Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then the lost Arch-angel, this the seat
That we must change for heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light?

John Milton, Paradise Lost: Book 1

This is intended for you. I wrote this in the folds of your memory, the contours of your form, the subtle inflections of the gaze I rarely meet. I think that it began long before I heard you speak, before I even learned your name. I only recalled it so many months later, in the cacophonous half-light of some whiskey bar well past midnight, when I saw the cyan flash of your iris in the knife’s edge. Your visage was shrouded in the smoke that I expelled from between my lips, and I had seldom seen you so alive. With the simplicity and grace of some half-forgotten thing, you offered up your flesh to my pen. I was drinking hard, to dull a pain as bright as steel, but I still remember the ebony lines of ink that adorned the backs of your hands: the caustic words and curves of a language we have yet to learn in full.

You have no way of knowing who you are, what I am. Are you reading this? Have you been named? I doubt that you will see this at all.

This year has passed through my mind like cyanide: I can feel myself breaking apart. My living body is reduced to a synesthetic nightmare—disfigured, frostbitten, malformed. Every movement smarts and sears, but the burning part of me is dim. I yearn in the waning curve of an arched and aching spine; in the mournful tune of my bones and the scars that extend over them; in the radio static hum of these faint blue veins; in the blood made thin with morphine; in the arcane, empty eyes. Patches of skin are bruising now: some in the deep blues and mottled purples of a nebulous dreamscape, others in cankerous stretches of diseased yellow. I fear that I could crumble at a touch, the marred flesh falling away from my frame, leaving only remnants of ash. This luck is running out now. How many resurrections do I have left to spend?

Weary to the point of half-etherized surrender, each joint infected with a soreness like desire, I lie down to rest and find that I am unable to escape my own lucidity. I am so aware, so damningly conscious, of this exhausted frame, driven well past the point of endurance. Utterly sleepless, I can feel my own heart beating. The toxic thrumming, the incessant, maddening cadence: it echoes like the rhythm of some hunted animal, enervated and relentlessly alive. Everything I am is reduced to a dull, aching sentience. I am so tired. When and how does this stop?

But this undertaking is not yet finished. There is still work to be done. And even now, I can withstand this, for my life is not my own anymore. This broken body has become a ritual sacrifice, a medium for something more and less than flagellation, emerging faithless and fatigued. But I am no martyr, not even close. I am something disposable—somatic, of course, and inclined towards agony. Twice-deceived idolatress or Judas’ last child, inadequate priestess or some false savior: it seems that though I suffer, no one heals. My immolation is futile, unfinished, but I offer it all the same. Perhaps it is mere masochism that compels me to do so. At any rate, this space becomes a crematorium, flooded with smoke and unheard prayers, not fifteen paces from the stained-glass houses of my childhood, where the devout converse in swells of melody, and I used to believe I felt the presence of God. There is no end in sight, but I will continue relentlessly on.

Futility and fascination take refuge in her, that child of the tempest, bearing witness to the tides of a life that could have drowned her (for it surely would have overtaken me). I wrest some sort of shelter from the brine-drenched countenance of this faithful, forlorn thing: her saturnine stare imbued with the nightmare of my body, the ongoing catastrophe from which she will not avert her eyes. I recall from my own childhood the rain-swept cliff’s edge whereupon she kneels: dark hair wind-whipped, irises like shattered crystal, the frigid sea silver-tinged below her sepulchral form.

I remember so fondly the nights of my near-resuscitation, each promise of renewal, those words that tethered my soul to his body in paradigmatic tides of empathy and admission. The gentle hands, as they moved across ivory keys—like Camelot, Troy, and Pandæmonium before us, this world of ours was built to music. There were times when he would sleep and I would write well into the dawn, filling that room with growing things: lotus boughs and reams of ivy, garlands of juniper and night-blooming jasmine. They blossomed in that darkness, and so did I, my body opening and unfolding until the space became a garden of my own design. Fertility breathed through me, in the quiet luster of his sighs: I gave life to my self and my longings once more, and when the morning rang with the bells of the city, I stood on the rooftops and saw a possible world take form. Like an ash tree growing through lovers’ beds, rooted in the soils of a history constructed, I knew then the Edenic joys of some new genesis of the body. Threatened with the specter of inevitable expulsion, I nevertheless endured. My nights lingered sweetly in charcoal impressions of his skin, until what we created became a kind of folklore: crystallized and bound to its irretrievable past.

Maybe someday, I will return to that garden; or more compellingly still, to the stone-etched necropolis that preceded it, where I first laid to rest the final, tender traces of a loving naïveté. Those shapes that gleamed like broken teeth in the moonlight, the patches of earth that lay exposed like chemical burns: the scene evoked an intemperate recollection of the mind that had closed against mine. I wonder where he might be now, that oft-mourned thing, for I am sure that he cannot sleep quietly. I wonder, always, if there ever was some other way. But I was so much younger then: at least now I know how to live on.

I left everything behind me. It is so often said or desired, but I really did it. I put an ocean between myself and the history I despised. I remembered and wrote and reimagined until there was nothing left that I knew except for myself. And what a time it was: my mind is all but fragmented now, and my physical form more desolate still. If these months do not break me, I doubt that there is anything that can. Perhaps, then, it is time for me to go under the knife once more.

