Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is.

W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

Precious little time remained before I was to put the tides of an echoing sea between myself and this strange world once more. But in the hallowed space of those seven hours, it was finally worth it. I felt wanted. I was wanted. In every moment of that bittersweet night, I was precisely where I desired to be. The city was shrouded in starlight, imbued with the kaleidoscope of a stained-glass coming dawn and the effervescent fragrance of a champagne bottle between my lips. I was keenly aware of how wonderful it felt; the dew-garnished grass beneath my stirring form; the rain-washed pathways, sorrowful and glistening; the hands that ran along my shivering skin; the mouth so warm and sweet and familiar; the bed unmade with fingertips and teeth; his sighs like reverence, breathless and heady; the hushed velvet stillness; the dampness and heat. Spires climbed skywards, and diaphanous morning unfolded like an eyelid: dimmed with rose-quartz and rust. This was harmony at last, we had found the balance I had so long sought after, and it tethered us fast to that scene. I derived from his movements no intention that was not also my own: no desire but that which I felt as well. And so we moved forward into the exquisite, unknowable expanse of the night. We sustained something more than mere illusion. We learned the rare pleasure of forging a memory that quickens my pulse even now.

I was most alive when you were inside of me, not only in my body but in my mind and discourse. You calmed the part of me that makes me hurt, the part I am afraid of, that causes me to lose control. You did not cure me of my affliction, but you blunted its edge. Your presence was a sedative: I felt safe and calm, not narcotized but beautiful, insouciant, unmarred. It took half a year, of course, but it has come at last to this. I loved feeling you speak my name, watching your voice move across my half-shattered skin, breathing your final phrases as they carved patterns in the crystal refuge of my memory. And I liked your mind, so different from this which writes for you now: the gentle, pragmatic inclinations, the soft edges of sanity whereupon my caustic intemperance burned and curled. After every confession I offered, you kissed me. In our mutual acts of forgiveness and atonement, each glance resonating like a caress, we learned to know each other: we loved gently, recklessly, and all at once.

Of course, it could never have lasted any longer than one night, for that is the nature of what we are. In the early hours of morning, we met our end together, and I took my leave exactly as I had after that first, fateful evening: turning away from your watching form and wandering down the winding flight of stairs. You stood, for a moment, silhouetted in the doorframe, and your eyes cut into the very heart of me. How very different it felt, this time around. A lifetime or more had passed in the intermittent instances between our first and last goodbyes. Almost before you were gone, I was already remembering you, and melancholic, trancelike, I stood outside those doors and watched the solitary sunrise. I think you understood at last, that night, how I loved you in my own strange way—and that if I had ever hurt you, this alone was why. But what a pyrrhic victory it seems.

If you ever felt unwanted, I am sorry, I am sorry. I liked you. I admired you. But sometimes I hurt the things that remind me of me. I never meant to be this way. When I love a thing, it leaves me. When it leaves, I start to love it. I do not know which comes first. Can I only really care for that which makes me suffer—am I inflicting the horror upon myself? Is this paradox rooted in the fact that the things I love have always, eventually hurt me, or does it stem from my own unspoken love of hurting? My only conclusion, tentative though it may be, is that I never learned the difference between what loves me and what leaves. If my pain and my affection seldom seem separable, it is only because no one ever taught me how to distinguish one from the other. This is not my natural state. This is not a choice that I remember making. This is an ongoing act of mourning: a lived eulogy to my childhood, my father, my sanity, myself.

But this undifferentiated nexus of agony and adoration has wounded more than me. It is what allowed me to act, on occasion, with such obstinance. It is what drove me to recoil from moment after irretrievable moment. It is why I could not love you when I wanted to, when I could have tried, when there was still time, when you might have loved me in return. I cannot remedy that now—I can scarcely even learn from it, I fear. And therefore I am sorry, I am so entirely sorry; not just for failing to love you, but also for how very much I think I might love you now. I do not know when or how this happened. I have always been predisposed towards infatuation, unsustainable bouts of augmented feeling, but this took place so slowly, so naturally: it grew like ivy in my veins, it blossomed in my lungs, it took root in the history that we will always share. I never could have expected it. That garden that you realized, and that I wrote, has at last taken its full form. I found parts of myself there that I had believed were lost forever. I was the life in that nighttime, I was the growing thing: somnambulist, child, lover, transgressor, repenter, votive, desecrator—not just unhinged but unknowing, unknowable. I was living always in the liminal periphery between two worlds, purgatorial and profane. You witnessed within me the ineffable lightness and the enigmatic fire of my own being—for I was, in many ways, the object of my own impalement; not simply the crucified body, but also, perhaps, its cross.

