And the rest is rust and stardust.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

If you were to draw back every layer of vanity and self-effacement and wariness from my countenance, would only the body remain? What a relief it might be, then, to dissemble each limb, become a discordant array of separate parts—a leg, an eye, a hand, a hip—a nightmare, a vivisection, a beautiful thing. And if you saw these scattered pieces—the ink-stained arms with faded scars, the blackened lungs and racing heart, the trembling fingers, the rigid spine—would you know that they, in aggregation, constituted me? Would you realize that they formed my very self, the only thing I feel in its entirety? Would it frighten you? Would you care?

And what would lie beneath that but a flowing essence of blood in the veins, of marrow in the bones: where, then, is the thing that compels me to write? I know it exists, because I can feel it there, it troubles me every day, it makes me crave cigarettes and stronger cures, it makes me too frightened to ever be alone. Could you find the source of it, this part of me that hurts? What would it look like? How would it react? Could it be lobotomized, reduced to a dull numbness as I lie etherised upon a table, palms turned skywards, eyelids half-shut, lank hair strewn about my shoulders?

What if you took apart the sentences on this page? If you deconstructed my language, would you see my lies? Could you identify my verbose illusions, all the ways in which I syntactically circumvent admissions of my guilt? Or would it become unintelligible: would the letters simply scatter across the screen? Would they lose whatever binds them to any measure of coherence? Would you uncover my truth, or merely reduce this voice to ink on paper, material and obsolete? I need language to lie, but also to feel, and so any guess is better than my own.

Only a few nights ago, I undid myself with more intent and precision than even my form is accustomed to. The sensation was unlike anything I had ever known, and too somatic to be readily described. My mind gave out with no resistance; I could have been immortal, I swear. It was irrepressible and ecstatic, and for days afterwards, I was wracked with tremors that I could not understand. There was some latent sense of contamination as well: something dirty or even degrading. Singularly narcotic, viciously physical, it was the kind of pleasure that can break a body in sheer excess of sensation. My skin was crawling, my pulse was beyond measure, my consciousness was in discourse with itself. I was euphoric. I loved it. It hurt.

Sometimes I wonder if I am still thinking straight. If these words seem frightening, then their implications are something else entirely. It was nothing I had not attempted before, but on that night, I performed my actions in such a way that their underlying connotations became clear. I had taken myself a step further towards the kinds of decisions that might destroy this vehicle, this body that keeps me conscious and sometimes does its job too well. Did I think of anyone in those hours: my mother, my brothers, my lovers and friends? Of course not. This impulse towards self-destruction is too strong, too inherent: it is almost instinctive, and requires no thinking at all. It does not feel like a decision. It feels like a way of being. It feels like a thing that I am. Every now and then, I seem to forget the difference.

I know that I used to be better than this. I remember so vividly those early months, melancholic and joyful at the same time, when I was writing and waiting and barely surviving impermanent bouts of madness, which seized my mind and rendered the physical world so vibrant, so stimulating. It used to feel beautiful. As I wandered from city to city, from person to person, I knew a sort of purpose. It was as though my soul was entirely exposed, a lidless eye that never shut: I was feeling everything and utterly undone, but there was earnestness and passion and a spectacular sense of creation. Seeking some truth, something better than what I had always known, I was perpetually on the edge of a precipice, striving towards another feeling.

I remember the late weeks of December, when I found myself laughing and shivering and half-dead with cold, kneeling in the currents of the Atlantic, having never been happier or more at peace. We did not know if my skin or limbs could survive the ordeal, but it hardly seemed to matter. All bared flesh and thin satin slipping off my shoulders, frigid and soaked so throughly that I could feel the salt water in my bones, it felt like I was being born again. I used to know how to hurt myself in ways that were wonderful.

Nowadays, I am afraid that I am starting to do these things simply because I am bored. I am not even cynical, or jaded, or defiant. I am just fucking bored. I forget that I am real. I forget that things can hurt me. I forget that this body can die. There is hardly any love left in me, because I wasted it all on absent fathers and the kinds of people who could not receive it in full, whose own abject states permitted me to engage in masochism and self-indulgence without any kind of reproach. Now I bring myself back to the brink of my own existence, time and time again, and it is not new or exciting anymore. It is hopelessly, almost despicably mundane.

