Other Forms of Boredom Advertised as Poetry

The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness.
And I prefer to put it off.
It is morning.

Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

A rooftop in Oxford; a flat in London; a valley in Nevada

It is morning. I am ending. I stand above the city and I watch the world take form. I recall a dream from a childhood that is no longer mine. A clamor arises among the city bells, and each peal is agony: an invocation, a condemnation. Slick and damp, the rafters are numb to my lapsarian resolve, my pale impression of the morning star. Frost gives way to swollen drops of dew. First light creeps in along the eaves. Shadows lengthen across the bruised earth below.

I have been given everything. I have retained nothing. I gaze down at a world I cannot fathom, where lonely spires strike like brands against my sight. I taste exhilaration and defeat, surrender and some uncertain promise. It occurs to me that this might prove the most compelling moment of my tired existence: shivering beneath an iron sky, alone but for deleterious rooks in the far-flung belfries, the soles of my bare feet aching with cold and tensed against the unfeeling edge.

*

That was lifetimes ago. Even now, I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I didn’t. It was so close to happening differently. It does not matter now.

The year had played out as each one invariably does: marked by melancholy, mania, and inexorable desire. I lost myself in the ides of autumn, reveled in the austere glory of an ancient, sprawling city. But slowly, with the winter, my pleasure began to thin. My mind, a Cajun churchyard, drew the bones back to its surface. Nothing stays buried there long. So like the rains of late November, I wept and then froze over. My spectacle of promise delineated and digressed.

By springtime, I was festering. I tried to mend my ways. I committed to a kind of yearning for purpose: a parody of participation in a world that did not want me. A body that learns its longings, I thought, will be well remembered in the end. But I was wrong and that is how, in the abject ache of early spring, I came to share a sky with crows and sparrows.

It was as though I could sense, before it happened, the terrible summer to come. Even then, it was too late. Fate had dealt its hand despite my bitter protests. By August, hills would burn: my bones would break. I would languish like a garden swollen with weeds, tilled and seeded and with no one left to tend to it, hopelessly teeming with neglected life. The hours would howl on until I lowered myself at last, with porcelain beneath my elbows and damp hair in my eyes, into the throes of a terrible truth—a truth to make the waters run crimson, a truth to make the waters run clean.

*

So I fled the hell I once constructed with such care. I told myself that I was not the first to suffer in a world where faith crawls often on all fours. What of Ariadne, alone and awake, eyes dim with Naxos brine and surveying a labyrinth of grief? Those gilded threads, unspooling like nerves along the alleyways: a triumph to spell out the death of her world. I knew I could not follow her fate. I sought to find, like Dido, a home among the ashes.

But far from shelter, I found in the cinders another undoing. She had a poet’s soul and a songbird’s skill, and I loved her with a ferocity and a forthrightness that I will never again be mad enough to recreate. We were geniuses. We were fools. I felt certain we would share a grave. But when we destroyed each other we did so utterly. If she was oracular, then her will was an uroboros: it devoured itself each day. Choking on prophecies, the promises clenched like bay laurel between her teeth, my nightingale traded her tongue for tapestries. Still, I kept on loving her. For months we remained in sullen ecstasy, adrift in the sweetness of soon-to-rot things. Ours was a monstrous, miraculous folie à deux.

I only left because I had to. By then, her muteness had all but become my own. She awoke alone, but for a letter I wrote while she slept, and if it broke her heart (and I think it must have) then she never told me. She retreated instead into the ebbing currents of her intellect, those melancholy waters where I once loved her well, but where I leave her now undisturbed. In time, she has dwindled into what she is today: a phantom limb, a lovely echo of loss. My best friend and muse, my lover and my victim, reduced to a symptom of my contrary longings—hers is the voice in the dark I still listen for.

*

The one that followed was an accident, but I was grateful all the same. Time and again, strange luck ensnared our fortunes until, unable to evade one another any longer, we relented. By the time I dropped my bags on his sitting room floor, we had long since arrived at our shared conclusion.

I loved every inch of that stowaway place: the water-stained walls and peeling paint, linoleum littered with ashtrays, the decrepit stairwell and the pipes like blocked arteries. Curtains were drawn to arrest the air that had grown heavy with cigarette smoke and sweet with something stranger. Beyond the clouded glass, London clamored on without us. The sounds of the city rang out through the fog, but for us, the world ended at the window.

On that floor, for hours at a time, I would appropriate another woman’s love. With all the audacity of shared abandon, rough tenderness blunted my nascent misgivings. In taut knuckles and whites of the eyes, those patterns of bruises reappeared along my skin, nebulous and yellowing like thunderclouds. I learned another living language: the coarse hair, carelessly shorn; the jutting ridge to mark the glade of the hip; the sinew and warmth; the sharp line of the jaw. When you spend so long with a person, you learn their wants so well—better than you thought you would ever care to. And that is how I remember him still, in slipknots and laughter and the strange, bright blazon of his eyes. I was wrapped up, tangled, lost where I began, savoring those stolen hours of rest and respite. Kneeling, knowing, tasting, trying, sprawled against the threadbare carpet, fibrous impressions pressing into the skin like echoes of a familiar touch—we were content in a world we caressed into being, of which nothing remains now but us.

I loved him briefly, imperfectly, but happily in that furtive respite: our smuggler’s hold for the brilliance all broken things secretly share. I loved him there for as long as my imagination would allow, always knowing that, beneath our kindled pleasures, there were only the pecked-clean bones of her. And I know he knew it too, because once he took my face between his palms and said, why are you lost in your love of her? Why remain impaled upon one who almost killed you? And I said I don’t know, and it was true. I’ve never known.

