It has been so long since I felt anyone gave a damn.

Tennessee Williams, Five O’Clock Angel

Last week, spring stayed smothered beneath the New England frost, with Venus in retrograde and the new moon encroaching, when I made a twelve-hour bid for new surroundings. I was feeling isolated and irritable, paranoid and passionate, oracular and obsessive, and bored as all hell—in short, quite the same as always—when I decided to jump a last-minute Greyhound to a distant city encrusted with filth and blank possibility. I found an old friend, fifteen minutes from the station. We picked up beer and cheap lipstick and matches. We wasted hours treading on the past. Over the last cigarette, she asked, “So, how are you doing?”

I glanced up at her, tapped ash into an empty can of Budweiser, and replied, with complete honesty, “I’m great.” We both laughed a little in spite of ourselves. Because when the hell, after all, was the last time I could say that?

Before mid-January, I had not been all right for a very long time. I say that it happened this November, but the truth is that it probably had been happening for a while before then, maybe even since the very start. Certainly from last April, at least, when I entered my own bedroom to find someone else’s blood on my sheets. The madness blossomed from there, and the circumstances got stranger, and people broke promises, or lied to me about whatever they fancied, and then the pressure was too much and I started to bend and break and blame myself, began to lose my then-tedious grip on reality, made all kinds of decisions that I might regret until the day I die. Then memory goes dark until late summer, when I forced myself through clinical treatments and resolved to try again.

But November was the most painful month, because a very specific wound had been reopened; I had been so sure that rusticating, taking this year off from university to focus on my health, would help me immensely. And maybe it would have, I’ll never know now. Because I listened to the pleas of all of the same people who were scaring me. I listened when they promised me that things would get easier and they loved me and would always be there for me and I should just give the coming autumn a shot—

And for a while, in October, things really did get better. We all tried harder. It honestly could have worked. We still had our dark moments, but they were nothing compared to what had come before. And as I felt each bump in the road get smaller, I could sense myself healing: it was only a question of how fast it would happen. I was starting to feel happiness, in brief but wonderful flashes, for the first time in almost a year. My dissociations were less and less frequent. My sense of self was coming back. I became more confident in asking for help. One night, not realizing how the sentiments might be construed, I felt ready to be candid with the people I loved about my occasional relapses into self-medication and self harm, and the fact that I was still considering going home for a few months if my conditions, though improving, were less stable than what I felt comfortable maintaining.

And then they gave up on me.

I never stood a fucking chance. They did not even give me a full month, time to find my footing or a new therapist—three weeks in their immediate company was all that I had, then I woke up one day and they were gone. That is not hyperbole, not metaphor. They were actually gone. Absolute, radio silence. I had experienced it before, from my father, and then again, from one absent lover, but never from my closest friends, and never from so many people at the same time. I nearly lost my mind in that first week. I felt like the most toxic thing alive. I wanted to grovel, I wanted to sob, I wanted to tear my teeth out. It was just so goddamn unfair. No one would tell me what was going on, and then a week later, with one false and frigid message, they purged their worlds of me entirely, never even permitted me an oppurtunity to speak with them.

So when did I get better? When did it stop hurting? Truth be told, I am not sure. But it has stopped hurting.

Don’t get me wrong: I still have more than my fair share of bitterness, of frustration, of the discomfort that comes with inevitable proximity. I still want to scream out at the world, because now that everything is said and done, I want you all to know what happened to me. I want you all to understand how unjust some of the treatment was, how one of my former friends laughed in disdain when I cried in front of him. I want to publish all of the messages. I want some explanation for the fact that I was branded “too unstable” for their company—until it was more convenient for them to reside where I was, and then the brunt of their accusations against me unraveled sardonically under the competing pressure of their own self-interest. I want to take every single one of you through my side of this horror-show: through all of the desperate attempts to understand, all of the people I reached out to seeking advice, all of the bids for “forgiveness” I made before realizing I was not the fucking problem.

