But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

This year has taught me that there is always more to lose. This year has taught me that no vow remains unbroken. This year has taught me to hate myself, completely. This year has taught me the twisted art of nonbeing. This year has taught me that to trust anything other than myself is to risk the wretched slew of disillusion, the eventual, crushing disappointment of being turned away or cast aside. I have become so afraid of being hurt, or left, or humiliated that I can no longer fathom who or what I am—other than some formless shade of imperfection, aggravation, and pale, infected love. This year has taught me a thousand ways to die without slowing my pulse, or stopping my breath. And I am grateful for it.

After missing the funeral, I was certain that things could not get worse. And then, of course, they did. For days, I did not eat. I did not drink. I did not speak. I did not sleep. The times I have striven to engage here, to exist, to mimic normalcy, have all but undone me. So this is my new way of worship, my Eucharist, my consecrated mass: every step that I take from this room, I regret threefold. Instead I lie here, still and without self, only worth what I can salvage: my work, my sobriety, the fragments on this blog. I am a divinely lifeless thing. I starve and sedate myself in the hope that, someday, I might be made pure.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, utterly uncaring, I watch the hated flesh hang strangely off these battered limbs. I spend entire days in a dissociative fog. I wake up in bizarre places. I am haunted by unusual thoughts. Last night, I dreamt that someone carved my name into the door of my closet. I dragged my fingernails across the surface until it all seemed like chaos, a bloodied cross, a star-strewn sky: no meaning to be found. Then I looked again and there was no name, no me, just claw marks and shredded wood. Out of my mind again. My senses were laced with benzodiazepine. My flesh was filthy. I should have died.

If this is your model of health, then I do not want it. I have nothing left to desire, or to know. I built a life on false affections and manufactured bliss, and now I have found the bottom of the glass. And my god, how fucking empty it all seems. But some small miracles still work their way into the world, pushing up like pale green things, like life through the cracks in the asphalt. I could count them on a hand, of course, but they matter. They must.

Frigid and shivering, fingers wrapped in shreds of cloth, cigarettes faltering in the wind, breath that mingled with smoke on the air. Words that drifted across the frozen silence. There was one living thing that still sought meaning, one body that was not mine, I tethered my mind to his, I reached out, I held on. Each thread was alight and I could feel a life somewhere far beneath the cautious words and silver-tinged pulse. And there it was. Something striving for a reason to be. Like me. Like me. Not a false friend or a worthless lover or a prying gaze. Just a glimpse of elsewhere. A flash of thought. A small miracle.

And then again. Staggering down tear-stained suburban roads, blind and numb with shock. Hollow with remorse, my mother’s screams following like scalding knives all the way across the threshold of the door. Walking fast towards the midnight streets, seeing streaks and blazes of light, like falling stars, whistling engines of sound, waiting to be struck, waiting to feel—to be found. It was in my mind and all around me. But then someone did find me, curled up against the darkness. Someone did come, in the end. And I was huddled in the passenger seat of my best friend’s car, chain smoking old Camels, half-dead with the cold, and there was no music playing, the silence murmured like a crypt, and there was nothing around us but memory and motion, and a blank expanse of highway, stretching out towards unreality, no way to be stopped, to be placated or constrained: a small miracle.

Today, I found her notebook, from when she loved me, or at least gave a damn. I haven’t the faintest idea when or how it came into my possession. But I knew its owner at once, recognized the reams of poetry wrought in emerald ink: “alchemic lips,” “crystal crust; depressed with snow…” how wonderfully she wrote, so very long ago, before she decided—or they decided for her—that the love of one half-mad girl was not worth her worthless time. The very thought of her mouth in mine makes me feel sick now, infected, like some parasite’s unwilling host. And I found the residue of that other one, too, more brutal than the first and yet less memorable, with her colored pens and her foreign postcards and her Bashō haiku, all as hollow as her apologies, her promises, her feigned concern for me. I let the flames wander up each sheet of paper, licking and snarling; the slow, toxic consciousness of consolation; the grim satisfaction as every edge curled and burned, and the tips of my fingers burned too. A history crumbled away with the embers. I owed them nothing, I was violently exonerated. A small miracle.