I told him close to everything, but I never mentioned the spring morning when I stood atop the rafters. I never mentioned that shame. Because maybe I didn’t really mean it—what I meant to do, I mean. Maybe it all amounted to nothing. But then, I know it cannot have been nothing, because I never forgave myself for it. I forgave myself for everything else, but not for that.

*

Yes, in spite of all that has happened since, I still grieve for the moment on that rooftop. The older I get, the more of a toll the memory seems to take. Knowing that I am too young to think so does nothing to make it less true.

It was a terrible realization to come to nineteen months ago, in a forsaken corner of the arid Earth. Beyond the yawning gate, the desert stretched against my sight in paroxysms of silence and sand. The salt and sweat dried in crystal patterns on my neck, my bare shoulders blistered, a dry wind howled beneath a blood red sun. It was not beautiful, for all its barren splendor. It bore no meaning. It just seemed empty, more irretraceable than iridescent. It simply existed, obsolete and unchanging, inspiring nothing.

The first night in that valley was a gilded haze of smoke and grit through which my companions slept. I lay with my eyes open, sketching lazing, lovely azimuths as innumerable bats rustled overhead and constellations gripped the sky. In the absence of the moon, there was no real darkness: the luminous emptiness of the star-strewn wasteland drenched the sands below. I thought about how lucky I was, and how luck had nearly killed me. There was a kind of relief in my listlessness: it was as though the world had stopped breathing in its sleep. I wrote down reasons to stay there forever, in the dust that settled on the hood of my car. When the daylight returned, it brought with it a terrible heat that flung the earth into stasis. So I lingered for a while, and allowed the past to catch up with me. For once, I held my history’s gaze.

It was then, for no real reason, that it came to me—the overdue indictment, the truth tasting of kerosene. I realized that I was going to get older, and the world was going to get stranger, and none of this was going to get any better.

The fact of the matter is this: I know that something is wrong with me. You think I don’t know it, but I do. I am quite as unsettled as any of you. I see when the world turns its back, mortified by my needs. And I never wonder, for I am the sharp-edged sum of a splintered childhood. Hateful memories in aggregated shards comprise me. I am deficient in all of the worst ways: I am cynical, where I should be credulous. I am secretive, where I should be sincere. I am selfish, sightless, and self-mutilating: my hatred is untenable, my affections still more so. Anyone who has ever loved me has been punished for it. And worse than that, worse than anything—I am afraid of my own mind. I am afraid to know what it is or is not capable of.

But I was not always like this. My mind was a decent thing, once, it really was. It just could not keep pace with the pulse of the waking world. I think that, over time, I lost my resolve. That is the truth to which I am condemned: the certainty that animates the scars. Time and again, I played my hand wrong. I should never have wondered. I should never have waited. I should have taken my silver—all thirty pieces—and walked away crueler, but clean.

Now, immutable, carrying on past the present, past-to-present, the past becomes a presence. Each day, I stand alone on a clandestine shoreline where every decision I make is both crucial and in vain. Nightly, I traverse a theatre of my own antiquities. Liminal and limitless, taciturn and twice the stranger, I hover at the threshold. My reckoning, I know, will come wearing yesterday’s clothes.

*

Just let it go. You never left. Let it go. Why can’t I do it over? As a dog gnaws bones, I savage the marrow of my past. Maybe I am out of chances. Maybe, when I falter, it will be fixed.  My final moment could define me—who in this world does not live for that? But I am not lost, not at all. I live and write on borrowed time. I am lucky. I am damned. I am a liar without an excuse. 

It is a purgatory no scripture accounts for: the gulf that lies between me and nothing, which is the converse of temporary, which is the crux of matter and meaning. That crisis of my being, which leans towards death, bears in it the promise of ephemerality. That last moment extends forever. God forsake me, I can’t fix it. I’ve got to live with it. I cannot fix it. I have to continue. I have to try. 

I will be standing on that rooftop for the rest of my life.

“Our selves were all we had.”

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

A hospital in Boston; a corridor beyond the Styx

Clearer than glass, the crystal shatters: He reaches between her ribs. Veins spider-web, they branch like cypress. She tosses and turns beneath the surface, in a corridor slick with scarlet and chrome: curtains of almandine and silver thread, tongues of flame and scrying bones. Above those fathomless depths, a patient immersed in ether prays for mercy on a table. Fingers clasp her shivering wrist, colder than surgical steel. I writhe between sheer white sheets as bare walls glisten: a snow-swept sight. A sightless moon peers in all the while. It filters between the window blinds and through cracks in the hot, dry earth. It chills the poppy vase beside the surgeon’s masterpiece; it licks like frost along the edges of consolatory crimson. It soothes the Beast’s ivory prize, adorns each petal of her fatefully plucked narcissus. In this alchemy of moonlight, the two scenes entwine.

Time and again, the mythology fails us: our history grants neither justice nor peace. Look no further than that wayward child, led astray by a single bright flower, condemned to horror by the Other’s errant desire. Did she learn, as I did, that the darkness does not relinquish its subjects so readily? That there are experiences you cannot recover from, advances you cannot withstand? Some fragment of her lingers there now, nourished by the furtive seeds she tasted, taking root in the underside of her soul. She had fed, where her only hope was to starve. Now a part of her belongs to Him and I am just as lucky. Whenever I leave a hospital, a piece of my mind remains there.

Ours is the masochistic art of unbecoming. Down, down, down we delve: each level we descend draws us nearer to the earth’s warm pulse. Swept up in an ecstasy of terror, these bare limbs seize their motion from beneath subduing hands. Madness—my consort, her captor—compels us to dance in our chains.

