Apologies for such a brief and grim post. I wrote this upon waking from a nightmare. It should not be taken too seriously. I will probably delete it sooner rather than later. 

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.

Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

No one is reading this. I am in a crypt. Inverting like shrieks of a memory-shell, these locusts move soft across the underside of my mind. The result is headless, and bears a kind of flesh: its image festers like carrion. My bent chest cracks with each whistle of breath. Skin, skin, skin, skin: I am writing for the birds now.

Here, in this moment, I am not getting better. Only more scared. This shouldn’t surprise us. Because you can’t spend half your life in the talons of an undue virtue and come out the other side feeling okay. You just can’t. And who knows–maybe we all hold this truth for a reason. Why should my lot be any better?

I write for all of you. How do you feel? Are you well? Is anyone fucking well anymore? Some of you have to be, because I gave you my health, I scattered it upon your minds like leaves on an autumn grave. Surely some difference was made. I lie where the vines clung in crimson-wrought tides, and rifted the bare iron dusk of your eyes. Come on, please: be all right for me. Live gladly again, because I can’t now.

I still love you all. There is no cult of madness more inane than these people, these nets of souls and human society. Every selfless display of concern becomes a sort of violence: sympathy is a more virulent indictment than any barbed rebuttal. It is all so simple and sentimental and cruel: why are they asking this of me? If I were a dog, they would have put me down by now. I have given them cause. Why can’t I just go?

But I stay and I stay. So stop worrying about me, for god’s sake, stop worrying. I am the farthest thing from fine, and yet, by their standards, it is all just as well. This culture does not care if I am merely a corpse reanimated. So long as I walk and I speak and I breathe, so long as I lend them my obedience and language, so long as I pour words across the empty pages of their lives, they are satisfied. By those principles, the crisis is over, my tragedy averted. I am fine, I am fine, I am fine. I am alive because that is what you need me to be. I am not going anywhere. I am not breaking stride. This is just a bad hour. A bad week. A bad year.

And besides, I still have a few deaths left to spend. Who knows what vampires stalk even now through this childlike nightmare of a mind? Maybe another dark-eyed man will come to drink love from between my lips and lifeless thighs. Maybe another faceless god will bleed me of sight and sanity. Maybe another crowd will jeer at the smoke of a witch’s burning. Maybe another thoughtless friend will tear each tenet of my trust away, seizing upon my faiths in sequence like a set of severed limbs.

To keep the impression of harmony, you need me to hate myself. Right? Maybe not. I don’t care anymore. I am simple and effaced. I want to be purer than the winter. I want this feeling gone from me. I am eating my own darkness: it is tougher than a deadened heart.

And what does it matter? I am remote. I am remiss. I am untouchable. Here is just now. No one is reading this.

I am undoing you from my skin.

Rupi Kaur, milk and honey

I had lingered too long in the keeping of my own unquiet mind; it was time to start moving again. I boarded a flight to the West Coast, found another world wherein I might incur mirages of meaning; but I was never content to find respite in the crystal depths of the Pacific. I was born of the freakish Atlantic, a daughter of its far-off, forlorn tides. My pulse recalls songs of its salt-bitten winds; a rainswept necropolis in gradients of grey; the nascent floods of brine that cut colder than my bones. I lost my childhood to those sepulchral shores, and returned ten years later to kneel in the bitter currents and pray for my own restoration.

This ontology of decision and desire seems more wrenching now than it ever has before. I have spent so long crushed beneath the foot of my first lover, groveling and gnawing upon exigencies of my own survival. I suffered under his architecture, the monstrous ingenuity of this master builder, my Daedalus: between us, we shared one strange and brilliant soul. I am the consequence of his failed designs, the product of a mind like a beautiful machine, enshrined in its crucible of ash. I forged a double consciousness within those sterile fires: engendered the two-tongued heart that will devour us both in the end.