These are the moments I have found amidst the frozen soil, the fragments of life made incarnate even as I sought to unearth my own grave. But I, myself, am no miracle. I am just smoke, and some blood, whatever you make of that. I am frightened and keep no promises. I hold no mastery over my own mind: I am not in control of its meaning any longer. The me you know now is still bitter and vicious and yearning for retribution. I tore through shreds of skin and scar tissue to seek my forgiveness. I found none. I reject you still.

I have been lost for a long time now; so long, in fact, that I have surrendered all hope of being remembered. But my god, my god am I alive. Against my better judgment, no less. I am blind and feral and crawling across the raw face of the world. My mind is slipping and splitting, the brain tumbling out across the tongue, breaking my teeth in its final exodus, while my words strike like diamond against an uncaring audience. And because I do not want to, I will outlive you all.

I need time and I need care and I need someone who will not turn away from me. I need to be heard. I need to understand myself and the source of my misery more fully. I need closure. I need forgiveness. I need guidance and I need goodwill. In this nexus of desire, decision, diazepam, disinterest, I must find some way to keep going, to stop breaking myself to bits upon the world, to become as immune and refined as a machine, a glistening engine, a triumph. Until then, I have myself, and I have moments. These wondrous instances, these small miracles, they do not save me, not even close—but they keep this flesh from going cold before its time. And I suppose that’s something, after all.

There is no freedom on earth like being uncared for. You taught me that before I learned my name. Even now, I would still come if you called.

So I will not be safe until I have nothing left to save. I must replace each of my losses with nothing. And there really is beauty left, somewhere in this dying world. There is respite. There are people worth staying for. Perhaps I will seek them again when the time comes, when my body is stronger, when this anemic season bristles and fades. Even now, the world is whiter than leprosy; the snowfall is breathless and still. Even now, some bloodless beauty remains.

But I am not a miracle. I am not a beautiful thing.

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. But people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that pain was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret to not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.

It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name

Last week, I took a holiday that wasn’t good for me. And I mean really wasn’t good for me. A perfectly horrible nightmare to round off a perfectly horrible term. An absolute, undiluted regret. I wish I was exaggerating. Or kidding. I am not. But if one single, worthwhile thing came out of that trip, it was when someone showed me an essay. This essay, to be exact. And as I skimmed it, I fell in love.

“Survival is not inspiring, it is repulsive, and it is always the rats that run first, the cockroachs that survive. I am a rat. A cockroach. A parasite…. And Charlie crawls around the sewers of Philadephia with no clothes on.”

(The spelling errors are in the original piece and I refuse to let autocorrect change them).

Yes, I fell in love, though I’m not sure who or what with!

Because like Charlie, our irredeemable hero and perpetually undermined Rat-King of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and like the author of the original article, I am a survivor in the most parasitic, depressing sense. I drink too much. I smoke too much. I sleep too little. I forget to shower. I forge relationships with unreliable, compromised people. I have a lot of daddy issues. True, I don’t hide dead pigeons under my army jacket, but once I kept a live mouse in my car for a period of time that I still refuse to specify. I, too, have difficulty navigating the admirer-stalker divide. I am similarly prone to the excessive employment of keyboards and crayons, and not always to the desired effect. I like words, but they usually come out in the wrong order. I’m notoriously hard to get rid of. In fact, I am such a relentlessly present presence, regardless of whether or not I am wanted, that I strongly suspect that I would also have survived my own abortion (and yes–that is a canonical fact of the show). I mean, who fucking knows? I don’t have a goddamn clue what’s going on most of the time, I find that I have more in common with spiders than with people, and I would absolutely bring spaghetti into a movie theatre in my purse.

