And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Toni Morrison, Sula

My dreams are predictably nonsensical, now: apocalyptic, anachronistic, antagonistic, undone. When the night-panic returns, and my mind is sober, it betrays one vision, which lingers like a long scream. I close my eyes and the world dies out. I see things of terrible beauty, I see things you could scarcely imagine.

I see a mirrored face of not-mine. I see a single eye that blinks, tattooed across the night-skin of the sky. I see hands, so many hands, reaching 
out. I see buildings that leer like broken teeth. 
I see the rich, raw earth inviting me to coil myself in its chasms. I see the sycophantic glimmer of the blind, unfeeling moon. I feel that shame, the childhood shame, and it guts me as I glean and I gleam.

Perhaps this is why poets drink themselves to sleep, why prophets do not dare to dream. But then, maybe it is simply the season. I always go a bit mad in the springtime.

At least I am not what I once was–some undesired life compounded by attractions that nearly proved fatal, a mortician’s spectacle intent upon undoing itself. To read my journals now is to read the ravings of a child born wanting: a need incarnate, bound to the bodies that loved her own. Defenseless or indefensible, I was my own suffering’s source. My yearnings betrayed an utter lack of plain stability, and the horror was mimicked in the very fabric of my existence, in the structure of the world I created around myself—for those who build worlds are condemned to live in them, and this is especially true of women.

I hope I do the right thing, this time around. I hope I hurt less people. I don’t want to be this, exhausting, volatile, unpredictable, violent, extreme. I want to be closer to normal. I want to rest easy. But I also want to burn. I want to be beyond this body, to not be tethered to a thing that takes on scars so easily. I want to relinquish the pain but not the nightmare.

I read theses reams of ink that curled and dried, so long ago now, on the pages of diaries I still cherish and still loathe. I was so vulnerable then, so open, so strangely naked to the world. I hung my love and my self on the cross that was their faithlessness, their inconstancy:
 reaching between my ribs, I plucked out my own heart, the lovely, crimson thing. Like a fledgling bird, still fragile, it hardly had a pulse. Desperately, recklessly I offered it to whatever words or fingers happened to worm their way into my life. I hoped someone would care for it, because I did not know how.

Now I am older, and so much more a stranger to myself. No more torn clothes and bleeding soles, no more howling winter winds and screaming at the streetlights. Are there things that even I cannot forgive or outrun? Have I found them? Does it matter? Losing her was just the punctuation mark on a sentence my father started when I was nine years old.

I should have been a proper girl, with kissed lips and starry eyes and half-staged love affairs, sitting on the harbor docks and combing out my sea-swept hair.
 I should have been a woman like the ones I saw in pin-up magazine pages, back when I was growing young, the cheap lipstick and candy skin. I should have been an image to be flattened out, cut and pasted, then forgotten, with a glassy smile to break and fade with the last of the summer skies.

Instead I am genderless, purgatorial, impure, with my father’s blunted bones and caustic mind, and my own strange desires, and clusters of burns, and knots of memories altered by chemicals, and that grudging will to live that even the fires could not purge. I want to wander the alleyways of cities I’ve never seen.
 I want to dance on glass and live on smoke
 and dream new languages. I want to bear down beneath the breaking waves
, and lose myself to the dim Atlantic. I want to make love in strange places, to be desirous and dangerous, to be abhorred and enraptured all at once.

But it is a foolish, selfish thing, to wish for prolonged madness. I am still a part of some world beyond my walls. I owe it to the rest of them to remain sober, and wary, and comparatively sane. I have to feel my own affections move through me, like memory through a living mind, flaring then fading, and I must not try to keep hold of them for too long. I must wait for the day when I wake up and I realize that it feels better, that I have healed, and I can live as an ordinary person–not as the product of a past I cannot forsake.

To live or love at all, you must know yourself sincerely, must know your own strangeness and your own conviction. You have to understand what parts of you to cultivate, and which ones to fear. When the cold spring morning comes, you walk out and face it. You cannot consider it. You must not delay.

a confessional digression

Please. Don’t switch off my mind by attempting to straighten me out. Listen and understand, and when you feel contempt don’t express it, at least not verbally, at least not to me.

Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

Last night, I watched the silver floods encroaching, another dawn I could not delay, another figure beside me, drenched in brine, immersed in the stygian shoreline of my bed. My limbs all tangled in his hands, eyes as wide and as empty as the harbor, not speaking, barely breathing, just awake. The rain fell like glass, splintering against the windows: English spring swept past the curtains to croon against the edges of my skin. In my shrine to inertia, self-effacement, inundation, I sang myself silently, at long last, to sleep.

This city has settled into the contours of my soul, has gutted the body I entrusted to its keeping. I know all of its intricacies, the dark architecture of its desire. I know its need to categorize, glamorize, idealize the misery of the human mind, to watch its spectacular collapse without interference. This respite is condemned to its own solitude, subjected to the whims of the horrific and achingly wonderful history it retains.

I adore and abhor my own feral half-life. Insurrectionary cultures and radical ideologies lend themselves to this spectacle of difference, this specter of indifference, this paradox that prevails here. To be violent and reckless and insolent is less frightening than trying to stay healthy and sane. How many of us are ‘mad geniuses,’ and how many the wayward products of troubled homes: still subconsciously childlike, in need of the guidance we never received, facing the consequences of adulthood as we must? 

If I were to lay my own heart bare, at this moment, even I am not sure what I would find. There is still so much that I do not understand.

But what do I have left to be afraid of? I used to fear the loneliness of being left. I don’t have to be afraid of that anymore because I have been left. I have been left over and over again. Of course, I wish some parts of me had not been killed off quite so quickly. Those were some of the best and most tender ways of feeling that I still knew. I was never supposed to be like this: I was supposed to be normal. But when you are dissected and lied to and always so goddamn confused–you learn to sharpen your edges. Where they hurt the most, you leave them jagged. You allow the others to wound themselves against you, to break like ships against the face of a cliff–that cliff they were so sure you were always on the edge of.

I knew the choice I was making last spring. I knew what the consequences would be if my trust proved ill-founded. And it did. So I lost the faint hope that I had salvaged so lovingly, that had sustained me for so long. No part of that remains inside of me now.

In the summer, I told my therapist that I would die for my friends, that they were the family I had never had. By early winter, I had to look her in the eye and explain that no, no they do not talk to me anymore, not because of what I did, but because of what I am, because they have finally come to know me, and they have come to know that they cannot love me. Not with my nightmares and my episodic terrors and my horribly wounded mind. I have no one now.

So I stopped caring so much. I learned to just fade away. I compare my life to what it once was, what it has been, when I loved viciously, when there was something left to save. Where I once knew madness and joy, now I only have this body. I have blood and enamel. I have fragments of a family. I have a place at university. I have a prognosis. I have my language. I have a promise I cannot break. These things are all that I am. Everything else is transient at best. My history is a grave: it is best left undisturbed. All the same, I keep my ear to the ground.

I am getting healthier, but health does not feel robust, or vivacious, or restorative. Mostly, it lives in the quiet acts of endurance that I practice, and practice, and must not forsake. It is strange not to suffer. It is strange not to know the loss. Health feels like growing older, warier, more indifferent. Sometimes it feels like solitude and solemnity. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all.

Even at my best, my most sincerely content, I still feel that irrevocable distance between myself and the exterior world. I see all of the people who are not me, those harbingers of lived existence, and I am not like them, but I want to be. Their lives are written in a language I can scarcely decipher, my entire existence is an act of translation with which I can barely keep pace.

So yes, sometimes I am still strange, and sometimes I still frighten myself. But more often I am deeply and utterly and unconsciously in love with the world around me. Because I am lucky. I am lucky to have been abandoned, I am lucky that it has been so hard. Every day has become a refinement of, an engagement with, the conscious art of loving myself. How many others can say the same? 

Once, I was a universe that could not keep its shape. I was a nebulous dreamscape of scorched flesh, and bleeding wrists, and vague, unparalleled yearning. I was filled with that aching need to be formed into something new. Now I am nothing but a purpose and a vow. I have yielded gently to some simple, starless life. You could not bring me back now if you wanted to. And I could not love you again if I tried.

And there was no pain.
The wind
was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.

Anne Carson, The Glass Essay