There was a morning, just one, in my recent memory, when I might have escaped from the labyrinthine past. What a blissful prospect it seemed, to evoke the fate of Icarus: to forsake a foregone body and fall burning into the sea. But I did not succumb to the breathless lure of that desire; for you were there behind frosted panes of glass. Your sleeping form recalled the ecstasy of more blameless days. I could still feel the rapture of our time spent in balance: the effortless joining of two reckless, untamed things, smoking and speaking and making love on the living room floor. You swam the dark waters of my enigmatic needs, traced patterns from my tongue upon supernal strains of music; you lured me, like Eurydice, from self-appointed death. A part of me lingers in the channels of England: unseen, eternal, and imbued with an endless longing. There I lay to rest not only the specter of our lost time, but also the memory of the child I was, immersed in the beautiful beginnings of my madness, when you found me in a smoke-dimmed room and made the first of your efforts towards my heart.

I know that you tried, in your own peculiar way. I know that you cared as well as you could. But I was not fully known to you. A body half-starved, craving tenderness and trust: untethered though my love may often have seemed, each moment took root like cypress in my soul. You were saner than I; you never understood, because you never could feel, how very much those shared months meant to me. I doubt that anyone in your position ever really will.

I have lately written, with such precise devotion, these effigies of what we were, what you are, what I always will be. But our mimetic self-abasement is unfurling still. I wanted to wait for you. Of course I did. But as early as the first glimpses of our distancing, I was already moving towards the threshold of that room; because this, you must understand, is a condition of my survival. I must hold this butchered consciousness together at any imaginable cost. I cannot hope too fondly, or love too fully, or write too honestly now—for though I can endure losing you, I cannot watch you fade. Have you imagined, all this time, that I feared the tragic implications of your absence? Nothing, my darling, strays further from the truth. There is no desertion that I cannot withstand, and this itself is what frightens me: I am reluctant, as ever, to confront the colorless expanse of my apathy. When you go, my narcoleptic mind will relinquish this, and expunge it all with an unsettling ease. You will not linger within me—not even slightly. You will lose your meaning all too quickly. I will forget what it felt like to love you in the first place. That, my love, is the tragedy I sought to defer.

My god, I really have lost you, haven’t I? You really are not coming back. Go ahead, then. Take it all. There is no bitterness left in me. Finish what you yourself began—for you wanted this once, more than I ever could. I blame you for that, you know. But I will survive. It is time to start thinking and loving again. It is time to forge some kind of peace with how very alone I am. So now, if it really is the end of this, I will go without question. My resistance bears the form of an absolute submission: one final testament to the clandestine longings now eclipsed by a reality I can hardly accept. I will know no anger, no remorse. I will simply remember you fondly. I will recall, with gratitude, the mind that once sheltered my own. There will be no grief, no horror, no hurting: just the melancholy ending of another finite and impossibly lovely thing.

You quieted my mind even as I tore it to pieces in front of you. You helped me to heal, and you wounded me past endurance. When you kept yourself distant, averted your dark-eyed gaze, you forged, implicitly, the fresh scores of scars that shower now across my skin. But if these myopic inclinations mutilated my reason, then they also made possible your most miraculous act. Through your gentle pragmatism, you came to learn the nature and the chaos of my form. You derived rhythms from its tremors and blood. You achieved precisely that which I had never believed possible. You revived this body. You restored its life. You knew what I was, and you saved me all the same. Now, at last, I can breathe again, and for as long as I live, I will be thankful for that.

My friend, my love, you were well met. You were enduring. You were adored. I will miss you unrestrainedly: I will endeavor to feel the fullness your loss in every corner of my being. Someday, I will find the courage to only want what is best for you—but lately, I have been too afflicted by desire to see beyond the shadow of an inexorable ending. And so I will not write of you any longer. I will not gnaw upon the bones of an irretrievable past. It is time, I think, to learn the value of solitude once more.

I write here an ending to these uncertain days. This is your farewell and your freedom. I ask nothing of you; I cling to the illusion of your affections no longer; I release you from it all. I hope that you go where you will, and love as you choose, and remember this well—but you have no obligation to me anymore. I suppose you never really did. And in the end, it would scarcely have made a difference. There was never any health left in me for you to protect or preserve.

Darling, you should understand by now that I always, inevitably, survive. I see no other option but to live and to live on. So take your leave of me entirely. There is nothing left to know.

