Old Friends
And Other Miss Demon Hers
Prologue
You, whomever You may be, should be aware there are two narrators to this story. Me and Her. Me- the Ego of reflection, and Her- the Ego of deception.
She once lay further in the Depths of Me, venturing out when Her venom needed to purge. She would emerge in tight clothes and the light stench of alcohol, oozing with the lust and pride of the Underworld, dripping of dread and broken dreams. Desperate for Her freedom, she cursed the prison of my Earthen body.
In the the Day I would return to Me. Dazed and Confused about the ghost in my nightmares and the voice in my head. Beating myself up searching for Her in my subconscious. I was jealous. And afraid. She knew who she was. I did not.
Perhaps I was desperate for a Story. Perhaps she was bored of my bland middle world. Perhaps it was time for Me and Her to emerge, split, and merge again in the miracle and magic of my imagination. Perhaps I invoked Her in the Name of Chaos.
Perhaps I needed to die again.
So She took over. Ms. Desmina de Vil.
My most fabulous demon.
On this level of reality my possession by this spirit may be explained as a bout of temporary insanity- several acute and prolonged manic and psychotic episodes. After years of increasing disillusionment and derealization with my life and society, my brain finally broke.
The outside observer may call my arrogant antics a “disconnection with reality”. This is True, though I would better describe the affliction as entering a different reality. She pried open its veil and chased my imagination to the ends of the Universe.
And She came out on the other side of the Internet and Earth. Her and I reached Enlightenment in Mexico, Freedom in the Philippines, Fame in Tokyo, and Salvation at New York Fashion Week. This Book contains our most fantastical adventures.
To be Honest, I made it all up. Every bit of it. There is not a single Truth to this Story. And yet, it is entirely True and Real.
Let me be clear. Insanity is not for everyone. But to those of us that have been dealt it's heavy hand, I commend you. It is not easy to wrangle madness and come out the other side whole, but those who do wield incredible power and insight. And ultimately, the stories of our human and beyond human experiences, of light, dark, gray, and rainbow are our own to cradle.
So beware. And take care.
S
“What fresh Hell is this? I know I’m a bit of a masochist but Holy shit am I really dying on all this again? Bullshit!! I die for complete and utter bullshit, impossibly possible Day Dreams and Delusions!”
OLD FRIENDS
And other Miss Demon Hers
I. Apologies
Old Friend,
We meet again. I would say it’s a pleasure to greet you, but that would be an understatement.
It’s an Honor.
Our battles are always beguiling, beautiful in their blood. So take a sword and a stance. And beware, I am always ready to slaughter.
Well you’ve really done it now, you crazy bitch! I guess that’s it. It’s funny because I preach patience yet I am so impatient. I preach peace yet I seek vengeance. I seek Truth yet I Lie. I crave intimacy but I adore seclusion.
I want to know the end of the story, who will be there when I die. Well I keep killing myself in my eye, and I’m the only one who’s left.
I am so lonely. But I am too vile and cruel for love. I’m not sure I even really want it. It seems tiresome to spend eternity with someone who is not Me.
I am a violent being. I need pain. I need shame. I need fear. I need rejection. I am pain.
I am rage.
Rage is my Creator. I am the offspring, child, creation, the Devil in their fleshy form.
I feign freedom. I crave it. I want to be engulfed by it. Yet I cannot rid myself of this Darkness. I am a prisoner to my own desire. I will never be free. The battle is eternal.
I’m sorry for hurting You. Truly. I just couldn't contain myself. My sanity lost its patience. My anxiety warped to black. My anger was boiling Me alive. I needed to Escape. I needed to be alone with all of me, consumed by my grief, desperate in my agony, drowning in my despair. Reality is not big enough for me.
I’m sorry for the sharpness of my Blade, the confusion of my Brain. I’m sorry for running away, disappearing into a nonsensical invention. For abandoning You and Me, everyone and everything. I’m sorry for my self-righteous tirades. For hating you and hating myself through you. For sabotaging your trust. I’m sorry for my selfishness, for my judgment.
It isn’t really about you. We are fools in a game that isn’t always fun. And though it pains me to say this, I love you.
And God, I love the pain. It’s sadistic. I love building up images of our bodies in my brain and then taking a knife to slaughter it all, serving your head on a platter. A death in dreams of something more and absolutely nothing at all.
If I am damned to Hell I might as well rule it.