I am waiting to be pieced back together again. Yours is the conception upon which my inexplicable fixations now take their most compelling forms. Living in my recollections, the first memory of a new life, you can only know me when I better know who or what it is that I am. But for now, a new dawn breaks upon this letter unsent. Amber-tinged tongues of flame caress the paper, curling at every edge. They undo a eulogy of honest desire. They consume the burnished clauses and still-burning words.

I have strayed far and fast from the sanctified affections that took root in the soils of the now-distant past. I am writing towards the day when we might begin, together, another effort towards paradise.

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.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

If you were to draw back every layer of vanity and self-effacement and wariness from my countenance, would only the body remain? What a relief it might be, then, to dissemble each limb, become a discordant array of separate parts—a leg, an eye, a hand, a hip—a nightmare, a vivisection, a beautiful thing. And if you saw these scattered pieces—the ink-stained arms with faded scars, the blackened lungs and racing heart, the trembling fingers, the rigid spine—would you know that they, in aggregation, constituted me? Would you realize that they formed my very self, the only thing I feel in its entirety? Would it frighten you? Would you care?

And what would lie beneath that but a flowing essence of blood in the veins, of marrow in the bones: where, then, is the thing that compels me to write? I know it exists, because I can feel it there, it troubles me every day, it makes me crave cigarettes and stronger cures, it makes me too frightened to ever be alone. Could you find the source of it, this part of me that hurts? What would it look like? How would it react? Could it be lobotomized, reduced to a dull numbness as I lie etherised upon a table, palms turned skywards, eyelids half-shut, lank hair strewn about my shoulders?

What if you took apart the sentences on this page? If you deconstructed my language, would you see my lies? Could you identify my verbose illusions, all the ways in which I syntactically circumvent admissions of my guilt? Or would it become unintelligible: would the letters simply scatter across the screen? Would they lose whatever binds them to any measure of coherence? Would you uncover my truth, or merely reduce this voice to ink on paper, material and obsolete? I need language to lie, but also to feel, and so any guess is better than my own.

Only a few nights ago, I undid myself with more intent and precision than even my form is accustomed to. The sensation was unlike anything I had ever known, and too somatic to be readily described. My mind gave out with no resistance; I could have been immortal, I swear. It was irrepressible and ecstatic, and for days afterwards, I was wracked with tremors that I could not understand. There was some latent sense of contamination as well: something dirty or even degrading. Singularly narcotic, viciously physical, it was the kind of pleasure that can break a body in sheer excess of sensation. My skin was crawling, my pulse was beyond measure, my consciousness was in discourse with itself. I was euphoric. I loved it. It hurt.

Sometimes I wonder if I am still thinking straight. If these words seem frightening, then their implications are something else entirely. It was nothing I had not attempted before, but on that night, I performed my actions in such a way that their underlying connotations became clear. I had taken myself a step further towards the kinds of decisions that might destroy this vehicle, this body that keeps me conscious and sometimes does its job too well. Did I think of anyone in those hours: my mother, my brothers, my lovers and friends? Of course not. This impulse towards self-destruction is too strong, too inherent: it is almost instinctive, and requires no thinking at all. It does not feel like a decision. It feels like a way of being. It feels like a thing that I am. Every now and then, I seem to forget the difference.

I know that I used to be better than this. I remember so vividly those early months, melancholic and joyful at the same time, when I was writing and waiting and barely surviving impermanent bouts of madness, which seized my mind and rendered the physical world so vibrant, so stimulating. It used to feel beautiful. As I wandered from city to city, from person to person, I knew a sort of purpose. It was as though my soul was entirely exposed, a lidless eye that never shut: I was feeling everything and utterly undone, but there was earnestness and passion and a spectacular sense of creation. Seeking some truth, something better than what I had always known, I was perpetually on the edge of a precipice, striving towards another feeling.

I remember the late weeks of December, when I found myself laughing and shivering and half-dead with cold, kneeling in the currents of the Atlantic, having never been happier or more at peace. We did not know if my skin or limbs could survive the ordeal, but it hardly seemed to matter. All bared flesh and thin satin slipping off my shoulders, frigid and soaked so throughly that I could feel the salt water in my bones, it felt like I was being born again. I used to know how to hurt myself in ways that were wonderful.

Nowadays, I am afraid that I am starting to do these things simply because I am bored. I am not even cynical, or jaded, or defiant. I am just fucking bored. I forget that I am real. I forget that things can hurt me. I forget that this body can die. There is hardly any love left in me, because I wasted it all on absent fathers and the kinds of people who could not receive it in full, whose own abject states permitted me to engage in masochism and self-indulgence without any kind of reproach. Now I bring myself back to the brink of my own existence, time and time again, and it is not new or exciting anymore. It is hopelessly, almost despicably mundane.

If anyone else is feeling this way, then they sure as hell are not expressing it in the manner that I am. Intentions aside, people cannot seem to reach me. I believe that they are trying, but all I can perceive is some tremendous sense of distance that knows neither mercy nor reason: something insurmountable and maybe even innate. They cannot quite seem to understand what I desire or need, or perhaps am I failing to communicate it, or perhaps they do not know me at all. They react, always, to the wrong signals, and fret when I am not at risk, and remain so hopelessly oblivious when I am suffering without cause. They give me what I do not need, yet engage in a manner that inadvertently denies the things I desire so desperately; the things that, in fairness, they have no way of knowing about, because they are so singular, and so vital, and so strange, that I rarely express them adequately, if at all.