I love you. I miss you. I’ll be fine.

Now, go.

Or: How My Latest Diagnosis Changed My Life (Again)

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

The summer has passed me by quietly so far. I am realizing lately that I rarely, if ever, write in my authorial (rather than narrative) voice. What I mean is, I don’t write in the same way that I talk (so to speak). What does that say about how I see myself in a social context? (That was rhetorical: don’t answer it).

Do not misunderstand me: my narrative voice is not—in my eyes, at least—contrived. It is not an obscuring of myself, but an actualization. I use language, become as verbose as I feel necessary, in order to engage with content that I otherwise regard as nearly unspeakable. It feels organic. It feels like a truth. Even so, I am a person and I write about people. When I allegorize each experience, I am only providing half of the story.

Every now and then, in some conversation or another, someone (and I can tell you every name and what they said, because these are some of the most humbling moments it is possible for me to have) will reference my blog while talking to me. Sometimes they mention specific phrases or images or ideas. Once, an attendant at a house party quoted a piece verbatim (that really tickled me). Every single time this occurs, it never fails to astound me—and I mean literally astound me—because with the exception of a few scattered “likes” on Facebook, I genuinely can’t believe that people actually read this blog.

And that might be for the better: I think I have to believe that. My literature (so to speak) is a full-on, unflinching chronicle of a mental state that sometimes seems to be deteriorating at a rate that frightens even me. What might it mean to know this, to see myself as being seen this way, as a thing that has spent half of this year one wrong word or thoughtless action away from a complete breakdown? I could hardly stand knowing that people knew me in this way. I have to believe that, as I work towards regaining much of my health, many of you are choosing not to look.

Do “people,” in the abstract—that is to say other people, people outside of myself and those that I know intimately—understand how much I like them? Not just as individuals, but as a notion, as people-who-are-not-me. I am fascinated by this whole living, breathing, thinking network of human bodies that all seem to know what they’re doing when I don’t. I want to be fond of it. I want to break down all of the unspoken barriers that seem to impede my relation to some greater world.

But to really grasp the difficulty of achieving this, one would first have to understand why I built up such remarkably effective walls in the first place. And I’m not sure even I really understand that.

I don’t think I was all that well-liked as a kid. I’m fairly certain that has something to do with it. Losing my relationship with my dad probably didn’t help either. But I never realized just how bad things were until the end of my first year at university. Now I am trying to remember the last time I felt completely comfortable in a social space full of other people—the last time I did not feel an implicit need to justify what I perceive as the inherent detriment of my presence—and I honestly cannot.

To be clear, this is not a new issue for me. One of the clearest and earliest memories I have of this, outside of family events and classroom settings, occurred when I was thirteen years old. I was enrolled in a summer theatre program that was, in my eyes, the single most wonderful place on the planet. I had never been more excited. It was not always easy for me: with a nonverbal disorder, chronic anxiety, and some symptoms of potentially being on the spectrum, I was unable to navigate the fast-paced and exhaustingly social atmosphere of the camp as easily as I might have liked to. Sometimes I spoke too much or too loudly. Sometimes I was too nervous to speak. Nevertheless, I was extremely happy. I was so thrilled to be there, in spite of its challenges, that to this day I am not completely sure what I was doing wrong.

But I must have been doing something, because one day, the program director asked to have a “conversation” with me. My memory has expunged most of the encounter—to protect me, most likely—but I remember that she said something about behavioral complaints. Then she asked me, very seriously and sternly, if someone was making me come to the program every day. That question hit me much harder than I am sure the poor woman had intended for it to. To her utter surprise and confusion, I began shaking, then crying hard.

“No one’s making me come here” I choked out, “I want to be here. This is my favorite place in the world.”

I will never forget that feeling. I was hurt and I was humiliated, but worst of all, I was crumbling beneath a sense of woeful and staggering inadequacy: not only, in my thirteen-year-old mind, could I not get these people to like me—I had somehow also failed to communicate how very much I liked and admired them. When I went home that day, I had cried all of the shock out of me, and so I sat in my room for hours and did nothing at all. When my parents came home, I did not tell them that anything (or everything) had gone wrong. I spent the next day stammering out explanations to anyone who would listen. I spent the rest of the summer apologizing everywhere I went.