If anyone else is feeling this way, then they sure as hell are not expressing it in the manner that I am. Intentions aside, people cannot seem to reach me. I believe that they are trying, but all I can perceive is some tremendous sense of distance that knows neither mercy nor reason: something insurmountable and maybe even innate. They cannot quite seem to understand what I desire or need, or perhaps am I failing to communicate it, or perhaps they do not know me at all. They react, always, to the wrong signals, and fret when I am not at risk, and remain so hopelessly oblivious when I am suffering without cause. They give me what I do not need, yet engage in a manner that inadvertently denies the things I desire so desperately; the things that, in fairness, they have no way of knowing about, because they are so singular, and so vital, and so strange, that I rarely express them adequately, if at all.

Underneath it all, though, I do not want anything particularly complicated. I think I just want to feel heard. And safe. Maybe even loved. I think I have always wanted that.

Does my writing seem repetitive lately? It certainly ought to. That would be because my entire life is grinding to a halt, utterly lacking in direction, with nothing to make me feel even close to the way I did just half a year ago, outside the gates of my college, when a stranger kissed me on an empty street. But I did not do it for him, not at all; as a matter of fact, he was barely significant. That part of me is changing and dying now, so that the strangest things, once so incredibly affecting, escape my present notice. This very morning, I sat reading alone in a coffee shop that I had not visited in months. It was only once I had arrived, and saw that table in the corner overlooking the city streets, that I remembered the cause of my prolonged absence. We had met here for the first time, one rainy afternoon, before moving to a smoke-filled bar as the sky began to dim. On that night, we each began to learn what it might mean to let the other in.

When all is said and done, and I finally lay this to rest, I will become his memory’s keeper. All of the months we spent  on our efforts towards affection; all of the wonderful nights when we talked well into the morning; all of the times we could not stand each other; all of the pleasure and hopefulness; all of those ways we felt and tried to feel; all of the time I spent writing and wondering until I knew him more completely than I had ever expected to know a living thing—he will forget it all. He will forget this, and it will not be his fault. So I will carry whatever recollections I can bear, and the rest I will abandon as well. No one survives this world without becoming a little colder. It was a difference, perhaps, of more than just the passing years. Maybe it had more to do with what our minds and bodies can sustain before we surrender quietly to the night. He was already far-off and fading, when I was just starting to burn. He was a waning constellation; I was the still-rising sun.

So I think that just leaves me again. I have this body, and nothing but this body: this complex and medicated and many-gendered thing with which I navigate a senseless world. It is a sort of Plathian social absurdity: a sacrifice or strip tease, I suppose, given the contemptible manner in which people occasionally regard me, as an object of physical desire. They do not understand or want to understand how it affects me—how more often than not, I feel inhuman, othered, not alluring but utterly debased. This body is graphically altered, explicitly my own, made to be unmade. It remains in constant motion. It will not succumb. It breaks stillness in the same way that a cry breaks silence: without language or restraint. Whatever I need to communicate or survive, it must be done through this body. If tear it to pieces, I will have nothing left.

I am not, I think, the kind of person who is capable of communicating or even understanding the remote and peculiar way that I feel now. It could be anything, who knows, it could even be the feeling that took my dad away from me. And that sounds damning and inane, but I am trying. Whatever else is my head or in my heart, I am trying, and I am so eager to feel differently again. So remember that, please, in all of your untold desires, and all of the letters that you burn. Recall the fatherless girl, barefoot and dissociated, moving like a sleepwalker and scarcely as sentient. She is not yet finished. She is not ready to submit to anything or anyone at all. She is only waiting for something new to engage her remains.

Miles to go before I sleep, right?

And I intend to see them all through.

Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself.

Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back

The winter is finally ending. Months passed violently, and I failed to notice. My mind inverted, folded over upon itself, sought inexplicably to reopen this history that resists like a wound long since cauterized. I have spent the past six months trying to name a need well beyond the limits of my language: something shrouded in opaque desire and all of the wordless things our bodies used to know.

These days, I am not sure where I stand. When I medicate my exhaustion, the elation feels fractured, like splintered crystal beneath my skin. When I stay clean, my jaw clenches and my hands shake until they can hardly find the laptop keys. When I laugh, the sound weighs strangely upon me: I wear happiness like a vice. When I speak, it is as though I am treading water. I have never been good at that. I write and I smoke and I read and I wonder: I move from one life to the next and I hardly feel anything at all. I tried so intently to exorcise this most recent onset of my dissociated self, but each effort proved futile. Everything stayed the same. I feel like I am running out of time.

I am a thing apart from itself. I have become restless and and undefined. I was sure that such a state would, if nothing else, engender literature. But if I am being honest, I have seldom felt so uninspired. The world is closing in around me once more, and I am left stationary, without interest or intention. I always thought, when I was younger and closer to selfless, that I could exploit the instability of this mind, wander always towards a better kind of life.  But there is no ambition, however limitless, which can assuage the desires of a consciousness such as mine. Once again, I wonder what sacrifices I might be making, without even the slightest knowledge of their consequences.