I am crying. Finally. It has been so long since I have been able to feel in this way. I may regard this, always, as the year that consumed me—but I know that I am healing now, however slowly, however belatedly, because yesterday, I remembered what the rain feels like. In some ways, I am grateful that you were not always there to witness the fracturing of my health. I was not necessarily successful in surviving these months. I fell to pieces about as often as I endured; I was sometimes strong, and sometimes I was very weak. I am happy that you were able to experience, in our earliest days, the better parts of of me. I am thankful that you did not see me shatter. There was another for that task, and it only grieved her. I lent her, a while, the misery of this skin: she bore it well, but can I ever forgive us? I was so wounded, so undone, that I allowed myself to bleed out carelessly upon her hands and mind. She still believes in me, even now—but how can that possibly be? Sometimes I think that I should do penance for this, for showing her a love that I was not well enough to keep. I knew better than to feed off of a thing that could barely sustain itself.

But you told me not to live looking backwards anymore. I think, in this case, you were right. This world will not change. Not for me. And if I seem wistful or repentant now, it is only because I refuse to lose another beautiful thing to my tainted conscience or my guarded ways or my fading recollections. I have no pride left. I have conviction, desire, and defiance, but no pride. Not anymore. I am a nerve exposed. I am going to feel everything, if I can—I am going to feel it entirely and unashamedly. And so I will honor and write our final moments: because that is as close as I can come to recompense, to redamancy, to loving you in the way that you have deserved for so long now. I cannot retrieve what time and circumstance have now rendered a part of the past. But I can mourn this history, find beauty in its ephemerality; and above all else, I can remember you well. A kind of immortality resides in all language: it is what I have to offer in my body’s stead. And offer it I will, because at long last, I am on the way to knowing love, to knowing myself again. Those dusky, tortured, ocher months, when I was dragged back to life from its unwilling edges, are finally coming to a close. I am ready now. I want this.

These are the days of my healing. They entail so much more than any one person, time, or place. But they will always have been made possible, at least in part, by you. Because for one night, beside you, I felt fondly again. I remembered how you saw me, and so remembered who I was. And I am certain that counts for something.

If this was my baptism by fire, then I have survived it all. I will bear the scars and the scourges and the burns of these past six months for the rest of my life. But I will not atone for this any longer; instead, I will invoke the fortitude that you yourself taught me. I will requite the clemency and the empathy and the mercy that I have been shown—by you, by her, by all of them and more—not with penance, but with the restoration of my own health. It is time, I think, to rise once more, in tides of a burning lucidity, in clauses barbed with the bliss of a second coming. Whatever it takes, I will revive this body, this skin like a mutilated miracle: I will repair the branded arms and shorn hair and genderless desires. Eye my scars, then, and hear my heart. I will find life in exactly that which has consumed me: in the melted gold that floods the crevices of my bones, in the ash that trails from my fingertips. I will do more than just survive this. I will emerge, and I will enthrall, and I will make myself a thing worth knowing once more. So remember me, revere me, and watch what you have helped me to achieve. Watch as the consequences crystallize. Watch as I forge, from this grim history, something caustic and new. Watch as this promise takes on, like daybreak, another beautiful and terrifying form.

Watch me unfold with the smoke of my own burning.

Watch me begin to live again.

“Go back to sleep,” she murmured. “These aren’t times for things like that.”
He saw himself in the mirrors on the ceiling, saw her spinal column like a row of spools strung together along a cluster of withered nerves, and he saw that she was right—not because of the times, but because of themselves, who were no longer up to those things.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

This is not a story about anything I have ever loved. This is a story about my illness, my undying anxieties, and the people I lost or never really had. This is just another chapter of the strangest year of my life, and it ends, as ever, with the specter of my earliest abandonment. But there was love there once. I did not always know this, but of late, I certainly have. So I am writing now in the sleepless delirium of another soon-to-be morning, with an overflowing ashtray and an onslaught of unwanted memories ringing through my tired mind. I am writing when I should be healing, because I am afraid that I have finally run out of time. After all, the spring has ended. I am crossing an ocean soon and leaving all of this behind.