But the conversations continued. Things just kept happening. And it all hurt tremendously, but how were they to know? They were all so well intended. They were trying to help by fixing me. But I didn’t need fixing. I needed someone to like me. I needed one goddamned person to understand how confused I was by the world. But that person never appeared, and at some point, I think that I just started assuming my own inevitable isolation. I wanted to become untouchable, and thus, less damageable.

So I got smarter. I worked my ass off in high school, and better yet, by the time I reached eighteen or so, I learned how to make it look as though I was not trying at all. (That’s bullshit, by the way. I am always trying very hard, and usually just in the interest of keeping my head above the water). I got angry. I started smoking, mostly so that my hands would stop shaking every time I tried to make conversation with a classmate or a shopkeeper or a stranger. I inked my skin. I shaved my hair. I learned how to argue with, dismiss, and mistreat other people. You could say that I learned to make them feel how they used to make me feel.

But that is the problem, isn’t it? These people aren’t all the same person; yet I began, ridiculously, to forego their demarcation by the inevitable virtue of their not being me. I saw everything in a manner that was almost explicitly oppositional: there was Myself, and then there was Everyone Else. And I was in equal parts envious, suspicious, contemptuous, and admiring of Everyone Else, simply because They were not Me. I still struggle with this.

Not all of the changes were detrimental, of course. Some of them were revelations, rites of passage, my means of coming into a better and fuller sense of personhood. The issue arises, I reckon, when I am no longer confident in my ability to differentiate between the protective spectacle and the unrestrained self. Because when your mind falls apart and your fingers are always twitching and you wake up one morning and realize that you have lost just about every trace of the optimism and vulnerability that you used to have in abundance, it is easy to be bitter and resentful of the world.

Is this helpful, though? Am I healing? If the last year is anything to go off of, then the answer is absolutely fucking not. The unhappy moments I describe have been internalized, by me, as lasting and deeply harmful parts of my psyche. They compounded with early strains of my depression, and years of verbal and psychological maltreatment, to such a damaging extreme that my therapist and my psychiatrist and my team of doctors finally produced another diagnosis to add to my nightmarishly accomplished mental repertoire. They gave my paranoia a new name, they called it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they wrote a few new clinical notes, and provided some impassive words of sympathy that dripped into my skin like anesthesia. It made me feel so fucking low.

Now, I am desperately seeking someone or something to hold onto. I am pushing away everything that I do not want to hurt, or that I do not want to lend the power to hurt me. I am not always doing the right thing. But if there is one thing I will credit myself for, it is that I did at least try to communicate what I was thinking and feeling. Yes, sure, maybe it was not enough. Maybe people really did not know the full extent of the damage they inflicted when they leveled unfair and untrue accusations, when they left me alone in the worst parts of my life, when they failed to stay in touch, when they made me start hating myself again. But they knew, they must have known, that I was violently ill. I wore it on my arms and my protruding ribs. I stopped laughing. I stopped working. I stopped going outside. And most unmistakably, most explicitly, I allegorized, documented, and published it all here. On this blog.

Does this read like I feel sorry for myself? That might be because I have nothing left to lose from self pity. I did everything I was supposed to. I “got help.” I tried to be honest. I fought back when I had to, and when I saw no other option but to be angry and unrepentant, that is exactly what I was. (Why is that so often construed as fucking funny, by the way? Why does it amuse people to see me so obviously upset: online or in person? What difference is there between aggravating my fears for entertainment and kicking a goddamned dog? If I remember the last incident correctly, there are 27 of you who might explain that difference to me sometime). I was ill to the point of incapacity, and it was overridden and ignored. My needs were overlooked and displaced in favor of a more greater and more comfortable social narrative wherein I was making some active choice to feel this way. But that wasn’t true, it just wasn’t. A half informed conception of my personhood was projected, perhaps inflicted, upon my scars and my episodes with a relentless and unforgiving precision. 