Underneath it all, though, I do not want anything particularly complicated. I think I just want to feel heard. And safe. Maybe even loved. I think I have always wanted that.

Does my writing seem repetitive lately? It certainly ought to. That would be because my entire life is grinding to a halt, utterly lacking in direction, with nothing to make me feel even close to the way I did just half a year ago, outside the gates of my college, when a stranger kissed me on an empty street. But I did not do it for him, not at all; as a matter of fact, he was barely significant. That part of me is changing and dying now, so that the strangest things, once so incredibly affecting, escape my present notice. This very morning, I sat reading alone in a coffee shop that I had not visited in months. It was only once I had arrived, and saw that table in the corner overlooking the city streets, that I remembered the cause of my prolonged absence. We had met here for the first time, one rainy afternoon, before moving to a smoke-filled bar as the sky began to dim. On that night, we each began to learn what it might mean to let the other in.

When all is said and done, and I finally lay this to rest, I will become his memory’s keeper. All of the months we spent  on our efforts towards affection; all of the wonderful nights when we talked well into the morning; all of the times we could not stand each other; all of the pleasure and hopefulness; all of those ways we felt and tried to feel; all of the time I spent writing and wondering until I knew him more completely than I had ever expected to know a living thing—he will forget it all. He will forget this, and it will not be his fault. So I will carry whatever recollections I can bear, and the rest I will abandon as well. No one survives this world without becoming a little colder. It was a difference, perhaps, of more than just the passing years. Maybe it had more to do with what our minds and bodies can sustain before we surrender quietly to the night. He was already far-off and fading, when I was just starting to burn. He was a waning constellation; I was the still-rising sun.

So I think that just leaves me again. I have this body, and nothing but this body: this complex and medicated and many-gendered thing with which I navigate a senseless world. It is a sort of Plathian social absurdity: a sacrifice or strip tease, I suppose, given the contemptible manner in which people occasionally regard me, as an object of physical desire. They do not understand or want to understand how it affects me—how more often than not, I feel inhuman, othered, not alluring but utterly debased. This body is graphically altered, explicitly my own, made to be unmade. It remains in constant motion. It will not succumb. It breaks stillness in the same way that a cry breaks silence: without language or restraint. Whatever I need to communicate or survive, it must be done through this body. If tear it to pieces, I will have nothing left.

I am not, I think, the kind of person who is capable of communicating or even understanding the remote and peculiar way that I feel now. It could be anything, who knows, it could even be the feeling that took my dad away from me. And that sounds damning and inane, but I am trying. Whatever else is my head or in my heart, I am trying, and I am so eager to feel differently again. So remember that, please, in all of your untold desires, and all of the letters that you burn. Recall the fatherless girl, barefoot and dissociated, moving like a sleepwalker and scarcely as sentient. She is not yet finished. She is not ready to submit to anything or anyone at all. She is only waiting for something new to engage her remains.

Miles to go before I sleep, right?

And I intend to see them all through.

Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself.

Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back

The winter is finally ending. Months passed violently, and I failed to notice. My mind inverted, folded over upon itself, sought inexplicably to reopen this history that resists like a wound long since cauterized. I have spent the past six months trying to name a need well beyond the limits of my language: something shrouded in opaque desire and all of the wordless things our bodies used to know.

These days, I am not sure where I stand. When I medicate my exhaustion, the elation feels fractured, like splintered crystal beneath my skin. When I stay clean, my jaw clenches and my hands shake until they can hardly find the laptop keys. When I laugh, the sound weighs strangely upon me: I wear happiness like a vice. When I speak, it is as though I am treading water. I have never been good at that. I write and I smoke and I read and I wonder: I move from one life to the next and I hardly feel anything at all. I tried so intently to exorcise this most recent onset of my dissociated self, but each effort proved futile. Everything stayed the same. I feel like I am running out of time.

I am a thing apart from itself. I have become restless and and undefined. I was sure that such a state would, if nothing else, engender literature. But if I am being honest, I have seldom felt so uninspired. The world is closing in around me once more, and I am left stationary, without interest or intention. I always thought, when I was younger and closer to selfless, that I could exploit the instability of this mind, wander always towards a better kind of life.  But there is no ambition, however limitless, which can assuage the desires of a consciousness such as mine. Once again, I wonder what sacrifices I might be making, without even the slightest knowledge of their consequences.

So much of my recent existence has been a concentrated effort towards apathy, but there were moments when I felt everything, and it hurt. I tried to lose myself in tides of desire and decision, in all of the chaos and virtue that I falsely ascribed to one ancient city and a man with a mind like broken glass. I might have loved him, or something close. He was extraordinary and obsolete: very headstrong, very gentle, very disarrayed. It was as though he existed out of time, occupying only space and memory, disconnected from everything I had ever known. He lent me what he had to offer, for a time, and I was captivated. I remembered what tenderness felt like. I even started to write again.

