-hot fire, and I’ll snuff myself out just to fit in with basic bitches. Just thinking about all the times I faked being basic and simple, and then blamed God for my poverty, it turns me on in a way like no other.”
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She devoured “Existential Kink” over the course of the week, alternating between journaling, sexting with the ex, staring at the wall, and burning up with desire. Deep, longing desire for everything she said she wanted (THE WORLD AND EVERYTHING IN IT) mixed up with unfathomable, delicious, damn near sexual satisfaction with her present condition. Everything about her poverty, her subjugation, her diminishment; all of the conditions that kept her down were her own sensual projections. And she didn’t even know it.
April 10th, 2020
“As long as I’m broke, underpaid, and drowning in debt, I get to justify a self-righteousness that I’m not even aware I carry around with me. And I get to be doted on: the world is an attentive lover, satisfying every craving and need. This unjust world, this disgusting, capitalist, racist world must cater to me, and I get to look down my nose at it. Because nothing gets me hotter than the vision of the mighty-yet-inferior attending to me, like a submissive who understands all the rules. My self-righteousnes and my moral SUPERIORITY must be quenched.”
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This dance she did, this foreplay she took her time giving, this love she made. She climaxed when, during one of her reveries, a song came on. A song she used to hear a lot in her 20s, when she was young and energetic and stupid and brilliant and wasteful and well-meaning and misguided and trying her best and doing the bare minimum. She shed tears in the climax. For her former self, who was svelte and beautiful and ultimately her destruction. She gave thanks for those libertine, sensual days and nights. She owned them, and then laid them down.
April 12th, 2020
“Carolyne says that ‘having is evidence of wanting’. If I believe in the unity and oneness of Spirit, and that I’ve never existed outside of Spirit, then this is true. I desire a beautiful living space, high ceilings, that I will share with my Love. But having that would mean losing out on this experience of hospitality, of being serviced, of being cossetted and fussed about. I must accept that it’s possible to experience this care and attention on a higher level.”
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She has been sketching herself since birth. She always used a firm hand and a dark #2 pencil. Every time she tried to erase her mistakes, there were still ghost lines, evidence that previous marks had already been made, evidence of a changed mind and of a weak will. A mess. And now she makes love to that mess of herself, because there’s nothing left to do.
by Alexia Lewis
Find more of Lewis’ work at https://www.memoria.art/.
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