Is it my fault, then? I know that it might be simpler, less painful, to comply a bit more. But I don’t see that it’s any better to kill myself slowly, in pieces, by behaving like a thing I am not, rather than simply taking care of it all in one permanent action. With any luck, this will remain a choice that does not need making. But do any of you really understand, for a even a goddamned second, what really compels me to write the way I do, and as often I do, and using the subject matter that I choose? I am not all that talented or thoughtful or insightful. I am just trying to justify my own presence, because I don’t think my presence is, on its own, justifiable. And I did not come to feel this way needlessly.

I want to be like everyone else. I want to be treated as normal. But I also need people to understand that, for me, it is a herculean effort to get out of bed every day. I can be wrenchingly honest about the fact that I am angry and sometimes hardly sane. But I am far less forthright in addressing the fact I am just sad, or sick, or scared sometimes, and it is not a cataclysmic tragedy, but a very simple and fixable problem. The “Confession” here, then, is that I am not special. I am just relentlessly sensitive, irrationally melancholic, and chronically unwell. The confession is that I believe, secretly, that most of you already knew that, and that my constructed narrative of feeling misunderstood is just a way of not having to face being understood and yet uncared for. This is everything I was too afraid to say; it is the exorcism of what I was taught not to speak of or remember.

I am trying so hard to negotiate some form of existence that does not feel like it is killing me off. I am trying to live an impassioned, compassionate life. I am trying to be likable. I am trying to love. If there is one action that I must resolve myself to, it is the critical and continued interrogation of my impact on other people; the influence I have by sheer virtue of speaking, moving, engaging within some space that is not my mind. Because that is how I will endure this. And I would prefer not to do so alone.

Tell me, how does it feel with my teeth in your heart?

Euripides, Medea

I clawed my way back from a pulse’s periphery, bearing the visage of some creature far from health. I returned to an unwilling existence, feeling so selfish and so sorry. I took a bus into the city, found you amidst the shop-strewn streets. I walked you home. You slept beside me. I let the night run quietly through my mind.

In those hours, I thought that the worst must be over. But it was only beginning—and I, of all people, should have known that. Mine are the botched efforts of an unhinged, half-formed child: I honor my mother with callousness and a trail of broken things. Dim figures break their lingering promises; I break their lovely, blistering hearts; we break whatever sinew still tethers us to sanity; I break myself upon them. I have no innocence, no reverence, I am wretchedly aware of it all. But I am still willing. Oh yes, I will own this. I mean to be a horror-show lover, filled with half-furious remorse—but never to lose twenty-five years of life to a thing that means to leave me. Not another bastard God. Please, please, give me anything but that. I am sick half to death of failed deities and absent Fathers and false saviours: once, I imbibed his brutal adoration like a toxin, anointed in trilemmatic despondency, drinking each sacrament with consecrated helplessness; but I will not be mute or virtuous any longer. I will be faithless in totality. I will know no master but my own will to live. My efforts will likely be successful, but their victory entails my dissent, my infidelity, the unholy utterances of an absolute freedom. I will be secular: I, who wants more than anything to atone. What could be lonelier than that?

In the end, my love, when it all was said and done, I only needed a promise. I only wanted your mind and your time. I only drove you off because I hoped so desperately for to you to stay. Of this, I am unrepentant. You used to like when I acted that way, waking with the morning, pushing my fingers through your mouth, your throat: the muscles moved, the joints unfurled, and thereupon, a language lay inscribed. I wanted and wanted and wanted you: I engendered meaning in diacopes of desire. When you responded in turn, it was ecstasy, a miracle: those words were the genesis of our better days. I imagined, then, that I was free to do and to write as I wished. I presumed that I was justified by the mere act of loving you. I was not.

