do not think
you are safe because
you love her.

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

Madeleine Christie, Atalanta

The first tinges of earliest winter work their way into my skin. Sometimes, I am all right. I am awake. I am engaged. I am efficient. I am resolved. It does not matter that the hours of silence have stretched horribly on into days, into weeks, until a month has passed and I have shared the time with no one. It does not matter because I am fine. I promised that I would be, so I am. I am fine. For a month, I have done precious little other than endeavor to prove just how mistaken they were; just how capable, how fine, I am.

Other times, it has not been so manageable. I am lost and confused, abandoned and alone. I am the child who cannot find her father, who cannot keep a friend. I do not have an adequate language for what those times feel like. I come so tantalizingly close to surrender. On evenings when I see these people, I commence a ritualistic communion of sharp whiskey, cold showers, little pills that blunt the edges of my grief. I spend nights wandering through empty streets or emptying bars, entire days pass where I cannot face the sun. I have broken down a fair few times. Have retreated. Cried. Sliced my knuckles on shards of plaster. Written long, impassioned letters, nonsensical apologies and half-hearted farewells, tucked them away within a pile of birthday cards, polaroids, drawings, and memories, and burned them all in wordless exorcisms of a reality I cannot face.

Even at my best, my strongest, there can be no denying it: I have had a miserable time. Each day has dawned like a deferred suicide, faithless and forlorn, and there is no consolation that anyone can offer. I have tried. I have tried. So in the end, I have resigned myself to apathy, replaced my appetite and empathy and affections with stale packs of cigarettes and hours of painstaking academic work, with bitterness and solitude and some reluctant purgatory between devastation and disgust.

Sometimes, I find that I cannot withstand it anymore. So I recommence my wanderings, find a love to sell within the confines of dim vanity and a handful of stolen hours. I shivered, last night, back into the familiarity of an ancient, sacred art: those burning moments of sanctuary, of unfettered life, of knotted limbs and hair, of hands, of hips, of knees, of tense and tangled words. And suddenly, fleetingly, my life was shining again, my pulse was strong, its rhythm was welcome. I was laughing as I have not laughed in weeks, a cigarette locked precariously between my knuckles, ash dispersed across the stained mattress, as we moved in ways that I can scarcely recall, my heels pressed hard against his waist, the pleasure running hot and fast, like blood or breath or constancy. The teeth that I had sharpened on discontentment were good for something now, tearing sensation from the savage flesh of November, and my desire was a triumph, I was feral, I was alive, I had managed to recall some final, defiant echo of the willful, half-wild person that I used to be.

Always, the specter of his absence remains, when I try to feel in these ways. Yes, yes, I hate myself for it, but in truth, I have missed him quite sincerely of late. After all, was he really so much worse than what came after? Rejection, the silence, it is always the same– he was just more honest about it.

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

If there is some other side to this, to all of the interspersed vitriol and cowardice, then I am having trouble seeing it. And is that really so surprising, so reprehensible? I challenge anyone to live as I have these past four weeks–cowering in my bedroom, too frightened to answer the knocks on my door, feeling unloved, unwell, unwelcome, unable to escape the radio silence as it cleaves my mind like a knife’s edge, abhorring my very existence–and not feel the uncompromised contempt that sustains me now.

What a wretch you all made of me. I cried. I begged. I crawled. Every night for the past four weeks, whenever I lose consciousness and vision, I am visited by the same nightmare: reliving my history as warm blood drips down my arms and from between my shaking thighs. I stagger through the silence, seeking respite. I see them, I call out, I implore them to answer, I tell them I need help. A lock clicks. My fingernails break against the door, leaving claw-marks of crimson and gouges in the wood. I wake up shaking. So now, I hardly sleep anymore–I lost that, too.

But not everyone was taken in. Just a week ago I spoke with a figure who could have said nothing, who could have remained impassive, who could have dismissed or ignored my pain, but he simply chose not to; he chose, instead, to care. I winced with realization at a single word he used, as he dragged the dark hair back from his eyes–“It isn’t fair. You’re being dehumanized.” Dehumanized. I loath those connotations, those undertones of victimization, but I could not deny or reject the phrase. He knew. He saw. And he was not the only one. I have felt alone, yes, but I have not entirely been so, for a handful of others have enacted those efforts towards empathy that their predecessors withheld. What a life I find, however fleetingly, however inconstantly, beyond the narrow binds of rejection. How many people have reached out to me since then? How many drinks and confessions and cigarettes have we shared? Reams of advice and tattered books of poetry, comfort and patience and moments of fleeting happiness, contentment, even belonging; in some ways, I think that I am finally found. 

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

These people, these places, have loved me at my darkest. We share no history, no obligation, but they have done so anyways. Heaven knows what it means when strangers and strange places are kinder towards you than those by which you thought to establish your long-desired home. But there is, always, a world elsewhere. And I am finding it now.

