Now hear, you blissful powers underground –
Answer the call, send help.
Bless the children, give them triumph now.

Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers

Midnight finds me solitary and reminiscent, enshrouded in the hush of morning’s soft-footed approach. The canals are silent and utterly still, wisps of vapor hanging low above their dark waters. I sit cross-legged on these muddy banks, imbibed as they are with rainwater and memory, and listen for half-forgotten voices on the wind. It is on such evenings that I begin to miss my home: the russet-tinged mountains, the sprawling earth, the always changing seasons. But there is a rare beauty to this ancient city, its Stygian currents and blind alleyways, its many bells that chime and toll like shattered crystal in the streets. I hear the low, musical crying of the birds. I know the dim truth of their sorrow, because it was mine once, too.

I recall, even in spite of myself, the strange, sad sickness that moved through us like a frost. These months have made a ruin of my sanity, my recollection, but even now, I remember her. Were it not for love and language, those twin prophets of calamity, could either of us have lied? How has it come to pass that I am haunted by their sins, carry the burden of that reckless disavowal? I never wanted this. I would have done anything to prevent it. I learned to turn away, to close off, to disappear. But I cannot make it stop hurting. I can never make it stop hurting. So let your candles burn to nothing–allow each stanza to flare out and fade. They have no meaning now. Feel a deafening silence emerge, and betray no image of its expression. This is the sound of missing you.

But even as I write this, the winter howls itself away into springtime, and we all begin again. The evenings pass in warm flushes of pleasure, a rapture that breathes through the twilight of my body. Hours slip by with the sweetness of honey or blood. I have learned a new life, and new people to love. I was found, at last, in my misery-dimmed wanderings, the desperate capillaries I carved through this lonely place. I was forsaken, apostate, left for dead: they took my body home again, sheltered me from solitude, forged life from the wreckage of my mind. I am too full of hope now to suffer as I used to.

They loved me at my darkest, my most dismembered, my most disturbed. They loved me when you, my dear, would not. I don’t know how it happened, these months have passed with such swift strangeness: all I know is that I woke, one day, to the blinding knowledge that I was no longer alone. I do not roam those silent streets. I am not the ghost you are to me.

When I was still a child, I learned the double arts of loss and love, of desperation and desire, of the lingering hush that imbibes a blind and abandoned heart. I wander back into that suffusion of warmth across unblemished skin: I am four years old, and my father is bathing me, telling the stories that made me wish to write long before I could. But bodies change and break like promises: the desire that once filled each margin of my still-breathing flesh has been replaced now by glistening scars and spilled ink and little pools of Garamond font.

There will always be a horror now, another slow, defeated sorrow in the edges of my waking mind. In spite of myself, I sometimes still count ways back into the darkness, break my mind against the stories in the soil, press my ear to the ground and dream of returning to you. But each flash of thought grows fainter with the thawing of the earth: the world is turning and changing again, and I must not yearn for the irretrievable past.

I can feel the terror of that long catastrophe ebbing away, the madness and misery, the horrors of a year that I yearn to shed like a dying skin. I am a wound that is healing now: not a mutilated absence of matter but a real and unfamiliar woman. I am learning to live again: it has been so long that I scarcely remember how. Some things are lost to me forever, of course, and I feel each passing like another incision, born of that familiar surgical knife. But their deaths engendered a kind of dark beauty: a vindication, a coherence, a resolve. I have to finish what was started so many years ago, in the sanctuary of my mother’s arms. The absurdity of this life is my conscience and my calling. I have to live. I want to.

And my god, how the world has altered since they made their unforgettable, unforgivable choice. The carnal sweetness of new affections, another figure sprawled in this bed beside me. Her pulse is quickening, the sheets dampen with exaltations, my knuckles are knotted in the dark tendrils of her hair. In the pale fires of encroaching dawn, I can trace each curve of her form, every tongue of brilliance illuminating her bare skin, all the notches and impressions of her spine. I cannot feel love like I used to, but I have learned a new sort of ecstasy all the same.

The finding of this life was worth the burning of the first: these moments, I imagine, are the raw beginnings of joy. The contours of moonlight, the sacred memory of strange new souls, the possibilities that gleam like chips of glittering arsenic–I do not cower beneath disbelief or misery now. This is the scared art of outrunning the past, of enduring despondency, of surviving your own madness. I have raced my darkness, and for once, I have triumphed.

Let me keep this moment, just this one. It has been so long since I have felt like anyone, or anything, at all.

None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom, the last.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

We spent the spring together in our solitude, our uncertainty, our grief. The room was a crypt for the broken but still-living, a printing-press of sorts for the reams of fabrication that we spun for an outside world. The fibers of our being could be found in book-spines and memories, in scar tissue and chips of glass along the filthy floor. There were empty bottles and fraying bed sheets, shivering limbs and bloodshot eyes. We were young, we were broke, we were violent, we were restless–and by the end, we were jaded as all hell.

