––––––––
It took me a long time to understand my fascination with death. My s****l maturity coincided with the shock sites of the early 2000s, and I remember feeling so disgusted when I looked at dead bodies with a tinge of hunger:
“Meat Grinder Accident”
“Helicopter Beheading”
“Man Eats Human Fetus”
Low resolution images from the most intimate moments of people’s existence were branded into my head with searing white flames. Even now, they glow. I felt guilty, but the meatiest ones, legs severed at the thigh, degloved limbs, those were the ones I would stare at the longest in the late hours of the night so that my family would never know.
Somehow, looking at those images with the background static of puberty’s relentless hormones, I started to associate it with gratification.
