Alchemist’s Prayer

Sealed safely away in the shrine of my memory, where I cannot hurt her, she breathes. Once, every touch burned with chemical nightmare-love. The singed skin, the wild bliss, the rolled-back whites of the eyes: I am not enough. I am never enough. I am deficient, I allow things to die. When she was gone, that was everyone, and I was alone. Does it sound hyperbolic, narcissistic, self-pitying? Can I change it? Does it matter? I don’t wonder.

My girl, when we meet again, when we hate each other — let it be our own hate that echoes over oceans. Knotted scabs stretch across the rushing channels: the color strongest where the skin was thinnest, where the scalpel was keenest, where I was weakest. Nothing matters beyond these scars: the spiderweb of my genealogy, the filthy house that bound and gagged me, those places where history catches its breath. For the life of me, I cannot recall what made it all hurt so badly. I only know that I cared then, and have not since.

I was the surgeon, my tongue was the craft-knife. I manufactured a love in their bodies, inflicted it upon the shrewd moments that I forged. Persuading, coercing, cajoling affection, I dreamt desire and decision into being. I coaxed paradise out of psychosis, wrought lifetimes from bare longing. Nothing that has known my hands has ever emerged unscathed.

If it is time to recompense for these sins, then I am not ready. I will never be ready, never be willing. I was once too close to innocent. I was irreverent and reflexive and did not know a life beyond the pulse I hated having. I cannot, will not, atone for that. So now I am here, with my broken mind and my hunger-pang frame, my shattered-glass eyes and my narcotized body.

If I can no longer write, then I will have nothing left. So I will make it all real again. I will make the sun rise for me. Offering flesh to a familiar pen, I will find something new. Writing for the person I that was, for the girl who fell apart three years and a lifetime ago. I can hardly bear to reflect upon her, that almost-woman, that writer user lover addict, imprecise and genderless and never meant to survive. Her countless years of painstaking effort, her sincerity and her vanity and her enthralling fucking misery—her failure is immortalized in paper and ink. How could she give this, her mind, to people she hates now?

If I create something beautiful, I can justify this. It will all have been worth it. I will be clean.

This is not the simple elegance of being or belonging. This is the ugly, idolatrous craft of unknowing, of un-becoming, of outlasting. My survival is a miracle, born of medicine and paired with pure spite. Everything I have ever made is malformed, but it is breathing. This is an absurd, unholy art: a secret astronomy of unfettered longing, a manifest desire that will outlive my own.

And I am not permitted to say it, to say any of it. That I hate what happened, that I hate what was done to me. That I hate the silence, hate the complicity, hate every person who watched and let it happen. That I hate being ignored, hate not being loved enough. I cannot say these things, because I have to be stronger than them. I have to be senseless, because that is the form that survival takes.

But if there is still a moment—one clandestine, exquisite, godforsaken moment—when I feel whole or at peace, it is this. It is now. When the raw, remaining words peel away from diseased edges of thought, and emerge silver-wrought and rhapsodic on the page. For as long as my heart can feel passion or loss, it will know something of language. It will remember something beyond doubt.

This is a violent fucking world—do not allow anyone to tell you otherwise. I have spent too long pretending that there will be any sanctuary other than that which I lend to myself. I have wasted years attempting to justify my craft with the promise of some better product.

If I breathe too deeply, I begin to feel it hurting. If I look back too fondly, I forget to live at all. If I linger too long, I remember why I loved them in the first place. So I do not apologize. I do not think. I do not need the things that people cannot give me. Instead, I desire shamelessly. I engage recklessly. I love absurdly. It is the only thing worth living for—and so I allow myself feel this way, again and again and again.