Survival is a savage sort of thing: it is always the rats that run first, the wretched who endure, and I have never been the kind to die. I gnawed marrow from the bones of discontent, sank my teeth into the throat of my own misery, left claw marks in the concrete of the blind and listening walls. I promised I would survive the summer, and whatever else you may think of me, I was steadfast in this. I loved them, I loved them beyond my own description, and so I wrestled health from the ashes of a life I longed to abandon. In the end, I was the one who endured.

There was so little good left in my world to squander. I thought her the most beautiful thing to cross my path in a lifetime or less–she was the last, best thing I had going. Sometimes I still peruse the strange sinew of her desire, still run a cold finger across lines of early poetry, still hear her voice break like a rainstorm across the underside of my mind. She was the most wonderful goddamn part of my salvaged world. How could she prove such an absent, mundane love?

But the vitriol was imprecise and meaningless. There was nothing left to miss. And so I stopped wondering, and then, it stopped mattering. Those lovely, strange, and sorrowful days, when the sordid evenings wept and murmured into rust-stained tides of dawn, have left me now forever. Whatever I am, or am to become, there is scarcely a history to recall. I know that I should not have given myself so easily to such faint echoes of desire. I should not have loved him, or her, or them, whose worth was as that of a slowing pulse. I would have done better to have loved myself instead.

Now I exhale the recollections of that year like celestial dust. Disillusion wrenches soft, sweet yearnings from my skin. I undo each memory of ill-founded love like a bandage from my arms, my hips, my ribs. I pry the knowing fingers from my mind. I am still wading through the dark, still waters of quiet endurance, the faint dream of purpose. I am wonderfully alone amidst the tangle of lips and eyes, the trail of promises that yearned to be broken, the shadow in the doorway when I turned, at last, to go.

To live is not an easy thing. To live in the state that I too often have is still more damning, more inane. I am a disconsolate aggregation of shrewd and disparate parts. I feel them in succession, like slow fragments of a suicide. Entropy. Apathy. Liquor. Cigarettes. Coffee. Self-absorption. Bloodlust. Real lust. Disinterest. Sanctimony. Desolation. Shame. There has been a note taped above my mirror for three weeks now. All it says is, Stay Alive.

And yet, I am more than alive now. I am burning. I am striving. I am not afraid to be. The future unfurls without form or composition, an iridescent expanse of possible meaning, a darkness that longs to be shaped into a world. Through the veil of a nascent conviction, I have learned, at long last, how not to care: how to seek pleasures that are not penitential, how to sell an affection that ebbs away with the morning. Sometimes I still feel the dull pull of catastrophe, like a far-off shriek in a forgotten life, but the immutable vanity of the present has already bled through whatever remains of the inexorable past. There is nothing left for me to fear. I love sparingly, I live viciously, I trust no one at all.

I once endeavored to tame my heart, but it does not know itself anymore. And so, I suppose, I am untethered at last from the bonds of an earliest yearning. The astringent energy of desire is murmuring beneath the surface of my conscious mind: I think that I am coming back to myself once more. The best and the worst of my days are still to come. I live and dream by the rising of the moon. As its pallor wanes, I see shadows on the surface, and there lingers, in that dark brilliance, the final image of those I once loved. But they are fading now, dwindling slowly into nothing more than another set of bones to lay to rest beside my father’s.

Perhaps I was meant to survive this after all.

Let me glimpse inside your velvet bones.

Edgar Allen Poe, The Collected Letters 

It has been months since I have felt the urge to write anything at all. This should not surprise me: my life has been a half-defined hellscape of burials and burning eyes, or dim evening flights back to those who have ruined me. Where has my mind gone since? My body moves like Orphean music and I see glimpses of a self in glass panes. How changed I am.

Where once I stood inexpressible, half-starved, all eyes and prominent ridges of bone, I now see a woman. Nothing more. I am heavier now, almost as heavy I used to be in childhood, my countenance always exhausted, or expressionless. The ink on my skin falls differently, for the curves of my body have altered. It is not unlovely, no, but certainly unfamiliar: this spray of flowers across the flesh, these living, growing memories of a wound.

But the scars, the scars look different: the new ones are thick and sinewy, they draw my eyes and mottle my arms. Every time someone asks after them, I am mutilated anew. The cuts crack fresh open, like trauma, like a birth. They used to fade so softly beneath the new skin, like barefoot impressions on alabaster shores, like constellations fading with the silver of dawn. But these ones will stay. I cannot outlive them. Someone turned the knife too deep. 