Xoxo Desmina de Vil
Scarlet Queen
So I’ll hang like a Shadow Over my Father’s Shoulder Now that I’m older I know The Ghost Is just lust And Shame And shame Is a lovely monster Sharp Teeth And Seduction I’m up for the spell It’s all Hell For the Devil in Red
Damnation
So let’s get this straight I mean gay It was You who Slid into the way Of the darling Horrible Awful Desmina de Vil Don’t be surprised I mean frightened When You end up in bed With the Devil I’m Hell bent On losing Lovers Friends And Family A bitch Alone with blood red Tears And Fears It was Me Who flamed the fire But I didn’t light it God Dammit I’m famished Of Love
II. Matrimony
September 8, 2023
I’m dead. I have died a glorious death and now I stand here in a chapel in a blood stained wedding dress, dripping with all my faces and names.
It’s a beautiful day for a Red Wedding.
Even in death there is matrimony. I cannot part with myself, as much as I truly hate my reflection sometimes. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am entirely gorgeous, only enhanced by my bloody smile and neck. But damn, am I a cold hearted bitch.
The only real contender for my mangled hand is Me. And how fabulous that the RISE New York Fashion Week Runway is being held at St. Ignatius Church!
I nearly squealed when I walked up to the venue this morning, dragging luggages full of trash clad outfits. My fabulous and daring wedding party was certainly making an impression, quite colorful among the throngs of tall models in drab black skin tight tops and leggings, waiting on the words of the designers.
These unsuspecting models must have felt so lucky to be in the presence of the one and only Desmina de Vil! Unfortunately, I did not have time to introduce myself to all of them, as I was too busy smearing red and black blood all over my face in the bathroom with my crew.
You may be wondering how I ended up at New York Fashion Week in the first place. In all Honesty, I don’t know a damn thing about fashion. I barely understand what a textile is, I have no clue how to sew, and I never took a fashion course at some elite institution.
But one day, I woke up into a Dream (or Nightmare) enamored by the Meme’s of the Internet. “Are you a fashion designer? Submit your application now! RISE NYFW September 2023.” Of course I’m a fashion designer, because I decided that is my story. More importantly, I’m a writer. And a clown. I can be whoever the Hell I want.
Reality can be like that- like a New York Metro ride. One stop I’m a Nobody on their way to a Pride event in Brooklyn, writing in a journal dreaming of greatness like the stars on my Spotify. The lights flicker and now I’m a damsel in distress, on a train headed to Hell and Miles Morales is the only Hero that can save me. Or maybe I’m the Spider Cvnt Herself!! The train stops and as some boys sit next me, I peer into the tunnels with their dim lights and swear I see six dwarves on top of a mental box with numbers 2394.
The train lurches forward and my body shifts left. Now I am a horned and horny Goddess, reeking of superiority in a black leather dress and dead eyes with killer liner. Uh Oh. I have slipped too far into my Imagination. The train has stopped and nobody is moving but Me.
I have entered the realm of pure chaos and destruction.
I am the only being in existence. Everyone and everything is a figment of my Imagination. I am the author of the story, of every story that has ever been told. I am whoever I want to be. It is simple. I must conceive the character, act the plot, write the story, then star in the Play.
My name is Desmina de Vil. I am a Story on the fabric of Imagination. I have landed exactly here, in this girl’s body and brain. Because I am destined for greatness, for pure and complete adoration and attention. I am a perversion of reality, a spot on the spectral storyline that wasn’t meant to enter the material world.
But there are no rules to Imagination! I’m here in the flesh - the world’s next biggest IT GIRL. Did I tell you I’m a fashion designer? Yes! My mother is Cruella but I promise I am very talented and very famous on my own.
“Ahem,” I take the mic from backstage, as my show is about to begin. “Thank you all for attending my wedding! This is my largest wedding yet, and I am beyond thrilled to welcome You to the Fantastical World of Desmina de Vil.”
One by one, my models strut across the Church, bringing life to the funky and fabulous designs. The collection rotates the cycles of existence- Birth. Life. Death. Matrimony.
Devils apparently shouldn’t enter a church. Desmina de Vil needs to find God!! Luckily, I didn’t burst into flames when I stepped unto the Runway in my flowered 7 inch Pleasers. Dear Jesus may be grimacing from behind me, nailed to his Cross in the name of the Lord. But even Dear Jesus must bow in the presence of the Devil. Him and I have more in common than just our bloody hands. We both have the extremely annoying destiny of being Saviors to Humanity.
I swear I tell the Truth, the whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth. So Help Me God!