At first, the blood howls in our separate worlds. We spurn the eyes that rake and rove. We rail against our stated roles; to wound, to witness, to obey. In plutonic clutches—the scent of dry sweat, the gleam of metal instruments—we revile the steady surface beneath our backs. In splitting gasps, something private and utterly shameful is unearthed, breached in thrusts of agony. She loses her youth to His savage ways, and I lose mine to the miracle of medicine. Both of us languish like twin fleshly sacrifices: struggling beneath the men we serve, while their conquest—their victory, their profound fucking cleverness—shivers its way to completion.

So when we fall to pieces, lose our meaning, break apart, we know to abandon the fight. Flayed and forsaken, the intricacies of our bones laid bare, we belong to ourselves no longer. We are lost to hands that are not our own, tethered to the savagery that lends us form and meaning. In the throes of some forgotten brilliance, of some solace beyond sanity, we lose the capacity for fortitude. Our palms are filthy with our failure, our mouths stained a thousand shades of crimson: communion wine and pomegranate, iodine tincture and slowly drying blood. Every drop tastes of inevitability. There is no turning back any longer: we learn to love our misery.

But that was three years ago. When I left, they swore I would be free. They promised I would forget that cloying haze. So I eschewed the blank walls, the grotesque factory, the shining cogs. I became apathetic and obsolete. Now I am deficient, I cannot love, I cannot be—but I still remember everything. I never stopped. I never could. I can’t not remember it, the blasphemous white. How wretched I was, the structures that were, the stone-strewn necropolis, the vacuum of disfigured thought—where was I, when was that, and why are you not with me? Which strange twist of fate’s knife brought me here—what cruelty, or memory, or mercy?

If she saw me now, that girl beneath the earth, would she envy or pity these bloodless remains? I wonder if she ever wished to lay me bare with her own hands: to strip back the flesh and raw sinew, wrench forth the slippery heart of our grief, unearth the cancerous core, wrest each chemical from the entrails. Or maybe it was I who wanted that. I loved her so much, I can still feel her absence eating away at me. I feed and I feed and I starve all the same, lost in her emptiness, gnawing my own skin: errant and addicted, I erase her into being. She was born of nothingness, without title or form, and in truth I hated her more often than I loved her. I resented her passiveness, her frailty, the way the world would shape her as she lay there, unresisting. I loathed myself and her still more every time she tried, and failed, to restrain me: to narcotize me, to placate me. I was afraid of myself. I was afraid that she was afraid. We were caught on our heads between jaws of treachery, nine circles down in the company of the faithless. When all of this ends, will she bury me? She has to. She must. Someone should.

How, how, how could you have forgotten? Did it not matter? Did you not care? How could you bury that, subsume it—you were the last, the only thing. You were what I had going, what I wanted and worked for. I can feel the brittle bones beneath your paper skin, my printing press, my opus. You bled my words, my ink, my shame, you fled some hell we found—

But there is nothing to pity me for. Because when all was said and done, it was I who left her in darkness. Once, she wrested rhapsodies from my tongue: her body was composed like notes on a twelve-bar staff, her candid eyes trained in a gaze I could not match. For this Eurydice, I mastered the art. I drew music from her fractured thoughts in torrents of tortuous, glorious sound; I learnt her mind like strings of the lyre. In her sycophantic melodies, I perfected the Orphean craft: to rise from sleep, from death, from madness.  My own sights were set forward, then, willing her to come after. But she was faithless at her core, and slow to follow where I led. So when I turned to face her, that look was not a loss. It was an indictment—a banishing. I chose to meet those eyes.

That is how it came to this, how our story starts and ends. In that glance, I made my choice. It is a terrible thing to know someone, to see them, and to understand that you can only love them while your fingers are on the strings. She was my best thing and my nothing: she was the cartilage of a dream I could not retain. So I relinquished her. I watched her fade. I will live with that knowledge for the rest of my life.

How could I have gone through with it? She was the only friend I have ever known, and I undid her. I prised each loving finger from my wrist: I extracted the teeth from my heart.

I cast her off in a fit of ascension. I rose: she remained below.

I unbound her arms from my neck like a tourniquet.

I tore her apart and let go.

What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Sylvia Plath, Three Women

A balcony in Rome; a desert in Egypt; two cities in Palestine; a café in Venice; a Garden

Let the wolves cry out and the loss subsume itself; let the last light falter in fixity and the mountains emerge like a cipher when the rain subsides. Writhing spires give way to weeping tides: ruins mutter like smoke beneath the rising Tiber. Salient currents flood the silent streets: ivy clasps and climbs. I am iridescent, etherized even now. But I am less undone than I have been of late, and not so disconsolate as I often used to be. This is just another kind of loneliness—another ancient city and another Troy to burn. So I grapple, and I grimace, and I bare my broken teeth. I try to be all that is asked of me. When the dawn light falls in daggers, I try to smile. When the night comes howling, I try to sleep.

It has been a long time. It has been such a long and thankless time. Maybe I am maudlin, melodramatic, obsolete. But I fear sometimes that I can no longer write; for my work is my blood made legible, and lately I seldom open the vein. I think I am afraid to—after all, it nearly killed me twice. I felt and I felt until I barely knew myself. Until I forgot what it was to be intact. And in the end, it never really felt worth it.