Whatever else occurred, or has yet to occur between us, he tried. It could never have been anything other than what it is now, but he tried, and that was something beautiful. It took me months to realize what tenacity and care must have gone into those efforts to know and recall me in a world he could barely survive. I wish that we had found each other in some different place and time, in some consecrated reality wherein I could still love, and he could still remember, and the past did not weigh like a nightmare upon our minds. But it never really ended: even now we seem drawn inexorably towards our own undoing, moving further together into the madness that has consumed us for half a year. It as if neither one can disassociate from the other: and whether our ongoing state is caused by the rare meeting of two well-matched countenances, or by a mere fear of returning to our respective states of solitude, it is impossible to say. But I still feel him in my veins, and so maybe, somewhere, we linger on. I could write our eulogy for years to come.

There were other objects of fascination, of course. There always inevitably will be, and I have been so lucky in so many ways. I encountered a woman more passionate and more pure than I would ever have believed possible, and by whose hands, in our narcotized first joining, I experienced an ecstasy that moved me almost past endurance. I found a man who spoke my name like it mattered and turned phrases in my tired mind. I met living things whose bodies transcended all insufficient categorization, and momentary lovers who knew no gender at all. Those nights were radiant in their own strange way, and the mornings felt insouciant and sanguine. And so there were instances of respite this winter. There were moments of invaluable connection.

Mostly, though, there was a tremendous sense of absence: a chasm of negative space that carved its way through weeks and months of my existence. It made me feel disconnected. It horrified me. I wanted so badly to be saved from that isolation. I often still do. I seem to spend half of my life in a state of disavowal, trying to escape the knowledge that I am alone, and that it scares me. I am so very reluctant to admit how self-reliant I must become. I want to believe that there is still some person, or some place, or some purpose, that might sustain me indefinitely, might eradicate this miserable need to consume, and so satiate, myself.

Briefly, and by sheer virtue of coincidence, I found the source of my imperfect solace. As ever, I was too turned in upon myself to recognize the value it held, and so it never felt beautiful until I knew that I might lose it. Then, of course, every touch registered with an uncommon clarity, glancing and resonating until I was tethered to some vague reality by every instance of contact between our skin. We spent one final night together, endeavoring to keep something worthwhile alive, and I remained awake well into the dawn, not moving, not speaking, just holding his sleeping form so close that I could feel each breath he drew.

For an instant, I nearly knew him: the angular profile, the piercings in the ears, the quick, unconscious movements when he shifted in his sleep. My arms around him, one of my hands gripped in one of his—he held it so tightly, even as he slept—I raised myself on one exhausted elbow and traced, with the edges of my outstretched fingers, this extraordinary and living thing that had accompanied me so steadfastly through my efforts to revive this ruined body. I could feel the muscles and bones and capillaries beneath the flesh, and I wondered if he had already faded beyond my recollection. I wondered how or why that might have come to be. I wondered, as I so often do, how the hell I became this way: so callous and self-contradicting, too withdrawn to remedy my own isolation, and too afraid to care. The morning came like an indictment. I never wanted to leave that room.

But when I awoke, and he was gone, I felt nothing at all. I found my feet, I dressed myself, I smoothed out the imprint of my form from his sheets. I took every trace of myself and I walked out the door.

The act of losing something is seldom determined by physical presence. We engage with loss, in its purest form, when we can no longer sustain the illusion of vitality: when we accept, without question, that an ending of sorts has begun. I hope I did the right thing—truly, I do. I hope I hurt fewer people this time around. I do not want to believe that this was without meaning or value. I like to think its roots were deeper, more singular, like the last words he said on the first night I knew him, and the stories we told in the darkness thereafter. But I also think that I can cope with it having been beautiful, fast, and strange. What other choice do I have? I will never really understand how or why these things come to end. I cannot fathom what I am feeling: but I am feeling. And that, at least, is something.

I do not want to be exhausting, unpredictable, volatile, extreme. I want to be something closer to normal. I want to be amiable and easy and at peace. But I also want to burn. I want to consume and linger on forever. I want to live with such spectacular finesse that if the world were to end in fire, you would know by whose hand it fell. It is mad, but not complicated: I want to be more than this body. I want to relinquish its past and its pain. I cannot remain tethered to a thing that bleeds so easily.

I like to think that I was born with chaos in my soul, a descendent of all of the witches that the world could not find fire to burn. Maybe that is why my body turns feral, why my sanity slips into paradigms of unreality and converses there with itself. I like to think that I am as potent as she was, my fallen companion and second self, before she took unspeakable measures and lost her beautiful mind. She reminded me of all the astonishing and terrible ways to feel like a living thing, and then she left me with nothing at all.

But I am more and less than she is: I could not survive my own inclinations, and so the winter reduced me to madness once more. I was incomplete and isolated and always wishing to be less so: I was working and using and striving to feel closer to whole. But the world was harsh, the sun was bright, and the people were terrifying and desirable. So I had to keep moving. I always have to keep moving.

I went to a place where the streets seemed less foreboding, with half a pack of cigarettes and two people I love. I thought that the anonymity of a new city might heal me. I tried, and perhaps it helped. At any rate, I started to breathe again. I did not retreat from each impending day. For the first time in months, I started to see once more in those currents of pleasure and even elation that used to come so naturally to me. I tried to view that singular city in all of its vibrancy and motion, tried to understand what one wild man must have felt, wandering the fields of Provence in his suffering state, when the universe became clear to him in paradigms of ecstasy. I  found clairvoyance in silent canals and the lights that fell upon their waters: in alabaster mornings and our smooth, indifferent souls.