But it’s also more than that. Like Charlie, I seldom feel welcome. I love too sincerely and usually at the wrong times. I keep unacceptable habits and I hurt people in all kinds of ways. I cry and scream and hit things and bleed. I storm out of my house with two packs of cigarettes and no shoes on. I feel lonely. I love cats and small, dark spaces. Sometimes I panic, and when I do, I fuck up everything.

If there’s one mistake I can’t seem to stop making, it’s that I never admit how disgusting my own existence feels. I usually try to aestheticize everything, especially myself, but no amount of charcoal sketches or feminist photoshoots or verbose writing has ever made me feel any cleaner. I went back to Oxford all full of hope and excitement, and by the fourth week I barely spoke to anyone. By the fifth week I was losing my memory. By the sixth I had forgotten how to spell “forgiveness.” By the time I came home, my family and my health were in total disarray, most of my relationships were worth next to nothing, my friend was dead, my dog was older than I ever remembered her being, my body was in wretched condition, and I had an uncontrollable nervous tremor in my right hand. Even now, typing is difficult.

My present life feels so despondent, so unfortunate, so perpetually disappointing, that at some point I have to stop pretending that it is beautiful or sad, or beautiful and sad. I have to get my hands dirty. When things get ugly, I have to match them. And I will. My survival is abject because of course it is. This is the form that survival takes. It is filthy and uninspiring and we all get fucking tired of it. Not all of us will make it, but I am going to, and it probably won’t be pretty. I think I am okay with that.

That is why I love the damn show, and the bizarre little man who informs and invigorates it. Survivors and narcissists and sociopaths and episodic tragedy abound—the only difference between their lives and mine is whether or not I can find some way to keep laughing. (Of course, sometimes, I remember that most of the people watching Always Sunny are not like me, which is fucking terrifying, but that’s a topic for another day.)

For me, Charlie is a mimetic horror, he is all the weird, gross parts of myself that I cannot admit: my dermatillomania, my PTSD, my addictive tendencies, my obsessive compulsions, my social ineptitudes, my delusions of grandeur, my occasionally questionable standards of hygiene, and my very, very low opinion of who I really am. Charlie is everything I am most reluctant to acknowledge or explain to you, and laughing at him is laughing at myself, is finding something worth smiling at in this absolute shitshow, this tired and half-assed existence I’ve salvaged from my many skirmishes with illness, abuse, suicidality, mania, and lots and lots and lots of disappointment.

I might not be slithering naked through the sewers (yet), but if that is what it takes to carve a life for myself, or a home for myself, then I’ll do it. I’ll fucking do it. I am desperate for something better than this: I don’t care what I have to do to get there, and I don’t care what form it takes.

I am not going anywhere, and you better fucking believe that. I am surviving. It seems disgusting sometimes, or hopeless, or inane, but I am surviving. I am not a fiction, but my god do I feel like one. And sometimes a made-up, semi-maniacal janitor at an indiscriminate Philadelphia pub is exactly what it takes to remind me that this is what my survival looks like. And every time I find myself I find myself sitting alone in an empty bathtub filled with bottles, or dissociating on a home-bound train, or pouring mouthwash on the floor because cleaning it up gives me something do–I try to remember that, if we ever met, Charlie and I would have a lot to scream about.

Psychosis on a London-Bound Train

 Maybe we will wake up to the silence
Of shoes at the foot of the bed not going anywhere.

Richard Seiken, Dots Everywhere

The forlorn shores, salient, grey, where I once walked hand in hand with my father, my small feet bare, coated with sand and nascent brine. The snarling, curling waves, the screams of the salt-bitten wind: my mind is an open grave. I am awake.

Yearnings that tighten like a noose, a flood of flesh, that scalding choice. And gone. Another thread is wrenched from the loosening fabric of this sanity, this will to be. No time to think, not even to mourn, no, not with the fighting and fucking and burning and dying–

I haven’t felt like that, no, not ever, no never again, and again, and again, always, my head collides with the unforgiving floor, again, again, this is my fault, chunks of hair are pulled out, she excoriates them, my forearms torn and howling beneath her teeth, her nails, my exposed back covered in strange, dull impressions of high heeled shoes and accusations—they drag her off of me, still screaming.

