Let it pass: April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing

There I was again, on the edge of that familiar precipice, with my mind all shrouded in the things I tried to forget. I knew that I was nearing an ending of sorts. I was starting to do the things that make me forget how meaningless it all can be, and starting to learn that there are some things I can only feel when I am alone. I was entirely aware of that blistering core beneath my body, that vital and terrible thing to which I have yet to ascribe a name. I was thinking of the father that I very rarely see, and of the chemicals that were coursing through my veins like an accusation. I was thinking that maybe, this time, I was ready.

Suddenly I was not standing: I was falling and feeling nothing. I was breathless, and I was overcome–and then I was awake, a part of the physical world once more. I realized that I had been dragged beneath a stream of cold water, running out from some unfamiliar shower head. I was shaking. My pulse was ebbing. I did not care, even then, but in that instant, I started to wonder. For the life of me, I could not understand how it had come to this. I could not remember why I was breathing at all. And I felt that, surely, this was no way to live.

So I wandered absently home again, and sought a person who might help me hurt less. I have seldom been luckier, for he had rarely been so present. Maybe some part of him knew–but then again, maybe not. It did not matter and never will. I knew that things could be better then, because it felt so gentle and so right: to be held in that silence, and to breathe. To trust the body tethering me to the physical world, the hands that moved along my wrists and throat, with no obligations and no hurting, was too extraordinary for the extent of my language. That was a moment to help me start to heal once more, and perhaps a little better this time. We were not in love, not even close, but we were in balance, in harmony, and there was trust and affection without any fear.

The words that I spoke that night were rare for their simplicity, and their gratitude, and their sobriety. But strangest of all, they were true—and what a wonder that was. Whatever happens now, and whichever mistakes I inevitably make, and wherever my wandering sanity goes, there will always have been a time, one bright and shining moment, when those words were true and I was not afraid to speak them.  In the darkness of that night, as it ebbed away like a slowing heartbeat, I was briefly close to whole. I wished to be like ivy, a climbing vine: growing into and through and around him, and binding us both to the tranquility of that bed.

Goodness knows I am still learning to love, but is there some way to exalt without obligation, without yearning? I love what this is, as it is, with no regard for potentiality or lack thereof.  I love its transience and relative constancy. I love that it is fleeting and tender. I love that I can walk away. I love that I choose not to.  I love that I am healing, and that my body is moving like a living thing once more. I love that this feeling imbues me like sunlight filtering through the gap between drawn curtains, when I stand above the moonlit watery chasms of this ancient city, and lose myself within the music of a half-mad mind and its meaningless ambitions.

I love that this thing is beautiful, but not by any means singular. I love the communities I have found, these writers and artists and lover-friends, sharing cigarettes and taking faded photographs and telling our stories well into the dawn: the crystal pendant on my bedside table, and the worlds we create within four walls, fearless and divine. My own memory evades me, trickles away like rainwater on panes of frosted glass, a consequence of those chemicals that took my breath away. But what a feeling, her fragile form, and how she looked at me, eyes alight, shadow-drenched skin, barbed tongue running along the length of my thighs. I knew my name as I seldom have before, when it fell burning from her mouth like a prayer.

I loved that single night of impulse and ecstatic longing, when I found myself tangled in tendrils of smoke and bare limbs: the singing curve of my notched spine, the enigmatic reality of their lips and eyes. I did not know to whom each set of hands belonged, those nameless fingers and flesh, and were were all of us something more than disparate bodies, and there was only desire in that room. I adored whatever my skin came into contact with. My body breathed in ecstasy, like an ocean. My entire countenance was blissfully lost.

The month of April nearly undid me. It may sound histrionic–I have come to believe that everything I write surely does–but there is no plainer way to say it. I have not cried like that since I was a little girl. Lying there motionless, like some child from a nightmare, I prayed to nothing for the feeling to pass. My bedroom was soaked with foreign blood, haunted by traces of narcotics and a rusted razor, and there was no one there to keep me from turning that hateful thing upon myself–but I did not, I did not. I knew no place where I could sleep that night: I sought solace from the few who might have been able to help me, and they failed to do so, and I refuse to blame them for that. Maybe they just did not understand. It hardly matters now. I had absolutely no one, I was utterly alone in that way that I fear, but I kept myself sane anyways. I survived that bare-skin horror-show scene, just as I am surviving all of the strange and sorrowful days that have followed. Maybe we can all heal now.

I decided that things needed to change, and I could no longer wait for a catalyst. And I did it, I really did. After half a week of endless nights and wretched mornings, of episodes so terrible that they made me feel sixteen again, I am finally ready to step outside once more. My limbs still shake, my head still sears, and my skin is still a nightmare of bruises. But my blood and my conscience are finally clean. I have faced a kind of hell, and though I am changed, I am yet living. How many others like me can say the same?

This is all just language. This is not the flesh that your eyes have cut so deeply. Why would you care? Why would anyone? But at any rate,  it is getting better. I am not well, not even close, but I think that I am stronger now. I am catching the faintest glimpses of what I have not felt in so long, the fleeting affirmations of sensation, the transient joy of being here at all–no, no this is real–and that must count for something.

I am carving a new and better space for it, for me, this writer-user-lover-addict, imprecise and genderless and never meant to survive. Lazarus form, Tiresian mind, Electra heart, Orphean soul—still lost, sometimes living, I shatter on. I am Icarus in flames, my burning body a testament to my father’s failures. Always relentlessly enduring, I am consumed within the labyrinth of a past where mind and memory meet in mechanical discord. I am nowhere close to apologizing.

If I run out of things to write about, then I will run out of things to live for, and I am not yet ready for that.

April is over and I am alive. I can only hope that is enough.