In smoke-filled shops I paid for respite, using burnished foreign coins like the ones my father kept in the shallow dish by his black office desk—my father, who travelled to faraway places, and who I loved more than my life, myself. Sometimes I still adore you, my first companion and finest muse: but where have you wandered to now?

I have said it all before, but I love without direction or purpose. And if it seems careless, or casual, or inane, that is only because I strive too intently for neutrality. I fear the sensation of being loved and left. I am obscenely well versed in impermanence and untruths.

But once again, in spite of my own best efforts, something in my subconscious stirs. It is roused and vaguely searching, enraptured by a desire for that of which it is too wary to ascribe any semblance of language or form. This vague potentiality is nothing new, nothing peculiar; it is one of the earliest memories of those strange and formative weeks when I began a different life. Beneath the surface, like a dream upon waking, or the narcotized images that linger half-forgotten in my sober mind, he is never really present and he is never fully gone. I have felt this way since the very start. This is the figure upon which my clandestine desires took their earliest and most inexplicable forms. And my sentience is nothing if not resilient,  if not hopeful: at the faintest indication of a promise, I am ready to try again. And yet I cannot bring myself to admit how close to real this might become.

Where did you sleep last night?

In my own misuse of the language that I love, I will begin once more. Another inane distraction, maybe even a newfound muse. It feels strange and wild and half-contrived, like the time I found a Polaroid of six-year-old me with my father, and tore it apart layer by layer until the tar bled like onyx from the marred remains. I sought to ruin the source of that image, to reckon with acts of destruction that lack a name. These impulses may lead me nowhere at all; even so, they never really seem to fade.

This is a violent fucking world—never let anyone tell you otherwise. But I have spent too long pretending that there will ever be any sanctuary other than that which I provide for myself. I have wasted years trying to justify my existence with the promise of some better place. I no longer wish to know the futility of this feeling. Someone told me once that my writing will always be too abstract for anyone to ever really read it. But I am ready to speak, for once, as plainly as I can. Maybe this will make the difference. Maybe someone will hear me now.

So be honest. Be direct. Be brief. Is this beautiful yet?

I drink coffee. I smoke cigarettes. I don’t fucking care anymore. Is this beautiful yet?

I am defiant. I am surviving. I want to die every now and again. Is this beautiful yet?

Don’t breathe too deeply, or you will begin to feel it hurting. Don’t remember too fondly, or you will forget to live at all. Don’t stay too long, or you’ll remember why you loved her in the first place. Lose yourself in intricate phrasings, intemperate and unwise—fuck, I’m doing it again. I’m writing in a way that will bring me closer to no one at all.

Be honest. Be direct. Be brief. Don’t apologize. Don’t think. Don’t need things that people can’t give you.

Desire shamelessly. Engage recklessly. Love absurdly. It is the only thing worth living for—so let yourself feel this way again, and again, and again.

Is this beautiful yet?

Am I beautiful yet?

Or am I merely something new?

It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.

E.B. White, The Ring of Time

Frigid currents of ink move in and around me: I lie still. Back arched, skin shivering pale, my eyes trace breathless patterns across a ceiling of mirrors. Some nights are easier than others. In shades of masochism, I disallow pleasure: I am not in pain, not exactly, but nearing it. My mind, like my body, resists its own desires—it is the final refuge of a form that has been wounded over and over again.

I wish that I had been found some years ago, before my soul was all scar tissue and rust: the debris of celestial bodies long past their time. How low and sorrowful, that one should only ever know the fading fires of their glory and their lust. How fragile and peculiar, that anyone could care for a thing so lost.

But then I feel my own self move: the skin and warmth, the vulnerability and vanity. Trauma bleeds out and away from whatever I am, as silver idioms fall from my mouth like fragments of the moon. In the amber haze of my own endurance, gentle hands revive the parts of me that have not yet been mutilated beyond repair: the mournful bones that murmur with sensation, the folds of skin still dusted with fading starlight. I awake bearing bruises that span this form like constellations, whispering nebulous patterns across my skin. The pleasure is so simple, so profound: to allow someone to love this tainted frame, to feel affection on its surface even when I cannot respond in full, is beautiful in its own right. Withdrawn and wretched though I may have become, my flesh remains a sanctuary upon which tenderness is still possible.

Enticed by the presence of each new fascination, I have lived these weeks within the subtle variations of music changing key. This is not a cosmic shift in circumstance, not the onset of a lasting passion, not the tremendous recalibration that accompanies a catastrophe or a muse. It is, in fact, almost poignant in its subtlety. I am affected, intrigued, even burning softly—but this will not destroy me. And how futile, how tedious that can feel.