The scene fades. I am awake again. Alone. In a bathtub filled with little white pills. No. No, it is empty. The bathtub is empty. A trick of the half-light. Empty. Knees pressed to my heaving chest and cigarette ash across my lips. Empty.

This blood that stains me is not mine; but it is everywhere. The floor, the walls, these clothes, under my fingernails. It will not come off. Now it is me, screaming wordlessly. I wake up on my side, the floor is cold, I am three paces from the bathroom door. I do not know where this dream ends and the real nightmare starts. I somehow claw and crawl my way into an unmade, unfamiliar bed. I disappear.

Yes, I vanish with the sun, I do not look back. I do not pretend to care. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know what is real. Everyone can see me, wherever I am. They are watching me now. I catch a glimpse of you at the train station. Younger, like I remember you. Oh, god, I am losing my mind. My hands are trowels, for all the good it’s done me, shoveling back bits of rock and bone, I claw at the earth, break my knuckles against its surface, I dig deeper. I want to get back, back, back to you, I want to join you there, but I am bound to this life like Prometheus to his fate, and you are the chains, the best and most savage ultimatum.

There is a pressure above my forehead: a dawning, livid bruise. I remember my head hitting the floor. And again. Should put concealer on that. Hide the mark. Keep hiding. Always hide. Vanish. Un-become. I am in free fall. I am falling always. I keep dreaming that the skin has come off of my hands and face. That is not at all what it feels like, but it comes far nearer to what I really mean.

I wrote the letter, you know, my love. Expect it soon. I will not burn this one before you wake. Those days are over. I will leave it for you, unaffected. And then you will be gone and that will be everyone and I will be alone. The way I am supposed to be.

But this did not happen, no, none of this happened, the friends I once had are still with me, his death was a dream in the underside of my soul, the scars and the bruises and the claw marks are mere fiction, her vicious attack a faint shriek of nonbeing, the funeral time is not ever, the train will stop at no station at all, and nothing is real now but me.

Not long now: the blazing dream of my head is crawling out.

Sophocles, Electra

Your body curved like a vow, and it broke, and the voice cracked like bone, the pale hair hung past your throat. I dragged you from the water and was sorry that it happened.

The person you used to be, I cannot remember. There are angels and monsters and malice inside of you now. The ashes found their way beneath your skin. I heard that you will change your mind, and your name, again, rather than lose each one in its turn. The underside of your wrist, paper-thin; the pale vertebral ridges; the softly feathered cicatrices of bone–the parts of you I used to love are fading fast. I will not delay them. You are less than memory; you are mere metaphor now. And you do not know me anymore.

Once I awoke in an anemic bliss, the tangled bedsheets soaked with blood and brine, just in time to watch the shattering of my warped and lovely world. It could have been simple, if I could have been strong. But I do not have desire any longer. I am repulsed by everything. There is no wanting. No pain. I have begun, once more, to consume myself: to satiate my writhing mind with limbs, with holy water, with rust. Useful, used, or using–the fractured crystals that sharpen my teeth, that enervate fragments of my skin–I am indifferent to refuge. There is not room enough beneath the earth to hold me now.

What happens to us, who have faced stranger odds? What happens to the woman who takes a knife to her own mind? Maybe we will awake to silence at the foot of the stairs; maybe it will soften us, and we will both be healed. More likely, though, I will someday cease to stay, and you will feel an absence in the corners of your soul.

After all, I’ve found my hate again. No credence binds me here. The flesh still stretches thin across the bone, the joints still move like memory, the tongue still carves verses between my ribs. But underneath, I am unrecognizable–an unfeeling darkness when the tide comes in. There is mere acedia behind these eyes: no burning to rift the iron skies of a life. My fingers will not grasp blindly at desire any longer. My faith has at last fled its long-faltering host. Each day, I care a little bit less. It is better this way.

Nothing will hurt me now, and I can meet the world unscathed.