In the far, forgotten refuge of some city astride the Nile, in houses of red clay and sun-burnished gold, I resided for a time. I waited and wondered until my countenance changed utterly, my waking mind mired in torment and talk. Then reverent, trancelike, I set off once more. Barefoot in the burning olive groves, I dragged my ruined carcass and my self-appointed cross down the narrow streets of Bethlehem, the caustic stones of Calvary, the gardens and the glory of a land I was not promised. With my pride and my memories and all my fucking medication, I walked for as long as my health would allow.

I strayed far from time and intent, lost utterly my self and my certainties, until I came to rest at last, asleep upon a sea of sand. There, through a half-mad poet’s Spiritus Mundi, and the thirteenth verse of a forsaken story, I saw a beast sedate in stone. I watched its barbaric splendor: dim with prowess, drunk on saints’ blood, drenched in holy water. But in that waking nightmare, in the thrall of a prodigy awaiting its genesis, it was I who committed the cardinal sin. Crowned in the dark glamour of Babylon, baring each inadequacy like a prophetess of false pretense, I kept my eyes open. When the world turned away, I looked on. I bore witness.

At first, I tried to atone for this, to exorcise my fantasies and phobias like confessions. I wielded the pen like a craft-knife, its barbed diatribes, its poison and promises. I took my long-festering vitriol and turned it upon myself. But when I carved the memory back out of me, all the secrets and untruths, the vicious multitudes, the visions and consequences—it all amounted to nothing more than the sum of my scars and the stains of a history I scarcely recall. I wanted to move past it. I wanted to start over. But I am condemned, all of us are, to live in the worlds we have built.

So in the end, I let it happen. When dry sands gave way to Venetian canals, and desert winds to the sensual bite of warm summer, I knew I had a choice. And under the sputtering gas lamps, in the sordid splendor of a silk-strewn café where the moon hung low above clouded waters, I made it. In foreign muscles of finality, I leant back, gave myself over, became myopic and mundane. I lent myself and my longings to those eyes—that scourge, that purgatory, staring back into mine. And what a resolution it was.

Hands moved soft across ivory keys—like Camelot, Troy, Pandæmonium before us, this world of ours was built to music. I wrote into the dawn when she slept, filling that room with growing things: lotus boughs and reams of ivy, garlands of juniper and night-blooming jasmine. Threatened with the specter of inevitable expulsion, we endured. And in that quiet chrysalis of thought, we created a kind of folklore: crystallized and bound to an irretrievable past.

And yet it felt too soon, to feel so gone. Losing with conviction, with precision, with wonder, I grew weary in the far-flung fields of starlight. I only ever wanted to hold you; to drink of your shadows and dance in your tangles; to rove the hazes of hyacinth, the woodbine and myrtle; to swim the wandering rivers of my Theanthropic lover when prisms of light adorned your opened skin. Our courtship was realized in the taste of bare flesh—sweeter than virtue, riper than knowledge—and the blossoms and briars of our Eden, raised again. But when the season faded, I dreamt alone in the dying light—I mourned the dusk of the girl I had loved, with a faded crown of asphodel and one foot forever in the earth.

They say that women change the world with their grief. In what little remains of our garden now, I recall Demeter’s last prayer. Hands unclasped, eyes upon the quiet earth, palms clenched like trowels, she digs: down below the surface, down towards the god she seeks, down to the lover and keeper of her last, most desperate desire. I will follow for longer than the sinew allows, scraping my knuckles to the bone, breaking my hands against the surface to attain my object. When the Earth withers and dies, when the grain weeps its last life away and the doves fall silent in the heather fields, I will take no notice. I will brave the barren lands where nothing grows. I will find my way back to her beneath the fertile soil.

None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom, the last.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

We spent the spring together in our solitude, our uncertainty, our grief. The room was a crypt for the broken but still living, a printing press of sorts for the fabrications we spun for the outside world. The fibers of our being were embedded in book-spines and memories, in scar tissue and chips of glass along the floor. There were empty bottles and fraying bed sheets, shivering limbs and tired eyes. 

Survival is a savage sort of thing: it is always the rats that run first, the wretched who endure. I have never been the kind to die. I gnawed marrow from the bones of my sorrow, left claw marks in the concrete of the blind, listening walls. In the end, I was the one who endured.

Sometimes I still peruse the strange sinew of her desire, still run a cold finger across lines of early poetry, still hear her voice break across the underside of my mind. She was the most wonderful part of my salvaged world. How could she prove so absent, so mundane?

But the vitriol was imprecise and meaningless. There was nothing left to miss. I stopped wondering, and then it stopped mattering. Those lovely, strange, and sorrowful days, when the evenings wept and murmured into dawn, are gone now forever. I should not have loved him, or her, or them, whose worth was as that of a slowing pulse. I would have done better to love myself instead.

I exhale the recollections of that year like celestial dust. I am wading through the dark, still waters of quiet endurance, the faint dream of purpose. I am wonderfully alone amidst the tangle of lips and eyes, the trail of promises that longed to be broken, the shadow in the doorway when I turned, at last, to go.

To live is not an easy thing. To live in the state that I too often have is still more damning, more inane. I am a disconsolate aggregation of shrewd and disparate parts. I feel them in succession, like slow fragments of a suicide. Entropy. Apathy. Liquor. Coffee. Self-absorption. Bloodlust. Real lust. Sanctimony. Desolation. Defiance.

Yet, I am more than alive now. I am burning. I am striving. I am unafraid to be. The future unfurls without form or composition, an expanse of possible meaning, a darkness aching to be shaped into a world. Through the veil of a nascent conviction, I have learned, how to seek pleasures that are not penitential. Sometimes I still feel the dull pull of catastrophe, like a far-off cry from a forgotten life, but the inexorable present has already bled through whatever remains of the past. There is nothing left for me to fear. I love sparingly, I live viciously, I trust no one at all.