Because whatever else you may think of me, I know what really happened in November, and I do not feel shame or remorse. Not in the slightest. Everything I did, I did because I was genuinely trying to make things better, or at my very worst, because I was resisting being shoved into a corner by a hydra-headed cluster of people who invented a false grave and expected me to crawl into it. Even now, I would accept some shred of their remorse, use it to bury as much of the hatchet as one still can, if they would only acknowledge the distress that they caused. But they are unwilling, or incapable. At any rate, perhaps it is more fitting for this to have ended in disrepair, because what they did was ugly and irreparable.

I used to wish that things could be different, that there could have been forgiveness or understanding before we parted ways, but I do not wish for that anymore. Hell, at this point the only thing I wish is that they had walked away sooner, or that I had walked away first. I spent so much time wondering what was wrong with me, or that place, that I never even stopped to consider how goddamn tired I was getting of watching people project the consequences of their actions onto everybody but themselves. I was completely numb to this way of living, blind to the absurdity of our actions. I forgot what it was like to be treated with real compassion or honesty or respect.

So at the end of the day, have I lost anything? Is it a “loss” if you are better off without the thing that leaves?

God only knows. It is almost unsettling, how much better the world has become since I stopped caring. After all, January came, and for all of its tragedies, it saw me through to new and better days. I found people who give a damn—or more accurately, they found me. Is there anything more refreshing than learning, after so much time, that there were better people out there all along? The ghosts of November have made their choice, and I will comply with the savagery of it. Yes, and I will fight back if I have to, tear each new accusation or indication or sidelong glance to shreds. I will not be crossed or criticized, they will not have my shame when they have not earned it—and I’ll be all right, I’ll always be all right, because I know that I am not alone anymore.

But this is something that happened to me, something I still have to face. This is something people should know about, because I have to deal with it every single day. I would not be surprised to learn that the others have forgotten or disregarded most of the events of November—safe as they are in the confines of their collective and collectively incorrect psyche. But truly, this is not about them. I mean that. It is not an indictment, or an accusation, or a confession (even though it inevitably contains elements of all three). This is just what happened. It is what I need the people who love to me to know about the past year of my life.

I am tired of writing in metaphor, of lending the subtleties of language to such mundane events. So here it is plainly: in November, my greatest fear was realized. I was left, without warning, by the people I loved the most. Just like I was when I was fifteen. Just like I probably will be again someday, in this lovely but unreliable life. And I fucking hate being left on my own—all I ever really wanted was to be the kind of person they would stay for.

But in the end, as I have said, it was for the best. Because I think I have a better shot this time around, with these new people, of forging friendships not animated by trauma, and so shielding myself from the fallibility of human love. But for those of you who have read this through, who have heard me out, I do ask one last favor. When you see me flinch at certain names, or shy away from certain people—please do not pretend any longer to be ignorant of the history behind this pain, which for a while was so real that I thought it was going to break me. I only hope that those of you who have professed your support of me and my health can acknowledge this critical fact. Because I want my voice back. I’ve earned as much.

‘You are a petty, selfish, manipulative, disciplined psycho bitch—’

‘You are a man,’ I say. ‘You are an average, lazy, boring, cowardly, woman-fearing man.’

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Just last winter, a feminist spent evenings in conversation with a man whose voice fell across her like rain on tinted glass. She used to sit on the windowsill of his bathroom: one foot jammed in the wooden frame, flicking cigarette ash out onto the street below. They would share stories until the sun glinted above the horizon, and as they talked, he would run his fingers along the leg that was keeping her steady–not the smooth expanse of inner thigh, where his own pleasure might be found, but the strip of flesh that ran from knee to ankle: the shins that she had not bothered to shave since long before she met him.