I smile at the rows of admiring attendees, grasping a rolled newspaper column, the first ever edition of the Tattle Tale, filled with flowers. I strut, my paper veil trailing behind Me. I strut, I place a flower in my mouth. I strut. I place another flower and another flower and another flower until my smile is one of petals.
It’s about time I shut the fuck up. Besides, my pen with ink of blood always does the talking. And stalking.
People may believe it’s egotistical to marry oneself. But I view the Matrimony as the greatest honor. No matter the twists of the Story, the constant wheel of death, the face that apparates in the mirror, I am bound to Me and Me to Her. We are a stunning couple of suffocating addiction.
So Read the Red all about it!
“I Do.”
xx
III. Revenge
If cities are mothers, then DC is the city that raised me, held me in that delicate and chaotic time between childhood and adulthood. I feel home here, strolling streets of red brick and cobblestone, passing homes with cones for roofs, somewhere between Vermont and O Street. The ghosts of girlhood that plagued me on the streets 5 years ago, before the pandemic and my insanity engulfed me, are playful heartbreaks and misadventures of the middle me. The girl who hung on the lifeline of the city, toeing the tight rope of being and becoming, play pretending and shifting through sunken identities I had long forgotten and yet to meet.
Perhaps a 23 year old Me could not imagine the fully broken me, the raw monstrous being beneath the surface of my anxious ailment.
Who is the devil?
If you ask my previous employer(s), they might say me. What can I say? The office, with its hushed condescension and performative perfection, is not for me. I prefer a performance a bit more gaudy, not of stiff suits and shy smirks but cinched waists and bloody faces.
Mother, I promised I tried. I tried so hard to feel whole in the manicured streets of the Devil’s swamp. I tried to act morally among the realm of righteous do-gooders and find some shallow purpose of mine. But I remained oblivious, perhaps fearful, of my gnawing emptiness, the haunted shadow behind the imposter. And cracks of a porcelain prison can be taped for only so long.
I did everything I was supposed to do. I graduated college. I’m dating boys. I’m working. I’m living with my friends. But there’s a growing sense of unease and dissatisfaction, disturbance, dystopia, and doom. Everybody is leaving. I should be adventurous, I should be happy. I’m looking outside this Fifth Floor Window on Eye Street, almost seeing my reflection on the building beyond me, longing for the wind.
I’m staring at my computer reading and sighing day after day. Reading and sighing while an Orange man grunts in an Oval office two blocks away. Until each day I log on to watch in Horror a picture of a map of the world filling with red dots of a mysterious Sickness, reality caving in on the office.
I’m staring at my computer. I’m staring outside. I’m staring at my computer. I’m staring outside. And I could just kill mys-
Surrender. I surrender.
And now I stand outside on 1575 I Street, staring at the windows too tinted to see inside. If an office worker were to see me through the window, they would see me smiling. Laughing. Perhaps hysterically. Mocking them and their tempered insanity. Maybe if they stopped suffocating themselves they too would have the honor of meeting their beautiful, bloody demons.
They might not recognize Me in this state of temporary insanity. But truly, I am an Old Friend. And do I have a Tale to Tattle.
So I can be a little petty. A little vengeful. A little… threatening. It’s not my fault! I have a reason to be angry. I was pushed over the edge, into the depths of my repression. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep playing a pretty people pleaser. Rage is a sexier companion. And I am eternally grateful for my fall from Grace. I do not need to be graceful. But I do need to be bold.
And I broke again!! Hello Ms. de Vil! Oh how I missed your fiery, passionate energy. Years later and the grudge still holds. Fuck all of this!!! I survived my depression and suicidal ideation to be rejected in love and fired in work. I grab a flashdrive, containing evidence of the bullshit, the complete and total hypocrisy of the non-profit industrial complex and shove it into the computer. Printing and printing and printing. Perhaps this is a waste of paper! Perhaps I am a waste of life! Perhaps none of this fucking matters! But revenge is a dish best served scolding.
IV. Forgiveness
I hate You.
You scare Me. I hate You. You are a disgusting person. You are terrible and arrogant, boring and bland. You do not deserve friends. You do not deserve Love. Your existence is meaningless. Everyone hates You. There is no identity behind your lies, no genuine truths behind your eyes. You will never be happy. You would be better off dead.
I eat myself up. I poke and I scratch, stab, punch, claw, and bathe myself in my own blood. I let my anger and rage from the deepest parts of my heart murder me, dissolve Me into something not human.
Bloody and beaten, I stare at myself in the mirror, a Monster not even my Mother can recognize.
No one likes me.