When the first blood of our carnal clauses was still drying like a cipher between my thighs, you lost the ability to read me. Those movements that you once thought so beautiful, so coherent, were a dead language to your mind. I might never know any skill with which to articulate what uncertain misery then unfolded, what catastrophe born of Babel drank the fluency from your tongue. Your lexicon, your literacy, the longings you derived—they came undone around us, inverting like rhythms of a chiasmus, until we were only the specter of our own discontent: loving what we could not keep, and keeping what we could not love. Our intentions turned in phrases, like hands on the face of a clock: we orbited one another in nameless, effaced wants. But there were not enough moments: I needed more time. I thought that you were coming home, but you never did. The absence of your demarcation flooded me with fear, immersed me in oppressive and somatic plentitude. The idioms faded fast from my many incisions, the agonized intaglios of my need for normalcy, the calligraphy of knotted scars that you once read like braille beneath your hands. Text and body met in incomprehension, showered in shades of your disavowal. Yearnings clashed like prosody. Why did you stop choosing me?

Your gentle mouth with its barbed tongue and clauses slick with chrome, 
Now excavated and bit back the palace of my bones

You gnashed and ground and gouged your teeth all through my sob-torn chest:
The crypt-like, cracking cartilage that caged my dying breaths.

You started then my work for me, the rest I did in bed:
Crouching in the darkness, grief-raw memory rusted red

I held out that feral thing, forsaken, soaked with brine—
And ate of my own heart, for it was bitter: it was mine.

I never understood it. Why did you not wait for me? I gave you my reverence. I gave you my rhetoric. I needed you more than my memories, I showed you a longing that surpassed language. Do you remember when the sheets were soaked with my suffering: when I allowed you to rest your head against this heart as it wrenched and raced with a chemical burn? That is what it looks like when, in spite of myself, I try. I always thought that if I held fast to your form, sank my fingernails into your mind, gave you blood and bliss and fortitude, then you might remain for just a little while longer. An astrology of scar tissue; the scorched starlight of my empty soul—I offered this cosmology to you alone. Those bandages, clean and whiter than a narcissus, I only applied so that I might meet your eyes. You saw so little, but did you suspect? You were the only desire I knew in the end. Why did you not wait?

A year or so ago, when I was young and enthralled, when I still had my memories and some reason left to lose, I fell in love with a longing made manifest. Back then, my body recalled cheap hotel rooms and unlit cigarettes and the kind of nights that flow like delirium into the mornings, and I gave it to him, understanding it to be everything. I undressed to my necklace, a bare-hearted girl in a silver chain: shivering skin, narcoleptic memory, undone desires, long ragged hair. I thought I loved him. I can still feel those hands upon me. I wanted him to tear the tarnished thing from my throat. If he had meant to hurt me, then I would have known pain. That was the choice I made. I thought I loved him, I honestly did. I wanted to be pure. What an exquisitely vicious mind I had.

This world was not built to sustain the inclinations of a half-devoured heart. It is too pragmatic. It is too sane. And I, love, wear affection like pathology: I am indifferent when and where it counts. I did not mean to frighten anyone, when I clambered half-conscious and barefoot atop that roof, the wind cutting hard against my scalded arms, the concrete calling out like a promise. I simply sought to be empty: to lie back, skin stripped raw, bare hands upturned beside an expressionless face. I saw nothing wrong with this; even now, I see precious little. But they mean to send me back to those rooms all the same, with their blank walls like blindness, because my dreams are bad, and getting worse. My skin is riddled with bullet holes, a wounded, skewered thing: my body dances on splinters of glass, and treads upon rows of teeth in the earth. Blood falls fatal from your mouth, your flesh undone beneath my touch; you turn away from me. I thought I lost you once before—now I lose you every goddamn night. It is not getting any easier. Yes, the dreams are bad.

I spent a year of my existence in some purgatorial nightmare of social life. I felt unwanted. I felt ashamed. But I cannot do it anymore: I will not comply. I no longer have any use for their scathing standards. Fuck them. I am not writing for them. I am not a fucking martyr. I am not an object of their sympathies. I am not an image of tragedy, and I will not be compliant in another tragic act. I am an ego in constant opposition. I am bitter. I am angry. This world has failed me, it asked too much. I am nothing but a body now. I am this, and only this, whatever the hell “this” is—all else is Other. And how can I tell the goddamned difference? Everything, everything, antagonizes me.