So much of my recent existence has been a concentrated effort towards apathy, but there were moments when I felt everything, and it hurt. I tried to lose myself in tides of desire and decision, in all of the chaos and virtue that I falsely ascribed to one ancient city and a man with a mind like broken glass. I might have loved him, or something close. He was extraordinary and obsolete: very headstrong, very gentle, very disarrayed. It was as though he existed out of time, occupying only space and memory, disconnected from everything I had ever known. He lent me what he had to offer, for a time, and I was captivated. I remembered what tenderness felt like. I even started to write again.

Whatever else occurred, or has yet to occur between us, he tried. It could never have been anything other than what it is now, but he tried, and that was something beautiful. It took me months to realize what tenacity and care must have gone into those efforts to know and recall me in a world he could barely survive. I wish that we had found each other in some different place and time, in some consecrated reality wherein I could still love, and he could still remember, and the past did not weigh like a nightmare upon our minds. But it never really ended: even now we seem drawn inexorably towards our own undoing, moving further together into the madness that has consumed us for half a year. It as if neither one can disassociate from the other: and whether our ongoing state is caused by the rare meeting of two well-matched countenances, or by a mere fear of returning to our respective states of solitude, it is impossible to say. But I still feel him in my veins, and so maybe, somewhere, we linger on. I could write our eulogy for years to come.

There were other objects of fascination, of course. There always inevitably will be, and I have been so lucky in so many ways. I encountered a woman more passionate and more pure than I would ever have believed possible, and by whose hands, in our narcotized first joining, I experienced an ecstasy that moved me almost past endurance. I found a man who spoke my name like it mattered and turned phrases in my tired mind. I met living things whose bodies transcended all insufficient categorization, and momentary lovers who knew no gender at all. Those nights were radiant in their own strange way, and the mornings felt insouciant and sanguine. And so there were instances of respite this winter. There were moments of invaluable connection.

Mostly, though, there was a tremendous sense of absence: a chasm of negative space that carved its way through weeks and months of my existence. It made me feel disconnected. It horrified me. I wanted so badly to be saved from that isolation. I often still do. I seem to spend half of my life in a state of disavowal, trying to escape the knowledge that I am alone, and that it scares me. I am so very reluctant to admit how self-reliant I must become. I want to believe that there is still some person, or some place, or some purpose, that might sustain me indefinitely, might eradicate this miserable need to consume, and so satiate, myself.

Briefly, and by sheer virtue of coincidence, I found the source of my imperfect solace. As ever, I was too turned in upon myself to recognize the value it held, and so it never felt beautiful until I knew that I might lose it. Then, of course, every touch registered with an uncommon clarity, glancing and resonating until I was tethered to some vague reality by every instance of contact between our skin. We spent one final night together, endeavoring to keep something worthwhile alive, and I remained awake well into the dawn, not moving, not speaking, just holding his sleeping form so close that I could feel each breath he drew.

For an instant, I nearly knew him: the angular profile, the piercings in the ears, the quick, unconscious movements when he shifted in his sleep. My arms around him, one of my hands gripped in one of his—he held it so tightly, even as he slept—I raised myself on one exhausted elbow and traced, with the edges of my outstretched fingers, this extraordinary and living thing that had accompanied me so steadfastly through my efforts to revive this ruined body. I could feel the muscles and bones and capillaries beneath the flesh, and I wondered if he had already faded beyond my recollection. I wondered how or why that might have come to be. I wondered, as I so often do, how the hell I became this way: so callous and self-contradicting, too withdrawn to remedy my own isolation, and too afraid to care. The morning came like an indictment. I never wanted to leave that room.

But when I awoke, and he was gone, I felt nothing at all. I found my feet, I dressed myself, I smoothed out the imprint of my form from his sheets. I took every trace of myself and I walked out the door.

The act of losing something is seldom determined by physical presence. We engage with loss, in its purest form, when we can no longer sustain the illusion of vitality: when we accept, without question, that an ending of sorts has begun. I hope I did the right thing—truly, I do. I hope I hurt fewer people this time around. I do not want to believe that this was without meaning or value. I like to think its roots were deeper, more singular, like the last words he said on the first night I knew him, and the stories we told in the darkness thereafter. But I also think that I can cope with it having been beautiful, fast, and strange. What other choice do I have? I will never really understand how or why these things come to end. I cannot fathom what I am feeling: but I am feeling. And that, at least, is something.