Some of my best moments, the most clairvoyant and frankly erotic instances of my life, were spent in an unmade bed and the garden of my own discontent, where this branded body, all burned and scarred and wary, unfolded at last like a miracle or a mercy: engaging me, absolving me, rendering me close to whole. Those were the times that I never wanted to end, gazing down upon the form that I had come to regard so fondly; the two faces held between our four hands, knuckles entwined in tangled locks of hair; the mouth that moved in mine, tasting of something more permanent than pleasure; the ecstasy that echoed in reams of flesh, grazing against the sheltered depths of my self and my soul. I remember the abandon with which I allowed my spine to arch, arms crossed above my head, mind empty and fingers outstretched–and between my knees that half-crouching form, singular and impossibly beautiful. I felt then an elation so simple, a want so uncontrollable, that I scarcely recalled how to speak. My pulse was rapid and absolute: my body was singing that name. Does it matter what language one ascribes to such a sensation? Must it necessarily entail obligation or resolve? All I know for certain is that I was happy then. I was so entirely happy. It was one of the few things left here that could make me feel happy, that could make me feel anything at all. And I wanted to keep it until the end.

Then that time passed suddenly–two days, nothing more. All of the worst things happen around Father’s Day, I have found. So I expected something, I think, but certainly not this. That night was one of the worst in my memory. The catalyst does not bear retelling, but its consequences were instantaneous. I still do not quite understand what occurred, or why it so thoroughly undid me, but I could never have anticipated the sensation. I felt as though the utter heart had been ripped out of me. I was butchered and desperately hollow. I had seldom been so shaken, so confused, and there was nothing left to do except feel everything at once. I tried to reason with my own dissociated consciousness, but my mind had turned upon itself. I heard a laugh, a sound that scalded, and it fell like madness upon me–Left again, so soon?–until I finally slept, unquietly and afraid. That night I survived, if you may call it survival, the careless massacre of some precious drop of vulnerability that I did not know I had left to lose. I had not been aware, however scarcely, of its presence, until he bit that pretty thing in two and left me in an empty bed, drunk and dripping crimson.

Did I exasperate and disgust you, the furthest and most extreme form of what you fear yourself to be, laying bare your limitations in the extent of my insanity, the purgatory of your own conception of a self? Or perhaps I bored you, my eccentricity only amusing for so long, its value now exhausted in your unconvinced mind. Were you always too altered, too consumed by chemicals or reckless desire, to care what remained of me in the morning? But why call a thing incredible, when you no longer want it at all? Your intentions were never decipherable, never spoken. Was I simply not useful anymore?

“You’re a special person, Grace Tully.” Those were the last words you spoke in the first hours of knowing me, on that beautiful and perhaps regrettable night when I first let you make love to me, and began to understand that I was not yet ruined or damaged beyond repair, and that there was something left for me to strive towards. I have remembered those words ever since. Maybe they were true. Maybe you believed them. After all, I was so alive and extraordinary and strange back then, with my shining eyes and my half-starved frame, irradiated by the incandescent recollection of my better days. But I have been fighting for my sanity for a long time now. How can you be horrified to see that I am losing? Of course I am not the person you used to know: that person faded with the early winter, she choked on every plea for help that went unanswered. So do not be too critical, or unsettled, or confused, by whatever it is that I have become. This change was not a thing that I could have prevented on my own, and although I tried and tried and tried, no one was willing to aid me.

I will find another figure now, and learn to love it all the same, until this matters less than a memory. If you have not already, then you must forgive me–but I doubt that will be necessary. I have been given little cause to believe that this absence-riddled grief is known to anyone but myself, and I truly do hope that I alone should feel it, if that is the choice we both made. I always fall a little in love with the things that I am soon to lose, and this was never going to last. I knew that, we both did. It never unsettled me. I just did not expect the end to come in so thoughtless a form.

But you saved my body. Of course that mattered. Try though I might–and mark me, I have tried–I could not make that meaningless, not ever. I just wanted one thing, one stupid, useless fucking thing: I wanted you not to hurt me. It is not complicated. I cared for you. I thought you understood that. I might wonder, sincerely, whether I had asked too much of you. But even now, I will not debase myself in that way. I have to know my own value. I have to know that I am worthy of the tenderness that I strive consciously to offer, and so expect in return. I have never pined for anything that I was not also willing to give. I have to believe that counts for something. So I will take this, all of this, everything that was done to me, all of the people who left me alone, who made me ashamed, who watched me cower. I will wear this upon my failing body like an albatross–and then with chemicals or electric currents, I will burn it out of me. I will purge my mind of its own inclinations, and make myself clean again.