This mind is an enigma, engaged in some perpetuity of motion. It knows so little. It barely even knows itself. But a lifetime ago, however briefly, however intemperately, I know that it knew you. It longs to hear your voice again: your contrapuntal promises, the staccato of your nomenclature, the evasive keys of a symphonic longing, the crescendo of your night-tinged scores. I remember, so fondly and sorrowfully, all of the times when I wanted to hold you or kiss you or fuse my heart with yours: to take whatever parts of you were tired, or hurting, or afraid, and endure it all in your stead. But I did not know how to, or if you would allow it, and so I stayed as mute as the child I no longer am. I wish that I had tried. I wish that I had silenced, with my mouth and hands, every doubt in your unquiet mind. I should have consumed all of that suffering until the only thing you felt was my skin. I should have taken care of you.

Darling, I have had my chances. I know what I am. I know that, in our ending, I lost something that I may not soon find again. But for what it is worth, I adored you. We liked to pretend that this was meaningless, but it was never, it was not. I will not accept even the suggestion of our insignificance. Nothing is without meaning, not in this life, and especially not us. We know that the world is in motion. We see how it births and dies. We feel, in our joined bodies, its constant burning. We were not thoughtless, but overcome by the brilliance of our being. I will always absolve you, by virtue of what you are. I willingly excuse the horrors you inflicted; I take them on gladly; I vindicate it all. I exonerate you of your false promises, your lost language, your perpetual absence, your notched and troubled ways. What did I ever do, in this godforsaken life, to earn such reckless affections? This is me saying that I love you. I love you; and you will never again, in all probability, be loved by a thing like me.

But I never owned you–would that I had–and when the waking spring finally drew to a close, it was I who crossed the distant sea. There is so little left to be written of us. But you do not have to worry about me. You never have to worry, for I am not the dying type. I am merely a parasite, devouring my own longings. I am sustained by the intolerable rhythm of my pulse; by the rust-tinted flood of the summer rain; by the lingering potency of a desire I mistook for God. I am a thing apart from sanity. I am an unrepentant self. It is as beautiful as it is appalling: I eat away at my own heart like some hateful, half-life Eucharist.

And what apostate, after all, has ever shied from a bloodletting?

“I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind. I leave someone
Who would adhere to me: I undo her
fingers like bandages: I go.”

I exist in two places,
Here and where you are.

Margaret Atwood, Corpse Song

It was a Thursday. I am almost certain of that. I was thinking about wars. They are everywhere, they were on my television set today. I struggled to engage, to endure the blank truths of the living world, but apathy dripped like static down the screen. I tried to care all the same. I want you to know that I tried.

And I missed you–I want you to know that, too. I felt your absence like a stillborn limb. That day, the white rooms were as quiet as light on water, and I missed you. The astral core of an iris contracted, and I missed you. The birds recited some babel-tongue song, and I missed you. The ocean gnawed at a cliff’s edge, and I missed you. The fireworks bloomed and I missed you. My brother smiled and I missed you. It was raining and I missed you.

I have always loved the shadows in my mind. But you, all of you, recoil: you draw back from the very mention of them. How can you hate such vivid parts of me? They are not always trying to kill me off. They can be so wonderful–you would not understand. It is hypocrisy, I think. You see these things hurt me. You feel that they should not. You protest their harrowing presence, and so hold the harbingers of my insanity to a higher standard than your own compromised selves. Stop trying to decide what to make of this flesh, this me. You know, in your heart of hearts, that it is not possible. Look closely at what I am.

Just the other evening, after yet another trying session, my senses became confused. They bit like frost and boiled with their own incoherence. So I wrote. I wrote about everything. I wrote about bed sheets, and their velvet felt lilac. I wrote about a girl I knew, and heard a softness like rosewater. I wrote about the piano beneath your window, and felt the winter I spent with you in gradients of E minor. I wrote about sex and it tasted silver. But when I tried to write about myself, about everything that happened this spring, I could only hear the shape of my bruises. So I stopped. I had to stop. It hurt too much to go on.

How can I learn what I am, when what I am is all that I ever thought I knew? There is still so much left to understand. What makes me feel like this? Why do some people stay? I sure as hell never planned to.