I do not want to be exhausting, unpredictable, volatile, extreme. I want to be something closer to normal. I want to be amiable and easy and at peace. But I also want to burn. I want to consume and linger on forever. I want to live with such spectacular finesse that if the world were to end in fire, you would know by whose hand it fell. It is mad, but not complicated: I want to be more than this body. I want to relinquish its past and its pain. I cannot remain tethered to a thing that bleeds so easily.

I like to think that I was born with chaos in my soul, a descendent of all of the witches that the world could not find fire to burn. Maybe that is why my body turns feral, why my sanity slips into paradigms of unreality and converses there with itself. I like to think that I am as potent as she was, my fallen companion and second self, before she took unspeakable measures and lost her beautiful mind. She reminded me of all the astonishing and terrible ways to feel like a living thing, and then she left me with nothing at all.

But I am more and less than she is: I could not survive my own inclinations, and so the winter reduced me to madness once more. I was incomplete and isolated and always wishing to be less so: I was working and using and striving to feel closer to whole. But the world was harsh, the sun was bright, and the people were terrifying and desirable. So I had to keep moving. I always have to keep moving.

I went to a place where the streets seemed less foreboding, with half a pack of cigarettes and two people I love. I thought that the anonymity of a new city might heal me. I tried, and perhaps it helped. At any rate, I started to breathe again. I did not retreat from each impending day. For the first time in months, I started to see once more in those currents of pleasure and even elation that used to come so naturally to me. I tried to view that singular city in all of its vibrancy and motion, tried to understand what one wild man must have felt, wandering the fields of Provence in his suffering state, when the universe became clear to him in paradigms of ecstasy. I  found clairvoyance in silent canals and the lights that fell upon their waters: in alabaster mornings and our smooth, indifferent souls.

In smoke-filled shops I paid for respite, using burnished foreign coins like the ones my father kept in the shallow dish by his black office desk—my father, who travelled to faraway places, and who I loved more than my life, myself. Sometimes I still adore you, my first companion and finest muse: but where have you wandered to now?

I have said it all before, but I love without direction or purpose. And if it seems careless, or casual, or inane, that is only because I strive too intently for neutrality. I fear the sensation of being loved and left. I am obscenely well versed in impermanence and untruths.

But once again, in spite of my own best efforts, something in my subconscious stirs. It is roused and vaguely searching, enraptured by a desire for that of which it is too wary to ascribe any semblance of language or form. This vague potentiality is nothing new, nothing peculiar; it is one of the earliest memories of those strange and formative weeks when I began a different life. Beneath the surface, like a dream upon waking, or the narcotized images that linger half-forgotten in my sober mind, he is never really present and he is never fully gone. I have felt this way since the very start. This is the figure upon which my clandestine desires took their earliest and most inexplicable forms. And my sentience is nothing if not resilient,  if not hopeful: at the faintest indication of a promise, I am ready to try again. And yet I cannot bring myself to admit how close to real this might become.

Where did you sleep last night?

In my own misuse of the language that I love, I will begin once more. Another inane distraction, maybe even a newfound muse. It feels strange and wild and half-contrived, like the time I found a Polaroid of six-year-old me with my father, and tore it apart layer by layer until the tar bled like onyx from the marred remains. I sought to ruin the source of that image, to reckon with acts of destruction that lack a name. These impulses may lead me nowhere at all; even so, they never really seem to fade.

This is a violent fucking world—never let anyone tell you otherwise. But I have spent too long pretending that there will ever be any sanctuary other than that which I provide for myself. I have wasted years trying to justify my existence with the promise of some better place. I no longer wish to know the futility of this feeling. Someone told me once that my writing will always be too abstract for anyone to ever really read it. But I am ready to speak, for once, as plainly as I can. Maybe this will make the difference. Maybe someone will hear me now.

So be honest. Be direct. Be brief. Is this beautiful yet?

I drink coffee. I smoke cigarettes. I don’t fucking care anymore. Is this beautiful yet?

I am defiant. I am surviving. I want to die every now and again. Is this beautiful yet?

Don’t breathe too deeply, or you will begin to feel it hurting. Don’t remember too fondly, or you will forget to live at all. Don’t stay too long, or you’ll remember why you loved her in the first place. Lose yourself in intricate phrasings, intemperate and unwise—fuck, I’m doing it again. I’m writing in a way that will bring me closer to no one at all.

Be honest. Be direct. Be brief. Don’t apologize. Don’t think. Don’t need things that people can’t give you.

Desire shamelessly. Engage recklessly. Love absurdly. It is the only thing worth living for—so let yourself feel this way again, and again, and again.

Is this beautiful yet?

Am I beautiful yet?

Or am I merely something new?