But I will leave claw marks in the flesh of these unforgettable days. I still recall when they began, and what that felt like, and how much I learned and grew and healed. I know that this meant something to me. I am not sure, in fact, when or how it came to matter so entirely: the change was rapid and sentimental and scared me. I am still so afraid to feel this way, and I cannot pretend that you have not given me cause. I am not in love, I am never in love, I am too far gone for loving–but still I adore you, and I will miss you, and I am sorry. I want to remember something better than this. I want there to still be a chance. I will want that until the very last. But I have so little desire left to spend.

Someday I will write this all, and honestly. I do not regret it, not entirely, not yet. But I need the space to hurt now. I believe that there is very little left for me to do. I am not sure whether or not you feel this way as well. I worry that, mostly, we need time, and there is no time left for either of us now–because I am going home, and when I come back, I might not be the same. I think that our days are ending. I am afraid that you might have wanted them to. I do not know how to feel about that, or how to survive it. But these things are always temporary. No one knows the same love twice. Nothing ever really lasts. So I think that our days are ending–and that maybe it is time for me to stop writing, and let them.

“…Only
we can regret
the perishing of the
burned place.
Only we could call it a
wound.”

Margaret Atwood, A Fire Place

I am going under the knife again.

I have often doubted whether, for anyone, such an endeavor could be necessary twice. But I think that this mind of mine may be dying now, undone by the discordant anxieties that roar through my body and split the searing soul.

I poured currents of salt water and measurable time between myself and my lived existence: the history that consumed my physical form, the paranoia and the people that broke me. I tried to purge myself, to burn from my skin the trauma of those who abandoned me, who rejected me by not being there, who left me impaled upon their absence. All of the empty promises, all of those beautiful lies: no one protected me this time, and so I protected myself. But no body can sustain its own worth indefinitely, whether it is driven by anger or by some horrible love. I have become emaciated, my flesh a grisly pattern of bruises, scabs, and scars. How the hell could I have allowed this to happen? I am afraid to leave my room in the mornings. I hardly even know my own name. And fuck you, fuck all of you, for loving what you thought you understood and failing to take care of it anyways. Fuck you for letting me adore you and then disappearing again. Fuck you for making me feel dispensable. You saved my life and you shattered my mind and you made me wish that I had been left alone from the start. This is your indictment, as much as it is mine. At long last, I am writing for us all.

At any rate, I cannot survive another year of this. So I am going back to my own beginnings, to those sterile rooms wherein shame and isolation drip like morphine through my blistering veins. Yes, I am afraid. But this time I will give myself up willingly. They can have everything, they can have my name, my clothes, my history, my body–for I have no health, and I want health desperately. I want to be new and whole again, I want to be better for the people who still trust me. So take it, please, take it all. Get this thing away from me, this flesh, this madness, this consciousness colder than surgical steel. I do not want it, not any of it, I never did. But I was not given a choice.

I sometimes fear that I am not a thing worth keeping alive. You liked me so much better before learning what I am. I opened my eyes this morning and you were already gone. I was surprised that I could still feel anything by then, but I woke up alone and I wished that you had stayed. Or maybe I just wished that I was worth staying for. But I will not crawl, not ever, and so when I stood at the world’s edge, upon that rooftop, I climbed higher than I ever have before. The morning light was cold. My arms were outstretched. My feet were on the brink of some limitless oblivion, some ineffable liberation, some chaos like surrender and some tragedy that might set me free. I understood, at last, that Icarus could never have been consumed in flames without suffering, eventually, his invaluable descent. But might it have been worth the fall, to burn so unforgettably? Some part of me wanted to learn this for myself. But instead, I stepped back from that compelling precipice. I called my mother, who sacrificed her body to bring me into this beautiful, terrible world. I told her at last, in my own way, how very much I love her. Then I covered my ancient wounds in something new. 

