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.