Now, when he talks about his untidy love affair with this not-quite-woman, this feminist, when he makes jokes about her body–does he remember how tenderly he once learned to love it? When he laments how demanding she was, does he think of all of the times she scraped her knees against his bedroom floor, because she did not want him to have to ask? When he calls her cold, or hard, or unfeeling, does he recall how often she thawed and then scattered like a rainstorm, felt everything crash over her at once: elation, despair, desire, grief? When he speaks of her madness, her instability, has he forgotten how he, himself, used to break apart in incoherent ecstasy at the feel of his body beneath hers? When he says that he could not provide support for a woman who left half of her mind in a hospital, does he remember the nights he spent telling her every fear and regret: laying the weight of his head and his words upon her bare chest? When he deems his time with her a mistake, does he not realize that she is a universe, alive and unfolding? Does he not understand that the precious months of her life were not, could never be reduced to, so small a thing as one man’s regret?

Once, she was a living, breathing person to him. Now she is nothing but one more reason not to date a feminist with illnesses and ideals; unshaved legs and half-shaved hair; freakish hopes and tarot cards; perfectly positioned indifference and woefully misplaced love. She is a cautionary tale for him to tell to other men.

Until recently, I erected the near-entirety of my being on the foundation of affection that I never received: walking some inane tightrope between woman and man, gay and straight, sane and raving, narcissistic and self-loathing, unabashed and ashamed, alive and not exactly so. Of course, then, in writing the disappointments of the summer, the specter of my first, last love, the oldest memory that I have, weighs inevitably upon me: the man who used to tell me stories, fill my mind with visions of a life beyond what I had known.

When I say that my father taught me nothing but apathy, why do I not mention that I learned to read with my head on his shoulder? When I reflect again and again upon why I no longer speak to him, do I ever stop to remember the long hours spent in reverential silence, in car rides from cities to mountains to shorelines, while he played old rock albums, and taught me to really hear them? When I swear that I never needed his approval, have I forgotten playing the piano while golden afternoons passed like arpeggios–hand over hand, hour over hour–and I checked the mirror to catch glimpses of him listening in the other room?

If you are the sort of person that I am, then you will already know that it is not easy to love men, in any way at all, without impaling yourself upon them in the process. In fact, it is pretty fucking close to impossible. This does not mean that the converse is easy, that loving women is easy–because of course it isn’t. It can’t be. As a matter of fact, one of the cruelest things in my entire life was done to me, this November, by women that I loved. But still, the question remains. How can you love and trust men (or love and trust yourself) when every tongue you allow between your teeth could hurl the words “crazy bitch” at you, cut you to size, reduce you to your sex and your psychosis in half a second?

The problem is, it never seems as if it is going to be that way. For us, every new touch seems more promising, more thrilling, a kind of Russian roulette: get bored, or fall in love. We cling to the hope that surely, surely, this most recent effort will not be in vain. Maybe this one will be gentler, maybe this one will respect me, maybe this one will understand why I am so messy-guarded-demanding-impassioned, maybe this one will just give a damn, maybe–

But time and time again, we are left empty-handed, heavy-hearted. Do we know, somewhere deep down, that it is always going to end like this? That some worlds are too far apart to be bridged, that some people are not meant to meet at all–because one will inevitably go back to her words and solitude, and the other to his stories of that bitch he used to know, and neither will mention how the smirking man, and the half-mad girl who loved him, were each once the best part of the other’s half-formed world?

It’s strange. I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you.

Jean Paul Sartre, The Flies

Life between fingers, sound beneath flesh: warm hands, searching tongues, memories slipping with grief. The clenching jaw, the scream, the loss that howls, then flickers, like a glimpse of your wrist on the knife. Empty concrete buildings grind their bared and broken teeth: abandoned, unbidden, recalled. Unforgotten insubstantial moments, forgotten once-substantial people: we were the ones who almost got out. Broke and unyielding, but shattered quite completely, we met beneath fading streetlights in evening’s grim embrace. We salvaged stale liquor and confession. You were always quickest to leave. 

We chased our last chances to an old Motel 6, to watch sullen men and the girls they were with. Frayed fishnet stockings and skin, skin, skin; torn by the night air, shivering thin.

We glanced, unaffected, from our windowsill-altar, altered the night with graffiti-stained souls: making love in strange places, or on shadowy floors– waking just sometimes, to the waxing of the moon. Damp sheets clung to the outline of us, cold knuckles twisting through my muttering spine. Fingers colliding with notches of bone, these jaws to your throat: adoration unfaded. 