So many people fear their own fragmentation. But I was undone in the beginning. I have no interest in pretending that I am anything other than mercurial, impassioned, half-insane. This story was written long before I knew what form it would take. Tiresian in nature, my language has predicted it all–her empty womb, that false crucifixion, the genderless prophecies, the horror of my own burning. Maybe this was the inexorable trajectory of my existence. But even so, I have to be better than this. I love him, her, them, you: I used to love myself, but I cannot love what I have become. This is not me, it is not, I refuse to accept it, I am not like this and I never was–not this broken, not this wasted, not a site for senseless suffering. Please, please, forgive me for this, for making it all so inescapable. Give me time, and nothing more. I will be whole again. I will be better. It will not always hurt so much. 

Subject me once more to the scalpel, and cut it all away. Sedate, anesthetize, lobotomize me–do anything you like, so long as I am well again. I want to pull my own skin apart. I want to tear it back and I want you to dismember me and I want to feel no pain. I will not have any more of this: the sleepless nights, the horrors in my periphery, the bouts of paranoia that make a nightmare of us all. I cannot endure many more days like this one, exposed to the sunlight, eyes downcast, consumed with some wrenching fear that I am alone and relentlessly despised within the confines of this rough reality. Nothing ever really helps, for I was not made to be saved. But I do not want your concern or your sanctimony. I just want to write. I want to heal. I want to not feel scared. I want someone to love me the way my dad never could. 

How lucky I am to be alive in this miserable world. I think that it was always coming to this. It is difficult to feel anything but fear, but I have been steadfast in my endurance for a long time now. Surely, I can keep on for just a little while longer. Thank you for surviving me–thank you all. There seems to be nothing left within me that can justify this, that can make it feel meaningful, that can put me back together again. I have tried and I have tried and I have tried and I have tried, and this is all that it amounts to. But even now, I want to be well again. I know that I will continue on. No one should have to live like this, and maybe that place can set me free. What, after all, have I left to lose?

I miss you, I love you, I hate you, I am you, and so I endure us as one. Return to me, please, and be whatever it was that you used to be. I would give anything to have you back again. So forgive me. Please. I love you. Please. You could never have made me whole, but it means the world to me that you tried. 

I am going under the knife again. What more is there to say?

You hold an absence
at your center
as if it were a life.

Richard Brostoff, Grief

I should have known, I should have known, that even a nightmare ends. Things are still so difficult, but getting better now. I wonder if you will notice. I wonder if you will care. I hope that, someday, you read this and realize that I remember it all. I hope that you have not yet lost faith in my endurance. I hope that you know how brilliantly, unbearably alive I still am.

In the last act of our horror-show scene, what I saw nearly undid me: his skin, this skin that was not mine, had split beneath my fingers like a scream– the image runs even now like a needle through my mind. A baby’s breath or a barren womb could hardly have warranted that. But what a misery it seemed: he was impaled upon a loss that could not be. His grief was all stitched with the absence of a life that never was, and I could not put the body back together again. So I found myself half-anguished, later in the night, smoking and speaking aimlessly to her sleeping form. I am lost, I said, in my etherized state: I am lost and I am trying to find my way back to you. But she could not hear the madness or the music in my mind, and when I did what I thought I had to, it hurt beyond all imagining. I melted and seared, and layers of me fell away with the smoke.

Had I not always said that I wanted to burn? Did I know what it entailed? Have I always known? Maybe it was always coming to this. There was nothing left to expose to that flame but me. And what was I then–Icarus, now fallen? Electra, already consumed? The sacrificial compensation for some ancient, nameless sin? Or was I was only myself, a self that I had hurt, and if so, could I ever recover? When all of it was over, I was utterly devoid of thought, with no force and no fire to speak of. I was fifteen again. I was ashamed. I was an open space, a darkness aching to be made into something new.

I needed him more than ever then, the one who gave form to my solitary endeavors, whose loss I feel only in the half-light of morning, and in the deafening silence of that forsaken room where I used to feel beautiful when he moved in me. But I am tired now, and so undone: I can scarcely recall the hands that pressed against me, and kindled some dim fondness in my bare, still-beating heart. My face between those steady palms, each subtle, half-conscious movement of his form, the gentle hesitance that lent me the strength to continue–my body was a thing we learned as one. And in the moments when it turned upon me, and I recoiled with the soreness of a long-festering fear, he stayed beside me anyways. Even a mind as guarded as my own will know, one day, the wound of his absence: perhaps so profoundly that I will wish he had never found me at all. Beautiful things must always, ineffably, be mourned. His were not the hands that brought me the joy of some impossible desire: he was not the figure for whom I knelt beneath the surface of that foreign shoreline, and felt wonderful and helpless and alive. But he was the clandestine surface whereupon I grew less afraid, and whatever I am becoming now is stronger, mending, and imbued with some quiet gratitude. Those months were sacred: there will always be love there.