But is it possible, perhaps, that I am healing? That maybe this is a different way of feeling and creating, dissociated entirely from the madness of the one who nearly drove me from my mind? The pain of that ending was damning, even for me: we were wasting my final cigarette on a poorly lit street corner when, without warning or provocation, my memory engaged at last with the full ramifications of my spent time. I watched the dispersion of ash across his fingernails, and desired suddenly to shake him, to scream, Meet my eyes. Say my name. There’s nothing! You’re empty, you’re empty—

And how was he to have appeased me, being so directionless, so undone? The answer emerges in its own futility: I never wanted to be appeased. I wanted to thrill him, to hurt him, to make him feel anything at all. When we made love, I wanted to tear him apart and work my way inside of him, to wrest something of value from that wasted mind. I wanted to undo each vertebral ridge, lace my fingers through the notches in his spine; I wanted to pull the lovely skin away and expose a labyrinth of bone. I wanted to dissemble him, that poor desperate thing, and breathe some sort of life into whatever remained. I wanted to punish and save him: I wanted to play God. Perhaps I would rather know my own value than ever love like that again.

But then, maybe that is not the whole truth of it. Maybe it was simpler and less cruel. Maybe I really did recognize something of myself in that gentle, disarrayed countenance. Maybe I just wanted to love something—to love anything at all.

When he passes I still feel him, still smell him; my entire body still reacts. He floods me like an opportunity wasted, but this time I am not at fault. I cannot love something half-alive; even at my strongest, I never could have. My mind reacts against that peril, recoils from the decisions that my mother made before me. I have to be better, and stronger, and closer to blameless—and if such severance mandates apathy, then may I never feel again.

But in the margins of my lucidity, his image haunts me still. Not even a week ago, I was reminded of this, as I lay in the arms of the woman who had shared my bed through the night. It was my waking mind that dreamt of him, and that was the most frightening of all. But it was dreaming all the same, and no less for my sentient state; I was conscious but not present, if you understand. And he was walking down empty streets drenched in rain and silence, his hands in his pockets, younger and stronger and unmarred by circumstance. I knew at once that he must have died to have been rendered so perfect, so complete. There was nothing left to be done, so we simply spoke on: and there were no secrets to draw back from, no deficiency in either of our minds. I felt no pain and his eyes seemed like the morning to me once more.

But fortitude is an exercise in self-denial. So I left the sleeping girl where she lay, her dark hair strewn about her shoulders, her raised scars gleaming faintly in the half-light. Kneeling beside the cluttered bedroom table, I cast myself again into that cold, clean high to which I have become so partial: the lucid currents that flood my veins like shards of glass and crystal, setting my teeth on edge, making me wish to set my past on fire and walk away without a word. But a history such as mine does not burn easily; it burns like flesh, and festers. With each new, self-inflicted horror, I remember that it never really fades.

Eight months ago, in late summer, the dawn sky was flooded with a gradient of muted tones. I was sharing cheap vodka, stale cigarettes, and half-remembered confessions with a young man I had met only hours previously. In the haze of that soon-to-be morning, I knew him as well as I have ever known another living being. I cannot recall what fear or desire I must have expressed, in the midst of those shared ruminations, but a response fell from his mouth with such simple conviction that I will remember each word for the rest of my life—

“You can’t seem to be anything other than what you are—you’re so you—and it’s funny, and it’s admirable, and it’s sad, and people are going to put you on a stage because they won’t know what else to do with you. And you’re going to have to be strong because of that.”

In the half-year that followed, I hardly knew what to make of so strange an assertion. After all, my own desires had always been so simple: to write, to speak, to not hurt. But when people mistake survival for performance, they judge it as such—that is only to be expected. And childhood was wasted on me, even before it went so wrong: I was always melancholic, always peculiar. People noticed, though I wish to God they never had. They made me feel different. I never wanted to feel different.

I want to be clear—I am not trying to martyr myself. My methods of endurance are flawed, to say the very least, and I am far from inculpable. But I am not performing. I never have been. I tried to be better, exhausted my sanity on efforts towards the normalcy that I was sure would bring acceptance. And for my part, I found it degrading. How could I even begin to forget what I am? Who would ever let me?

I have loved recklessly. I have bled with deliberation. I have felt my entire form buckle below the weight of the memories I cannot keep at bay. I have lied and grown listless: I have tried to die time and time again. Shall I go on—recall the hands on the back of my neck, the profane helplessness of my shame? Whatever this mind has done to me, whatever it is doing, it provided solace when nothing else would. Were I anything other than what I am, then I would be nothing at all. So I will not suffer to be made a spectacle of, will not look on as my survival is cheapened to a dirty joke. I imagine that even the most cynical among you can forgive me for that.

In the early months of winter, I wished to know what it felt like to heal. I sought a long-awaited beginning, and of course I did not find that: I never really expected to. But in the tranquility of a certain sunlit room, I found something close, and it was more than I could have hoped for. I loved this time so effortlessly and entirely: it was sweet, and it was clairvoyant, and it should not have ended so soon. Truly, I did not want it to. I still do not want it to. I wish I could have stayed just a little while longer in the sanctuary of those four walls, where I was desired and unafraid.

But there is no place for me there anymore, because the waking world intervened. It turned that sanctuary into just another facet of my perverse effort towards self-portraiture, condemned to fade with the chemical tinges of winter. I thought that I could trust the pleasure I derived, when the night fell softly and we moved into it as one, but now even the gentlest of these engagements recall nightmares of my abandonment. No two living beings can exist indefinitely, together and untouched; and so once again, I am watching something die, something that I cared for, and I am powerless to save it.