I once endeavored to tame my heart, but it does not know itself anymore. And so I suppose I am untethered at last, from the bonds of an earliest yearning. The best and the worst of my days are still to come. I live and dream by the rising of the moon. As its pallor wanes, I see shadows on the surface, and there lingers, in that dark brilliance, the final image of those I once loved. But they are fading now, dwindling slowly into nothing more than another set of bones to lay to rest beside the others. I was meant to survive this after all.

do not think
you are safe because
you love her.

do not think
she will not stain her mouth red
with your blood too.

Madeleine Christie, Atalanta

The first tinges of winter work their way back into my skin. Sometimes, I am all right. I am awake. I am engaged. I am resolute. It does not matter that hours of silence have stretched on into days, into weeks. It does not matter because I am fine. I promised that I would be, so I am. For a month, I have done precious little other than endeavor to prove just how mistaken they were; just how capable, how fine, I am.

Other times, it has not been so manageable. I am lost and confused. I am the child who cannot find her father, who cannot keep a friend. I do not have an adequate language for what those times feel like. I have broken down a few times. Retreated. Cried. Written long, impassioned letters, bitter apologies, and half-hearted farewells, tucked them away within a pile of birthday cards, polaroids, sketches, and other cherished memories, and burned them all away in wordless exorcisms of a reality I cannot face.

Sometimes, I find that I cannot withstand it anymore. I shivered, last night, back into the familiarity of an ancient, sacred art: those burning moments of sanctuary, of unfettered life, of knotted limbs and hair, of hands, of hips, of knees, of tense and tangled words. And suddenly, fleetingly, my life was shining again, my pulse was strong, its rhythm was welcome. The teeth that I had sharpened on discontent were good for something now, tearing sensation from the savage flesh of November, and my desire was a triumph, I was feral, I was alive, I conjured some defiant echo of the willful, half-wild person that I was.

I am learning now, albeit slowly, what I expect from the people I care for. I have no patience left for weakness and apologies, for half-hearted defenses of others’ cruelty, for those content to watch mistreatment and the infliction of suffering so long as they, themselves, remain unaffected. I do not accept, should never have accepted, the professed love of anyone who would sanction what I stand against. Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli, né lo profondo inferno li riceve, ch’alcuna gloria i rei avrebber d’elli.

If there is some other side to this, to all of the interspersed vitriol and cowardice, then I am having trouble seeing it. I challenge anyone to live as I have these past four weeks and not feel the contempt that sustains me now.

But not everyone was taken in. Just a week ago I spoke with a figure who could have said nothing, who could have remained impassive, who could have dismissed or ignored my pain, but he simply chose not to; he chose, instead, to care. I winced with realization at a single word he used, as he dragged the dark hair back from his eyes—”It isn’t fair. You’re being dehumanized.” Dehumanized. I loath those connotations, those undertones of victimization, but I could not deny or reject the phrase. He knew. He saw. And he was not the only one.

I have felt alone, but I have not actually been so. What a life I still find, however fleetingly, however inconstantly, beyond the narrow binds of rejection. How many people have reached out to me? How many drinks and confessions and cigarettes have we shared? Reams of advice and tattered books of poetry, comfort and patience and moments of fleeting happiness, contentment, even belonging. In some ways, I think that I am finally found.

When I ran away again, it was into a wonderful haze of smoke and sunlight, into the company of a woman who still believed I was still something. In the taste of Spanish wine, in azure waters suspended in perfect stillness, in rich patterns of shadow across glints of burnished gold, in foreign tongues and flavors of thought, in haunting dreamscapes of lamplight and mist, in her lovely hands and amber eyes. I sat in silence, a resplendent city blazing below me, far and bright. I chewed on the end of a cigarette and swore never to allow a person to hurt me again.

These people, these places, have loved me at my darkest. We share no history, no obligation, but they have done so anyways. There is a world elsewhere. I am finding it now.

There will be no more postcards, no more consternation, no more explanations, no more prying eyes.  The photographs are peeled like flesh from my walls. The images have all been burned away. The room has been stripped bare, reduced to a pale, watchful iris. The livid tapestry of fabrication is all I will keep to remember this by.

You should be afraid of me. I do not forgive you.

I was worth more than this, and you could not make me forget that. You could not drive me away from this place. You never had the strength to bleed me out. You will never again have my yearning, my commitment, you will not even have my hatred. I will strive to feel nothing. But for as long as I remain in this city of entropy and stone, I will remember what was done. And I am not the only one. My continued efforts have not gone unnoticed. I am a walking testament to deficiencies that are not my own.

It never had to be this way–but this is the choice that you made. So I accept it. I accept all of it. I have no sympathy, no willingness to understand anymore. And I am not sorry for generating, on my own terms, the discourse that I have been denied. I hope that you feel every promise you broke, every lie that you told.  I am not sorry for writing this. For weeks, I have faced the wrong side of her whims. You can deign now to face the wrong side of my pen.

I am ready, at last, to see this all for what it was. To condemn and walk away. It took every effort to assail my health to remind me just how badly I want to live fully, to be whole once more. On the underside of my ambition, my disillusionment, my contempt, emerge the inscriptions of real possibility. I am awake. I feel remorseless. I feel strong. The obscurity of remorse is lifting.  I am inexorable. Complete.

Nothing will hurt me now. I can meet the world unscathed. At long last, my history has served me well.

And maybe you can’t know me now.
Maybe I’m just blood.
Whatever that’s for.