What have I come to since the summer? There is no way of telling, not anymore, and maybe there never was. All I know for certain is that it has been a long year. I can say it until I run out of breath, but it is true, it has been so long, and how I have lived since I roamed the streets of New York City in wonder and grief. I now know, less than ever, where I am, where I may go. My father, my family, the girl I thought I could love: did I leave them all behind? Or were they lost before I crossed that sprawling sea? Her voice like raw silk, and all of the rough choices she made: for the first time in so many long and terrible months, I found her, really found her, once more. Those intonations reminded me, if only for an instant, of who I used to be, and all of the ways I used to feel. I met again the woman of these nine months past, whose specter lingers in each new bout of melancholy. “Always” was a handful unforgettable moments. “Always” was an ending that nearly broke me. “Always” was a promise we were both too young to keep.

Always. Always. That word belongs to her now, but its consequences are my own.

So when he wandered through my bedroom door, with the carelessness and integrity I had tried so desperately to forget, I reacted without meaning to, though I could never have anticipated the words that fell hesitantly from his mouth. I knew, with such damning sincerity, precisely that which I had been afraid to know: the feeling of having felt, of having loved and forgotten. It had been so long since my mind was one with his. Some half-recalled adoration stirred in my guarded form: the final evocations of the child who adored him, who still hoped that maybe his gentle consciousness could repair itself, that maybe late autumn was just a ruse or a terrible dream. That secret part of me ached to silence each lingering doubt, abandon entirely my better judgement, and try to love him one more time. But it cannot be about that. It will not be about that. I have no innocence left to give: and even if I wanted to, I could not endure our history twice.

I really think I like you. I like you, I like you, and your disbelief cannot cure me. I can only hope that you never begin to understand. In the horror of my last dissociation, I was sitting in the front quad, and I thought that I could see straight into the core of each ancient structure in my periphery. The frameworks were skeletal, all of their grandeur gone–I realized that a house of God, when not alight with song, is a hollow thing to witness. That day I saw through dreaming spires, and into the heart of some harsh and corrupt reality: the bare bones of a world where strangers and children play unforgivable games, and where I learned to trust no one but myself. This city has been killing me slowly, and for longer than I have cared to admit. But it does not always have to feel this way: and even now, I am not sorry. Not for what was done to me. Not for what I am.

My healing, my salvation, will be made possible by the very things that brought me here to begin with: the half-mad fears and longings that first reduced me to this state. For all of the reasons that I suffer, I will also, inevitably, survive. I am certain that I sound histrionic, and perhaps self congratulatory, once more. But that does not matter: it cannot matter. These are the things I tell myself because I have nothing else to say, and because I see no better means by which I may endure or engage. The dream of a normal death, a natural death, a death not inflicted by the hands that write this piece, has not always been more than mere fantasy for me. I have clung to it in desperation and desire when it seemed less likely than a miracle. If I was not ready for this life, it was only because I did not believe it was possible.

Someday I will write, in full, the history of this form: in gradients of desire and each forgotten cross I have climbed. I will give a language, at last, to whatever absence breathes and burns within me, to the specter of my wordless story, and to the child who I cannot mourn, having never learned her name. I do not know where it is taking me, this body that atones. I know that I am not well yet. To heal will require time, and even now, I feel listless and wary and disillusioned as all hell. Survival is the art of accepting nothing more or less than your own continued existence–and so I have always lived like this, because I knew no other way.

But I have done my penance, for now. I have taken measures that unsettled even me, and I have given months of my life to the people I am striving to love. So let it be over now, if only for a while. Tell me that I have suffered enough, and let me lay these ghosts to rest. I have always been peculiar and half-aimless and inane. I am disparate and I am flawed beyond measure. I am beautiful and strange. I am the blistering core of your discontent. I am the center that holds. But more than any of that, I am older now. I am stronger, I hope. I am finally ready to try again.

What will I become, now that I am no longer content to merely survive?