I cannot sustain tender, or gentle, or vulnerable things. I am too violent, too defective. I burn with spectacular precision, but I cannot live simply or decently. I am not getting older: just growing weary of watching the same cycles take newer forms. The sheer repetition, elation followed by despondency, hardly hurts at all anymore. I know that something left my life, but I do not understand when or why. So maybe I truly am deficient, maybe I always was. I am passionate but infertile, and when things fall apart, I cannot stop them. In fact, I often wonder if I deconstruct them myself. And what does it matter anyways, this time around? This is not new to me: it will never be new to anyone whose countenance is desirable only in its abstraction. Fissures appear, the glamour fades. I have lost beautiful things before now, and I will lose this too.

I am everyone and no one, always running, always remembering, always trying so hard not to want to die anymore. I have to keep moving: I cannot ever stop. My Tiresian soul carves patterns in the fabric of the world, shapes the currents of negative space wherein my consciousness sears with its own differentiation. Vanity, self-loathing, and fascination imbue all of the people that I am or have been—the withdrawn woman with shorn hair and faraway eyes, retreating always towards an empty doorframe; the reverential lover of those bright and shining forms, wielding elation like a knife’s edge and leaving her image in their skin; the jaded user who medicates each memory, drowning her indifferent soul in chemical tides; the restless adolescent with open wounds and a mind like a broken mirror; the cynical young man smoking cigarettes on London streets; the debased artist closer to laughter than confession; the radical dreaming of a different world; the lost little girl who still cannot quite understand where her father has gone, or why.

I have spent so much of my own existence wistfully mimicking tenderness, affection, vulnerability, gratitude. I socially perform paradigms of loving when I am often too tired to feel anything at all. And yet, I am not fully spent, because there have always been those who will not lose or leave me. They keep me here when nothing can; they call me by name when I fall beyond language, and so call me back to myself. When I am withdrawn or withdrawing, they lie patiently by my side, trusting me to resurrect myself again and again, knowing that I am doing everything that I can to make my way back to them. Perhaps this is one of those times; perhaps I have merely wandered too far from those who know me, in the mists of my somnambulist state. But I am awake now, I can feel it—and I will find them again. I will find them.

My desperation ebbs like a pulse. I used to be so much stronger, but I am tired now: I am tired, I am tired, and I wish to feel nothing at all. All I want anymore is to love, to be loved, to engage. I want to be like a child again, immersed in that sense of abandon that I only achieve when that thing that lies dead or dying in my mind is rekindled, and breathes inside of me. I want to believe that I can care and be cared for, that I am known and valued, that I do not have to be afraid. I harbor an unspoken desire to be unnoticed and overlooked: to harm no one and eventually fade away. It is the yearning of the child I was never allowed to be: to keep so quiet that no one can never find me. But my nostalgia is futile, and I mourn for a past that is not mine. I am growing so weary of solitude and self-protection. I am ready to feel some other way.

My mind is tangled in bloodstains and bed sheets: in the refuge of a nameless language and the longings of a body altered long past recognition. Even after all of these years, there are parts of me that are not getting better. This is not a meditation: it is a confessional verse. Whatever I may write or say, always remember that people like me were never meant to survive.

So what in the world does it mean for us when we do?

I knew a girl in childhood who, when I was still young enough to believe in my father, was already infected with the history of this world. In the final conversation we shared, as we lay in the afternoon light, our silence was flooded with formless expression: the ever-present thoughts to which we never gave a name.

I am with you. I love you. More than my life, and always, always—

Her head fell sighing back upon the white fabric, among the drops of blood that framed her mouth like garnets, beautiful and clean. Gazing at me, one unclenched hand resting by her face, she placed her wrist beneath my fingertips, and let her eyelids fall. Then I could feel everything she was, running like memory through those ephemeral veins, and I knew the last dream of my childhood: to never love again.

There will be time to murder and create.

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I found you in the edges of some long-forgotten calamity, in the respite of my solitude, in the hunting call of winter. I still remember the night you came into my life; you had shadows under your eyes and a voice like tinted glass. I had been cynical and listless and tired as all hell, and you made me feel new, like the morning. But I was reckless, when I should have been wary. I cared deeply, when I should have felt nothing at all. That will be the tragedy to destroy our aimless days: what I mistook for love was nothing more than the reflection of a formless vanity, an irredeemable exercise in the practice of self-gratification. Our tenderness dims now into a delirium of unfinished thoughts and half-remembered sentiments. In the mournful present of this fading exaltation, I have nothing left to give.

Are you reluctant now to live like this, to descend further into the chaos of a liminal existence at my side? I know a rapid, caustic love that breathes away beneath my reason, tasting faintly of an abandonment that I may never exorcise. It festers and compels my form, like a richness in the soil: can you feel this darkness, when you move in me? Is it why you draw back, then closer, imitating tenderness, when we both desire to tear skin back with gleaming teeth and bare our subtle bones? What madness have you kindled in the refuge of my intrigue, and why you, why now? You know I never wanted this—so forgive me, Eurydice, if I cannot meet your gaze.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stele. Witness your expulsion from my fury and form: your normalcy, your mortality, all the strange and sensual yearnings of the body you destroy, your own. You were a long-term causality, you were a slowly unwinding catastrophe. I exhale your savage radiance like a constellation; oh, you feral thing.