Alice Notley, Hemostatic

The misery of a week, now past, is rooted in pathologies of song. The sound of a piano along, a whistling melody, the wondrous tune of my discontent. A swift, sharp, movement of hands, left over right, an arpeggio along my skin. I knew better than to trust this. I knew better than to trust. And then, of course, not six hours later, a silence fell on me, spread through my half-healed lungs, until it hurt my jaws, my throat. I was nothing. Unanswered. Again.

I scarcely feel the absence. I hardly feel a loss. Instead there is a vitriol here, a kind of writhing energy, a thinly swallowed wrath. I have done my penance, and then some. I have paid a thousand times for every scar. My mind collapsed beneath chemicals and steel; I learned the worth of listlessness; I made these fragments whole. I spent the autumn half-deafened by the miracle of my health. My efforts are at long last realized, if not complete. That has to count for something.

Wake up, step through the front door. Keep your eyes down. Don’t recognize what was, if it isn’t anymore. Breathe softly. Speak less. Show them what you’ve always known. You have outlived worse.

Falling out of love with a girl I knew so long ago, with eyes darker than starlight and a mind that once sheltered mine, then falling back into it, and out again, soft and sweet, a detuned radio. I’m not bitter. I’m just trying.

An ancient city collapses around me, the mighty cathedrals crumble; the illusion is undone; the blank bones of concrete are exposed.

Let them see that we were not heroines or heroes at all.
But we believed passionately in our goals and we pursued them.
We were sometimes strong and sometimes we were very weak.

Alexandra Kollontai, in Bolshevik Feminist

A girl I knew vaguely, half a lifetime ago, recently wrote a staggering piece on abusive relationships; in a wrenching turn of language, of honesty, of recollection, she chronicled the untimely horrors of adolescence, the toxins of mistreatment, the devastating fate of far too many women at the hands of far too many men. Her essat left me inspired and silenced; compelled to speak and unable to do so; burning to write, but lacking the language. The piece itself can be read here.

The aftermath of the article’s publication saw an outpouring of affected, astonished individuals, particularly girls and women, who expressed their gratitude, offered their shared strength, described their own experiences, and penned lingering clauses of admiration and empathy. Watching from my position behind a computer screen, I was struck by these events—both the piece and its reception—in a singular way. For all of my involuntary skepticism, I saw beauty quite plainly in this.

From one woman’s courage, her reckoning with and articulation of an agony-imbibed history, there had emerged an invaluable source of caution and solace for women anywhere and everywhere, which in turn engendered a flood of acknowledgement, gratitude, and love. I realized then how lucky I am to be surrounded, directly and indirectly, implicitly and explicitly, in precise and arbitrary fashion alike, by women who write and think and feel in such extraordinary, authentic ways.

I am writing carefully now. To reorient the brilliance and raw potency of another’s work around myself, to detract from its shattering impact in any way, would be unforgivable. I don’t want to do that, and in fact, I likely couldn’t; Alana’s text breathes diatribes of admission and power that I am not equipped to equal. What I hope to communicate now is not self-serving recalibration, but gratitude: I hope to contribute something modest of my own by echoing, however ineptly, its model of candor and integrity. I am trying to extend the parameters of my own mind beyond my rudimentary understandings of gender, sexuality and human love, to interrogate the individual and collective implications of an article such as this one.

I want to understand the beauty and force inherent not only in this single excursion of language, this gorgeous scattering of text upon a page, but also in the response that it has elicited: the selflessness and courage that reverberates now across the threads of a webbed nexus, some online community that, before my very eyes, emerged to exemplify the concept and the triumph of women loving, protecting, and uplifting other women in the modern world. I want to understand  what it means for women to nurture and inspire and adore one another, openly and uninhibitedly, at this moment in time. And I want to write about it.

I think that the deeply personal resonance of this event, and the manner by which I perceive it, is as physical as it is political. For me, the terms “woman” and “girl” are deeply conflicted: they are desirous, unfamiliar, constricting, erotic, and sacred all at once. I am a woman, of sorts. I was called a girl when I was born, and named a woman when men assessed my value. And I have been loving women for all of my life.

It all started around the eighth grade, hastily and half in jest, with one shared kiss in the late summer; a stolen moment of sweetness that lingered on my tongue, and altered eternally the cast of my desires. In the lifetime that followed, I learned a thousand forms of forbidden tenderness. A letter slipped between the panels of a locker. A hushed conversation in a bathroom stall. A smile or a glance in a middle school hallway. Shorn hair like cropped silk; pastel brushstrokes; soft fingers that ran, searching, along the notches of my spine. A disheveled apartment in New York’s East Village. A ringing peal of laughter, like rain, in the Oxford streets. Amidst these scattered, near-infinite moments, there emerged the first person I ever thought to love sincerely: and in one intrepid summer of insolence and affection, she seared herself onto my heart. We met in motion beneath the waters, while the fractured moonlight cast off its pallor and crystallized her skin. I lost myself to the salient curves along her waist, the parting of her lips, the taste of salt. And there have been others, since then.

But back in the beginning, it was all very different. I was a girl from a small, normal town, who did not feel a small, normal love. There were a few like me, then, but we sought to hide from one another, from ourselves, even as something wonderful was unfurling inside of us. We all were afraid. Sometimes, I still am.

Five years almost to the day of my first, clandestine kiss, forty-nine queer people, largely of color, were massacred in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. And although I certainly did not share every experience or identity of those caught in the carnage, I felt this loss directly: my mind buckled beneath the gore-smeared violation of a place where people who felt different, in ways both like and unlike the ways that I felt different, could come together and live and love and not feel quite so different anymore. The idea of such reckless hate in such a sacred space was enough to physically sicken me.