I am immersed in the caustic Atlantic: its eerie green-blues curl in toxic, foam-tinged tongues of brine. My consciousness drifts between two broken nations, seeking solace in both, finding respite in neither. I am disparate; separated, as they are, by ringing chasms of salt water and wind. There is not even the faintest hope of a homecoming for me. But sometimes it is all right to be here, in this place, where I am restless, reverential, half-haunted with the memories of some strange other life. 

Exhausted, always, by this mind that flips like a tarot card, I watch the tortured dusk of the past take form. I feel you emerge, a chameleon: lips curled, air-eating. Your stomach glows the burnt-gold of embers that fracture under your skin. I cannot recall my own father’s smile, and yet I remember, with perfect clarity, the way your hands moved when you rolled cigarettes on the streets outside of a bookstore café. Your joints unfolding like poetry, the lightness when you laughed, the invaluable instances of tenderness, our apologies, my convictions, your entropy and bright, bright eyes. I know how these things felt, but I am already forgetting your voice. What does it matter, anyways, if I loved you at the end? Contention, contentment, condemnation, contempt: now I just want to drive my teeth into your throat and taste the warm-as-salt miracle of your skin once more. And I want you to want me to.

All of that time I spent fear-filled, striving to achieve some fiction of normalcy: those were the moments that I could have spent loving you. I am sorry for not knowing that. I am sorry for knowing it now. I am sorry that you loved a virus. I am sorry that I let you. But sometimes I think that I should hold your mind to the fire: extract a confession, a catharsis, a promise, a penance, from the tongue that I once held like communion between my teeth. Are you blameless? How can you be? I was dying, did you fail to notice? Sometimes, when I am scared or sick or sleepless, I ask myself, wretchedly, if perhaps you preferred not to look. For if you had, you would have seen me, you would have seen how unhappy I was. Deep in the innermost core of me, I suspect that you were too clever for your oversight to have been a mere carelessness.

But how can I ask you to suffer this: how can I want you to know, for any reason at all, what it feels like when the doctors cut into me? I could not even bring myself to make you look. I never wanted you to see what was happening to me. And how can I hate you, for not engaging, not trying to save me, when I would only have consumed each earnest effort, and become some parasitic thing: leech-like, useless, hateful even to myself? But look at me, really look. It is safe to look now–for I am irreverent, and I am far away, and you could not help me if you tried.

It is my fault too, you know. After all, I let it grow inside of me. Childless mother, nightmare that I am, I should never have tended to it. I should never have made it love me. And I never would have, not ever, had I known that I was to love you. I still remember that morning: the sky was clouded, shrouded in white. White like the narcissi, white as blindness: the flames licked at my wrist until I was cleaner than snow. But why did I hate myself so? Maybe some part of me knew. I wish that I had murdered it then, this thing that now murders me.

You never ceased to confound me, with your lovely brown eyes and your arresting phrases and your aimless wants and your steadfast ways. But you loved what I wrote, what I am. I should have held fast to that.

So what does it matter, really? You are not as she was: she had a a way of making me want her, of wresting form and expression from my reluctant heart until, wary though it had become, I felt willfully and ecstatically, imbued with a passionate vulnerability that all but silenced my astounded soul. And when she seared and scalded me, I knew her too well to draw back. I understood quite clearly what I had to do. It was not my love she needed. It was my language. And that was fine. I have enough words left to give, I think. I can barely face each day upon waking, but I could write for a lover like that until the night waxed sanguine and the stars fell burning from the sky. I could do it for you, as well. Do you want me to? Have you ever? Have you always? It could be both or neither. How very sightless I have become.

It matters not at all. This endeavor bears no purpose. This is a simple meditation on distance, on loneliness, on longing. Who is to blame for what I am? The soles of my feet are harder than cypress, and my soul is a diamond, corrupted by a spectatorial gaze. I enter the world like a lidless iris: a naked pupil, incorrigible and obscene. Drink, then, the pure blind blankness of my exposure. I am utterly lacking, I am as faceless as the moon. The eye, this eye, it is me: I am and am. So love what I forgot to be, this relentless, searching self.

Someday my mind will return to me–and I, my love, to you.