An ashen grey gradient grapples with sky, smoke tumbles from your mouth, pale and bone-dry. Your eyes are wide—you’re still mine.

This is my vision of not getting out. I walk across the railway tracks, asphalt underfoot, my family and denim jacket fraying at their seams. The conflict and chaos and televised wars–how could I have left this unchanging place? Crunching gravel, broken windows, jagged-edge shards of empty bottles in the streets: unfinished promises beckon me home. I pause in the entrance, I linger on the last step. For just an instant, I catch my breath. I close my eyes. I remember what remains of my half-fictive past.

I am the last thing this history knows: a shadow in the doorway–it opens, I close.

Midwinter draws to an iridescent close, and the spring snarls slowly, like a promise, from the soil.

A mirror is shattered, and formed. My could-have-been brother still sleeps beneath the thawing ice, and I speak a language that you cannot understand. I know that you tried, I know, but even so, you became a thing that wasn’t. Murmuring half-truths in the half-light, I swear–I thought you were a life beyond living. But this monument to discontent, this damned Babel-tongue, the hushed, rolling, coil of words, of cowardice and false comfort, of burgeoning disquiet–do you choke on every once-promise made? How could you not give a damn? Why on earth did you lie?

I thought that I loved her, because she lives like an echo: every word that drips from her mouth or her pen is just the better part of another being. She reflected my best, and my worst, back at me, and I loved her for it. I mistook her deficiencies for virtues, her weakness for resolution. I did not recognize what she was, because I could not recognize my own self veiled beneath the skin of another. The mistake is mine; the catalyst is her. If she is anyone, beneath that groveling artifice, then I must confess that I have never truly known her. That body was merely a mimesis in which I learned what not to be. There are no secrets between us anymore.

Her imprint, desirous and desirable, in this bed we used to share, is so far faded now. It belongs to others, of course, to the dark-haired reminiscence, her roiling moors and strains of a rough, nascent tenderness, the way she tugs one pearl-smooth thumb across my lip—she steadies and thrills in one fluid motion: she tastes like a breaking wave. And of course there are others, so many others, the woman with the name that runs like rain through the streets, each assertion working like volition between the margins and gaps of my soul. And the one like a world beyond what I have known: enchanting, radiant, seraphic, capricious—I love her as I love what could never be. I love them all.

This absence that you manifest is nothing to me now. Because the vacated space belongs to others now, yes, as they come and go with the rising of the moon—but mostly, it belongs to myself. The people I loved left in cowardice and cruelty. I am the best thing that I still have. I am beyond your false providence. I have healed with such brutal precision, with so little mercy, that often I wonder what I have become. But I love, and I feel, and I trust again. So I am content.

Sometimes I wonder. If she stays any longer in that garden, will she endure? I know the place where she erected her tomb. The weeds will curl around her throat, like cigarette ash in our mouths, my flesh—she will hurt like I have. I want to save her, spare her, but why worry? This was her choice, not mine. She has already been crucified, half a dozen times over, for her salience and her sins. No one is to blame but her: she climbs each oaken cross herself. Why should I be privy to this most recent Fall?

At times, I wish that I could still make myself care. I wish that I could feel that affection, that adoration, just one more time. But again, as always, the passion becomes disgust, the emotion slips into unreality, and I wake to the vast, frigid expanse of apathy. I feel nothing. I feel nothing. I do not even remember what she tasted like. I do not care. She has become real nothingness, like she always wanted. She has passed away like a shadow. All I can recall is my own wasted time.

I loved you, I loved you, I hardly knew you. You were a mirage. You were mimetic despondency. And so it goes on. Terrors, like clockwork, burn through the milk-white flesh of the world, and when the memories fade away, I am left alive.

Whatever this feeling is, whatever our memory entails, I will endure beyond the irrevocable collapse of your burning artifice. Do not write of me anymore. Do not sing. Do not care. Forget me, please, and leave me alone. You were the last lie I will ever live. You are the last broken promise.

My scars are yours, my love. May you wear them well.