So I shared the blinding horror and uncertain misery of that afternoon with a woman: a figure still sometimes shrouded in allegory, for reasons that even now, as they lay forgotten across the Atlantic, wrench the raw nerves and the contours of my heart. We received the news in a blinking disarray of text alerts and slowly unfolding coverage. We waited in silence for the nationwide address. Alone together, in the confines of my room, we saw the president on our computer screen, confirming those forty-nine dead. We watched a national, cultural, and spiritual catastrophe unfold. We lit cigarettes. We held each other. We cried.

Three months later, I lay back on an artist’s table as another woman, dark-eyed and steady-handed, preformed for me a burning art. In the searing rise and fall of a needle against my skin, imbued with the scorching intimacy of carefully applied ink, she emblazoned upon my shoulder that old symbol of resistance: a small triangle in holocaust pink. Its impression still whispers with the potency and pain of those hours spent learning of the horror in Orlando: that wonderful girl and her gentle embrace, my tearstained countenance, our grief.

In this rough and uncertain reality, girls love girls because we can, because we must. Because this world can be beautiful; but too often, it is callous, unassuming, and cold. Of course, I have loved men too, in many different ways. I recall with soft, confused tenderness the young man with the sad eyes like winter mornings, and the cruelty of his chrome-tongued successor. I think fondly of my friends and my brothers. I grieve for my father.

But to love another woman is a hallowed art: a practice sanctified by generations of camaraderie, self-preservation, and quiet, transgressive desire. It is not an exclusively romantic or physical act; nor it constrained to any single identity. I know and cherish multitudes of women who are neither lovers nor figures of my desire: we are merely joined, all of us, in the terrible beauty of our difference. Womanhood, as I conceive it, is not a question of physical terminology; thus, the word, “girl,” as I employ it here, is not meant to be exclusive or binding. I hope it will be read as just one of many terms used to signify and celebrate those who have practiced, for centuries, the art of affection, of tenderness, of solidarity; who have been those certain kinds of children, those bent and branded things called girls: raised to be girls, afraid to love girls, or living in bodies that made parents and teachers call them the wrong names.

I still see them all now, down in the city streets, luckless or genderless, queer or unwell, ignored or abused, with hearts like gaping mouths, with memories that bite like tongues of fire, with entire universes of cautious hope contained in the depths of their hearts. I want to protect them. I want to be their mother, their sister, their brother, their lover, their friend. I want to love and live for them in all of the ways that so many women have loved and lived for me. This, alone, is my womanhood. It knows no definition by which it may be condemned or constrained.

Those who have known or cared for me, as a lover, or a pupil, or a classmate, or a patient, or a friend, or merely as a fellow woman, have me mind something closer to whole. A thousand names flood my tongue. The pages I turned in a childhood closet as I came to know that I was neither alone nor forsaken: Barnes, Lorde, Woolf, Bechdel, Sappho, Rich. Every girl who has shared my bed, or calmed my soul, or read my writing, or cut my hair, who has steadied my shaking hands or consoled me when men taught me all the worst parts of what I am and what can be done to me. The ones who wrapped my arms with bandages, played my guitar, wrote annotations in the margins of the books they lent me, let me wear their borrowed clothes, made me laugh, made me feel, asked me questions, told me stories in the night. These women soldered my skin with sinews of their own hearts. They kept me alive when the surgical knife could not.

And so I have come to be, fully, that which I always was: a girl who loves girls in this strange century. And we are not writing, or speaking, or loving, or fucking, or living, or dying, for you. We are for each other. We are for ourselves. In our shared and varied affections, we desire and astound. Our learned affections break the binds of known convention: we ring out through the silence with insurrectionary love. The blinding cast of our hearts subdues an expressionless stillness, and echoing, astonishing, aspiring, we express.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.

Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

Plath wrote once that every woman adores a fascist, but I will not deify a deserter twice. The fact that I could survive it does not mean that I should have had to.

I know that I lost nothing useful in the end. Nothing real. Just a fiction that took whatever I had to give, and offered little in return. All I ever gained was that which I projected on the presence. The health that I would have sworn it had inspired was, I know now, mine all along. I alone made it possible.

But there was a time when this did not hurt at all. I was ready for an ending, but not this one. I’ve seen enough already of beautiful, barbaric acts. Still, I relent. I don’t seek answers that aren’t worth their telling.

Just know this: as surely as I once cared for you, and as surely as I bled for that mistake, you will not return from this. Nothing can alter what the body recalls. No one, I swear, knows that better than me.

I am wrenching out every trace of you.  I am extracting your venom from my veins. You will not shed our history so easily. Someday, your luck will run out, and you will remember everything. 

Even now, kid, I am a part of your skin. And I do not envy you that.

Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted—made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world—as did Anne Sexton—as do we all. Why not concentrate on the successes, the small and large joys of these lives, the genuine artistic accomplishments? After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can’t be very important. 

Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982  

Our culture does not speak openly of suicide, or of the presently suicidal. Such content is an unnamed notion in the periphery of our lives. The ever-present threat inherent within many an errant phrase or earnest intention, it is seldom articulated as an ongoing fact. The term “suicidal” itself is, in our collective consciousness, always temporally bound. One might commit suicide, or attempt suicide, or have once been at risk of doing so, but the chronology is diametric. Linguistically and culturally, the phenological application of the phrase “suicidal” to existence implicitly anticipates that word’s own ending—logically, one either recovers from their depressive state, and so ceases to be suicidal, or one commits suicide successfully, and so ceases to be any number of adjectives, “suicidal” among them.