Where once I was all love and affection and gratitude, a child still seeking solace, now I am colder than ice. I really do feel hatred. This is worse than anger, and yet, less personal: this is the pure acrimony of contempt, of disdain unmarred by remorse or even personal affront. I am finally learning what I so long professed a desire to know. How to walk “carefully, precariously”: I carry myself like something rare. I feel nothing but precise, controlled disgust. There is no sorrow. I have suffered no loss. 

I have only really known three people, so far, who have looked at me like the most beautiful thing in the world. The first of them was a catalyst: the worst was the last. It still sickens me, to watch that razor-edged frame. Shall we talk of rapture or raptor talons, of jaws or viper’s tongues? That sickness that devours each of us from within, unfeeling, flesh-eating, was only an echo of what she was capable of. She watched them tear me apart, watch me tear myself apart, and she fed on that, when I never could. Her tongue and her voice sicken me now: that I ever succumbed to such infected neglect. What must it feel like, to wield the vices of apathy, of self-vindication, of carelessness? Avarice and artifice, the audacity to feign some normalcy: the very sight of her spreads like a cancer across my form. The sound of your breath sparks the ceasing of mine. I could not starve myself long enough to expunge the toxins of your cowardice, your skin. Your heart, your mouth, like a Janus you were halved, and I hate you for it–someday, you will know this feeling. You will. 

But here is the beauty of the thing. You think you know who I am writing about. You, love, think you know who you are. You are mistaken. You are blinder than the narcissi. You are not the woman of whom I now write. This is not about you. It was never about you. You aren’t you. You’re an absence. You’re a wound. You aren’t. No one knows who I write of now. You’ve never met her. Not one of you.

And so I am clean. Amazingly, unfathomably, I am clean. Not unscathed, of course, but finally, finally, I am something close to blameless. Because it was not me after all, they all just kept on dying without me. I am not like them. I am entering into existence again: like an iris, the lid unfolds. I am in pain, I suffer beneath their eyes and lingering accusations, but I am deeply alive. And I don’t self harm anymore.

I do not mutilate my own body because I will not make the job easier for them–for anyone who wants to see me sick or scared or hopeless. I don’t cut. I don’t burn my skin. I don’t medicate beyond recompense, don’t drink to kill, don’t take risks chasing worthless shadows of affection. I used to think that to undo myself was to find a way out. To be impaled upon the living world. To be heard and found and saved. But I know better now. I know how little this life cares, I know that if I continued to carve the cruelty of others into my skin, I would only waste away in some room somewhere, friendless and purposeless and alone. No one will ever save me, and seldom will they even choose to stay. I have been taught the lesson too many times. I need not learn it again.

There are people who want me gone, who do not care either way, who would rather spare themselves the trouble of my existence. I will not make their lot any easier. I will not comply. Instead, I live. Absurdly, I live. Out of pure, undesirable spite, I still live. 

I don’t self harm because when they left me, they took that part of me with them. Just look at me now. I think I died sometime along the way. Dead in the beginning. Did not die when I should have. I lost my father, my lover, my best friends, my could-have-been brother, my purpose, my memory, my pride. I’ve felt blood expunged like life from between my legs (or was it the other way around?) and I’ve seen the underside of a mind that was my grave. One after another, they picked like vultures at my rotting flesh. But the mutilated mass they all left there, sliced and shivering, had not yet submitted entirely. 

Consider me in what fashion you will. But whatever clambered from my corpse is still living beside you, I see it in the mirror when I stare and I stare. Asphodel burns away, with thorns and Irish roses: my funeral rites. I am flint, I am ash, I am cypress and bone.

I am the child of a possibility long since passed. They buried my hope with his body. They only left this carcass: a seraph fallen to earth on the knife’s edge. My mind is smoke and diamond, and that thing in my chest, the burning core that nearly killed me, the writhing darkness I once exhaled with all my willful, wild ways–it no longer howls. It knows me. I welcome it. We are one.

Apathy and loathing, I waver between the two like a detuned radio, and contempt is the closest thing to love that I know. Sometimes I still feel the dark glamour of desire: the woman with the water streaming through her opal hair, the figures flickering on my periphery, who were kind to me, who kept me from worse than dying, who are trying to care. But it hardly matters anymore. 

I am no longer afraid of solitude. I am not afraid of being denied love. I have faced both and found my breath again. I have buried the people I cared for. I have bruised my own heart and fractured my mind against the unending question, where did they go, why did they leave, why will they not answer, why—

It has all passed through me like memory through a living mind. These things cannot hurt me anymore, because I cannot make myself love the way I used to. I will never feel that way again, and so will never open my own skin to see pale blue capillaries or crimson rain-showers or dazzling prisms of light. Farewell, the lovely promises. I do not self harm because there is no longer anything or anyone worth harming myself for. There never really was.