There will be no more postcards, no more tears of consternation, no more belated explanations, no more prying eyes. You will not waste whatever time I still have. The photographs have peeled like raw flesh from my walls. The images and letters have all been burned away. The broken glass is strewn softly across the threshold of my door. The room has been stripped bare, reduced to a pale, watchful iris of exposure, and your scalding words and fabrications, the livid tapestry of accusation that you wove, are all I will keep to remember you by.

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

I was worth more than this, and you could not make me forget that. You could not drive me away from this place. You never had the strength, not any of you, to bleed me out. And you will never again have my yearning, my commitment, you will not even have my hatred. I will strive to feel nothing. But for as long as I live in this strange and violent place, this city of entropy and stone, I will remember what was done to me. And I am not the only one. My continued efforts to communicate, to survive, to heal, to hold myself accountable, have not gone unnoticed. I am a walking testament to deficiencies that are not my own. It never had to be this way–but this is the choice that you made.

So I accept it. I accept it all. I have no sympathy, no willingness to understand anymore. And I am not sorry for generating, on my own terms, the discourse that I have lately been denied. I have faced a month of silence, of denouncement, of ludicrously imagined false crises, of inexplicable narratives that would have damaged most people beyond repair. I have faced, for the first time in a long while now, a horror-show of instability that emerged not from my own troubled mind, but from the callousness and cowardice of others. I hope that they feel every promise they broke, every lie that they told. No, I am not sorry for writing this. For a month I have faced the wrong side of their whims; they can deign, now, to face the wrong side of my pen.

And does it really matter, anymore? Does any facet of me still truly care, except for,  perhaps, the part that bristles with frustration to remember that I ever believed that I deserved such degradation, such disrespect? I think that it is time to write of something else. I have done it. I have survived. The treatments must have worked, because even at my worst, I endured. And I have my work to show for it, and my writing, and the bonds I have forged with so many brilliant, fascinating people who I am so eager, so privileged, and so excited to know more fully in all the time to come.

I am alone now, they have made certain of that, but I will not always be. And I am ready, at last, to see this all for what it is: to condemn, to atone, to resist, or walk away. It took their every effort against my health to remind me just how badly I want to live fully, to be whole once more. On the underside of my ambition, my disillusionment, my contempt, there emerges the inscriptions of real possibility. I think I am finally awake again. I feel remorseless. I feel strong. The obscurity of my own regret is lifting. I am inexorable. Complete.

My father has taught me so well.

I’m with you. No matter what else you have in your head I’m with you and I love you.

Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

A solitary drink in this, the most silent corner of a dimly lit bar. Alone with my scars and my shattered sense of health, of self, I listen to the world. It echoes in my lungs. I draw breath, exhale, watch the impact fade. No one notices me. Of course not. Why should they? When people call you something, even something distressing, something terrible, might it actually become true? Can they change what you are? Can they undo all of your efforts? It has come close. I do not know. I hope not. We will have to see.

But how I hate this, this baseless fear, this horror-show of accusation that frames my untethered existence. I am trying, oh god, I am trying, but I am too afraid to even leave the miserable confines of these four walls. I am blind and I am faceless, so utterly effaced. I cannot see or be or become. I can only retreat, shamefaced, until my next fatal error, until the next time I am forced to reckon with how very despicable I am found. They know how to hurt me, even if they do not mean to. It makes me hate myself. It humiliates. And how it hurts. How I wish I could be numb. Disappear. But I couldn’t, not even if I tried. Oh god, I always come back in the end. I make my life possible, if not, perhaps, desirable. I have been left and left and left, but I still linger on. I don’t leave. Not ever.

This want, this lack, runs so much deeper than a tangled set of absent limbs, a breathing constellation of bruised or burning flesh, the unbearable turning click of a lock, the people who will not come back or care. I have lived with this wretched, gutted emptiness for as long as I can remember. But what does it matter? Whatever else I am, or have been, or may become, I will not die before my time. The sin, you understand, falls not upon whatever events have taken place. It was my own incapacity to communicate how my love transcends, renders cold and senseless, my own suicidality. This is what devastates whatever is left of the me they used to know. Did I really fail so utterly to show this, the affection that might assuage such a fear? Did they really think I would leave them, that I would leave them, me? Do they really believe the things that they have said? I suppose so. And since I cannot change that, can I at least live with it? I must. I must. I owe myself as much.

Make no mistake, I feel wretched now. I feel like a calamity. I feel subhuman. I don’t feel worth. And yet, I came back, didn’t I? Haven’t I always? How couldn’t they know that? It must be my fault. It hurts, it hurts beyond all reckoning, I am an architectural nightmare of memory and bone. My veins are knotted, my limbs are malcontent, my knuckles bleed with pale exposure below the vicious skin. I never knew that I could feel this way. I really didn’t know.