So, to exist in our society while wanting to die (or having tried to), and while the quality of that urge is still latently or consciously present, is nothing short of extraordinary. In a culturally enforced narrative of health and redemption (where “recovery” is medically possible but entails a total expunging of the death impuls),  or in the artistic spectacle of failed annihilation (where the Plathian miracle-skin rises, like Lazarus from the ashes), or in the self-inflicted deaths and subsequent deification of figures like Hemingway, Wallace, or Cobain, there seems to be no place for those of us who are both and neither.

Yet we do exist. We are quite possibly everywhere. We are the margins and ruptures of everyday life. We are not immediately ‘at risk’ of dying; nor are we ‘threatening’ to die (though, to be clear, such terms are reductive, accusatory and pseudo-clinical and should serve solely as a comparative cultural function herein). On the contrary, we hold down jobs and places at universities. We have stable relationships and we sometimes start families. We are, or can be, suicidal the entire time. I know this as fact because I am one such person.

To write this terrifies me, because I am unyieldingly afraid of how it will be received. ‘Suicidal’ is not a term that I want ascribed to me. ‘Suicide’ is not a notion that I want to be associated with. I am not tragic or irreparable or incapable of a worthwhile existence. I do not wake up in the morning and hate being alive. As a matter of fact, I hardly hate anything, and my life least of all. I am filled with love. I love my family. I love my friends. I love writing. I love music. I have ambitions. I want to be around for a long time yet. But this does not change, and can never change, the biological circumstances that have rendered my unmedicated mind incapable of sustaining life on its own. Consciously, it wants to. But it cannot and never could. I am not always depressive in the clinical sense. But, like a diabetic needs insulin, I need serotonin to survive, and my neurochemistry does not produce adequate amounts on its own. I cannot live without it. Because without it, I will want, and possibly try, to die.

In a strange, depersonalized way, this can make me feel like I have become public property. To be medicated as I am medicated, and for the purposes that I am medicated, makes me not entirely my own. I carry the diagnostic hypotheses of others in my bloodstream. Their concerns and convictions, actualized as pharmaceutical reality, begin to slow my pulse, strain my libido, and alter my neurochemistry. Sometimes, they take my own consciousness away from me.

This is my relationship to therapists, doctors, and surgeons. I am the walking measure of their success. I am the body that they have been tasked with keeping alive.

They posit; I disprove.

They prescribe; I ingest.

They instruct; I live.

In this very physical sense, I am more alive than anyone, because I am living somebody else’s idea of health. It isn’t me, not entirely; but then again, it is, because it is what I have to do. And I can do it. I am happy to do it. It could be so much worse.

But it also accounts, perhaps, for the foolish stabs of pride I feel on the rare occasions when diazepam cannot calm me, or sertraline cannot elevate my mood, or lithium cannot balance my mind. In those moments, I remember that somewhere, beneath all of this medically sanctioned self-cannibalization, some small part of my body is still fighting to exist on its own terms: the terms of my birth. However begrudgingly, however unwisely, I sometimes catch myself cherishing that. Because one of my greatest fears is that my autopsy will be marred by some throwaway line about “recreational” use—when, in truth, there has rarely been anything at all recreational in my usage. Usually, I am just trying to do all of the things that most people take for granted, like quell the tremors, or calm the sobbing, or get some sleep. Yes, the medications scare me. They always have.

Oates surmises this better than I ever could. In the introductory quotation of this post, she describes the astonishing, herculean triumph of a woman like Virginia Woolf, who bound herself to the wonder and grief of existence for fifty-nine long years, suicidal the entire time. When she finally moved towards her own death, alone at the bottom of the sea, can it really have mattered whether such an action signified the tragic lack of timely access to contemporary chemicals, or the sheer relief of a body that, having labored under a single illness for its entire lifetime, finally managed to find some semblance of peace?

For me, this post, this extended meditation on suicide, is the farthest thing from a threat. It is not a warning sign. It is not a cry for help. It is a plain assessment of what I, and my doctors, have always known. The potential health risks that accompany any failure on my part to walk, as Plath once wrote, “carefully, precariously, like something rare.” Mine is the dream of a normal death. My goal is to maximize any model of health that allows me to find fulfillment until I meet, someday, with a bodily and spiritual ending that does not occur by these same hands that I use to write, and create, and make love.

In writing this, I hope not only to illustrate my own state of being (which is, by comparison, an exceedingly manageable one), but also to shed some light upon the reductive cultural views that frame the suicidal human condition as dichotomous and deeply flawed—a triumph if it results in a “natural” death, or a failure when it does not. It will never cease to astonish me how fundamentally incapable we are of reckoning with the notion of the suicidal body as anything other than a temporally restricted subject. Healing has never been, and never will be, as simple as that. Many of us will engage in long, full, promising lives without ever foregoing our medical status as chronically suicidal. This can be done. In fact, it is done more often than any onlooker might expect. But for us, such life is not a gift, but a hard-earned and double-edged victory.

So, it certainly seems, as Oates has written before me (and far more coherently), that to negotiate a lived suicidal existence, for any measure of time, should be considered a triumph. Such a life requires tremendous strength, endurance, and loyalty to the ones who love us: an irrevocable passion for our “attach[ments]…to the exterior world.” Regardless of the nature of one’s eventual ending, and in stark opposition to common belief, I am of the conviction that the possession and articulation of the suicidal condition is neither despondent nor self-serving. On the contrary, it is tremendously selfless—an honest, committed, and ongoing act of courage.

Perhaps even of love.