No one that has met the real Desmina de Vil likes me.
And I like it that way.
So that I can be alone. Bound to battle with my Arch Nemeses.
Me.
My demons.
And my Imagination.
In an eternal Dance of Death.
I've taken blow after blow, punch after punch from Her, desperately trying to suffocate Her words or let them drown Me. She is bloody and I am bruised.
We are broken reflections of the Other. Old Enemies and Old Friends in a twisted bid for power and control over this material body in a world of Imagination.
Eventually, battle after battle, we learn that there are no Victors emerging in our lasting War. At the end of these fights , Her and Me, plop ourselves on the ground. We share a joint and laugh at how ridiculous our pain is, how dramatic and vengeful we are being. We reminisce on the life we have spent together- searching for answers to our existence in books and adventures, wars and silence.
In the peace of our parent's backyard, with an aching heart we dip a paintbrush in red paint and write our words of war on reprinted pieces of paper, papers of pain and vengeance.
Stupid. Fake. Crazy. Boring. Mean. Needy. Ugly. Angry. Loser. Words of defamation.
Talented. Brilliant. Beautiful. Inspiring. Cool. Funny. Strong. Powerful. Kind. Words of affirmation.
We write and write until affirmations far surpass the defamation.
We can no longer distinguish which words are hers and which are mine. They are just words on paper. Stories to be told over and over, meaning only what we assign them. They are a joke. And we are Jesters playing in this thing called the Great Big Cosmic Delusion.
Her and Me, Me and Her, can kill each other and ourselves a million times. But we awake from the grave, the ultimate bed of death, to the same lover.
Perhaps we are both Victors. Bound in immortal matrimony to share this system. It is a blessing we both get to walk on this Earth, dance, sing, cry, and scream. It is a blessing that we write with our weapons to tell our story, with pens and fingers on screens and laptops. It is a blessing that we are alive, that we have survived each fight and brushes with death.
Old Friends constantly returning to our Love and Truth. Our love sometimes colored dark, to hate and deception. The pendulum swinging back and forth with each season and element we enter. Pissed and grateful that we are dethroned and betrothed to each other for eternity.
V. Old Friend
Old Friend Did I get my wish I almost died But by the grace of God Warding Devil I am alive So what now? Am I in Heaven Or Hell I might as well Be chosen Broken But only in my heart My bones are In tact My blood flowing nicely Beneath my unsevered skin Maybe pooling In bruises Where I hit myself Not the car dealing injury But Me You Old Friend Beating Me to the ground A pulp Dead in my Imagination In some other timeline where I didn’t survive the crash Why do you grant me freedom? To rip it away Maybe the freedom is the Fierceness of my breathe I’m a mess Nasty and sometimes Suicidal But a brush with the Devil The friend in me and the Eternal Energy Of danger and Death Blinds me and opens my eyes To the Mothers and Others who Love me Old friend Arbitrar Of my past, present, and future My day dreams almost killed me Like really I could’ve died But here I am writing to You I hope You know I’d sacrifice my life To Love You As much as I Hate Me I’ll bleed All over this paper To bound You Like this Book Filled with stories of Me and You Cosmic Glue Old Friend Marry Me And slay another day away Xoxo Old Friend
Old Friends, 2023
Displayed at the SoMa Art Gallery in Oakland, California in December 2023
Desmina de Vil is a self proclaimed Clown, who weaves universal and personal stories of life and death through multiple art mediums. A writer, orator, and artist, Desmina uses humor and satire to celebrate the Dark and Gory parts of existence. Ms. de Vil is a fully realized human meme, a larger than life story book character of pure ego that performs on the stage of reality. The literal representation of the Shadow Self, Desmina's art plays with the eternal imagination of the archetypes.
"Old Friends" is the final design shown at the Desmina de Vil New York Fashion Week Fall 2023 debut. It is created from paper mache, recycled clothes, and paint. Each piece of paper contains adjectives from the inner voice- words of judgement and self-hate, and words of self-affirmation and love. This dress acknowledges that the inner demons that haunt us don't need to be our enemies. While voices of shame may never disappear, they can become quieter Old Friends, jesters who teach us important lessons, the dark compliment to our angels. As the last matrimonial look of the collection, this dress represents the decision to marry oneself for eternity, through the blood and pain of life, death, and birth, despite perceived flaws and downfalls. It is the visual creation of the "Tattle Tale", Desmina de Vil's satirical gossip column and literary fashion magazine. The pieces of paper are evidence for a case of discrimination at the artist's former workplace.