But I cannot remain in such a state of disrepair. I will be alive until life takes its leave of me. I will never die by my own hands–no, not these. Not ever. I thought, by now, that much had been made clear. I will it say it once more now, I will say it for the final time. Whoever you are, wherever you are–if you love me, I will return to you. I will always be waiting. I will always come back. This place has let me fall so fast, these people have made a nightmare of me, or the person I thought I could be, half-burned. But I will always live on, I will always endure, I will never fade out like a pale and senseless thing.

Whoever you are, if you love me, I will find you. I am here. I am breathing. I am okay. Yes, I will find you. I will always find you.

Find me.

I praise the human,
gutted and rising.

Katie Ford, Song After Sadness

I am writing plainly because I have been feeling voiceless lately. I don’t like that feeling. The arts of loving, of losing, of coping with disappointment, have seldom seemed more relevant to me than of late. I am not happy; not at the present, anyways. The cause is quite simple. When I went home for the summer, when I made the decision to undergo more regular and intensive forms of care then I had ever experienced before, when I agreed to take higher doses of stronger medications, when I sacrificed elements and sources of my own comfort because I was told that it was in the best interest of those that I loved, I had a very different understanding of what I would be returning to when I arrived back at Oxford.

I thought that I would be re-entering an environment that, while rigorous, was nevertheless a space where I felt welcomed, supported, and loved. I hoped that the pastoral care systems would have improved. I hoped that I would not have to do such a large portion of the labor by myself. And I was absolutely certain that my friends would make time for me, be honest with me, accept me in full, at the very least regard me as I have always regarded them–as a person worthy of the simple human dignities of being acknowledged, being listened to, being treated with respect.

In almost all of these senses, I have been let down.

I am not a victim; but nor am I immune to the occasional feelings of alienation, worthlessness, and distress that accompany times and circumstances such as these. I am not despairing, but I certainly am disillusioned, disquieted, and discontented. Because everyone said how much better this year would be, everyone promised we would make it work. And honestly, the only difference I can really see is that I take more medication and attend more doctor’s appointments. So yes, perhaps I am more equipped for how bad such places and people can be, but learning to tolerate external toxins does not amount to “improvement” in my eyes.

The sad irony is that, in many ways, I am healthier now than I have been in a very long time. I know this to be true, because if my mental health had not improved over the summer, then I would never have been able to make it through some of the more devastating facets of this term. All of my work has been completed on time, I haven’t missed a single tutorial or class, I am eating regularly, I have met some wonderful and interesting people, I try to keep my room clean. I have been doing so much better than I, a chronically mentally ill person coming off of a deeply traumatizing year, ever could have expected to. I have so much to feel happy and proud about. And I feel like I have no one to share that victory with.

It really is not all that complicated. I never needed people here to try to explain my illnesses to me, to pretend to be my therapists, or to perform enormous, taxing, unequivocal feats of emotional labor. I just needed company. I needed to feel heard. I needed love. But the people whose promises lent me the strength to endure one of the most difficult periods of my entire life have simply not made good on those promises; the same can be said for the institution itself, with all its bits and cogs and shining multiples. So much of the illusion has fallen away. And I am working very hard to resist succumbing to a misinformed cultural narrative of what it means to be mentally ill in a competitive university. But I have found it to be tiresome and deeply solitary work.

I sometimes wonder if everyone feels this way, and I am just complaining more loudly, or allowing it to affect me more. But I have lived long enough, and worked hard enough, and considered deeply enough to be relatively certain that this is not all in my head. It is hard, it is really, very hard, to look at the people and places and things that you love, that you want to regard as perfect, that you want to love you back, and realize that they just aren’t doing right by you. It is hard to keep on clawing yourself back into standing position, and trying again and again. It is hard to remember that you’re worth something, when everything from a locked door, to an unanswered text, to the American presidential election is saying otherwise. It is hard to give your love and your trust to the wrong people.

But Christ, who is less of a stranger to that feeling than me?

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

Alice Notley, Hemostatic

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

My father, my lover, all over, and over: I am never memorable enough. Not even to hate. Not now. I scarcely feel the absence; I hardly feel a loss. Instead there is a vitriol here, a kind of writhing energy, a thinly swallowed wrath. For I have worked my recompense, and then some. I have paid a thousand times for every hateful scar. My mind collapsed beneath chemicals and steel; I learned the worth of listlessness; I made these fragments whole. I spent the crackling autumn half-deafened by the screaming miracle of my health, my efforts at long last realized, if not complete. Has it all gone unnoticed then, unacknowledged–as worthless as the thing they’ve made of me?

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

Falling softly out of love with a girl I knew so long ago, with eyes darker than starlight and a mind that once sheltered mine, then falling back into love, and out, soft and sweet, with the static uncertainty of a detuned radio–I’m not bitter. I’m just trying. Realizing at last that I have not ever really been cared for. I saw it then, really saw it, yes, my last and greatest lapse of sanity: the city collapsing around me, the ancient cathedrals crumbling, the illusion undone, the buildings exposing blank concrete of bone.

I am alone. More alone than ever, I think. But it simply does not matter anymore. I go on. I go on. I go on.