I will be there when the floods roll back, when celestial light rains down in landslides and sanctifies this living earth in tides of midday fire. On the shorelines of Tragedy, that Janus-faced collapsing of time, I will remain and recall this lost potentiality, the stillborn adoration that died before taking form. As it waned, it left me barren, and neither the earth nor I can now sustain what our ravaged countenances crave. This, of all inane things, is my inherent sin: I could not keep her, or my memories, or this love alive. I am not fertile, I am not whole. My empathy is not a virtue, but a willful tendency towards self-mutilation. I am deficient. I am empty. I allow things to die.

In the volatile fervor of a physical existence, allegory invariably falls short; you and I evoke a wasteland that has yet to come into being. Desecrate or find me there, in the chemical currents of that which could consume you, for we have destroyed each other as surely as we have destroyed ourselves. In what light remains, I glimpse her preternatural form: that strange, seraphic figure, lamenting and exalting as the mutilated world moves silently towards decay. I recall her from childhood, in reluctant fingers turning the pages of my mother’s Bible, Isaiah 14:12—And how you have fallen from heaven, morning star, child of the dawn! In the narcotic-dimmed haze of my first dying, I knew the violence in those eyes, the hair cropped short in locks of silver, the saturnine wings unfolding from the notches in her spine. Alone now, she unwillingly endures; and the world will suffer the torment of looking upon her, somnambulist and wretched thing, wandering that desolation in search of a better self. Even you will know then, for all your pride and carelessness, how I came to live like this.

Every woman was born to wrest stars from their galaxies, to grapple with the voiceless language that floods the ruptures of physical sensation, when ecstasy moves through the body’s breathing core, and the world speaks to itself in paradigms of music. I more than most, in the still-living darkness of my sanity and soul, have been birthed for this purpose. I occupy that liminal positionality between the tangible and the untrue, my memory colored by the fantasies and phobias of a thousand other minds. A sentient lucidity moves through my androgyny and my desires, carving the space for a nameless gender.

Two years ago, the waking spring told different stories of this same conscience. Even now, I cannot write or speak plainly of that time: it is too shameful, too obscene. When I lost her, that second self, I lost all will to suffer on. I thought that this mind, and all that it is capable of, would die there, on some shit couch, in some shit apartment, and I simply did not care. But when the fourth morning dawned, its pale light found me upright, enduring, alive. I had waited for my grief to end, and it had not. Do not mistake me: this was not an epiphany, not a rebirth. It was resignation to living another day. It was, in some ways, unforgivable surrender. I was too dead even to die.

So I turned from what was left of it, that life I used to love: I stopped striving for pleasure and learned to appreciate feeling anything at all. It was then, on the streets of London, that I found her. She stood before me, grinning wryly in the shadow of the city, and I experienced a sensation that I could never hope to name—something fierce, like defiance, and something rapturous, like joy. I knew then what I should have known all along: that no trivial circumstance of the social world, no meaningless extent of its sanctimony or its cruelty, could have undone so extraordinary a mind. How arrogant I had been, how misguided, to imagine that I alone could crawl from a self-appointed grave. Denied the tenderness and the solace that I owed her, she had nevertheless endured. I had betrayed her utterly, I had failed her unforgivably; and still she had come back to me, and she was altered, but alive.

We spent six hours in a dimly lit bar. Soporific elation whispered up and down my form, and in the revenant consequences of a shared history of self-destruction, we met one another once more. A part of us had died with bygone days: we both felt this irrevocable absence, both mourned for that which we could not change. But we spoke on in spite of this, exchanging admissions of pleasure and penance; we resurrected the world of our collective past, and all of the memories, sweet and unspeakable, which we had so wrongly believed would be better off forgotten. Until my mind fails me entirely, and perhaps even then, I will remember that night. She seemed to be more than human and far from divine; not angelic, of course, for she had always been too irreverent for such fragile categorization, but savage, sardonic, extraordinary. As the light threw shadows across her face, I could feel, like ink and cyanide, the chiaroscuro of this beautiful creature: and how natural it was, how fitting, to be one with her again. How easily I knew her mind—after all, it was mine.

The bus was silent and midnight had long since passed. From one sleeping city to the next, I rode with leaden eyelids and an opiate soul. The young man sitting behind me answered a ringing phone, and received, as I could perceive it, the news of a woman’s death. He had loved her, at some time and in some way: I could it hear it in the way his voice broke, running like a wrist across the edge of each shattered word. That man bled as he spoke, and I watched his life change before my clouded eyes. In my narcotized state, I felt his sobs move like ocean currents through my mind. Compelled to preserve the strangeness and sorrow of the scene, I made as though to write, but could form only a single phrase, which echoed incessantly as I lapsed in and out of consciousness—I bear witness. I bear witness.

I was a voyeur to tragedy, in that night torn mad with a thousand turns of circumstance; and although some secret part of me felt deeply for him, it was more than I could communicate or understand. So it was her that I ultimately thought of, the catastrophe that almost was, flooding my exhausted memory in the garlands of white roses that framed her sightless eyes. Foremost among my racing thoughts was the question so simple and so very strange—how can a body die? And why couldn’t ours, when we wanted them to?

Sometimes I wonder at my own inane existence. Would I be another Lazarus, incomparably versed in the art of impermanent demise? I catch my reflection in each window that I pass: lithe and emaciated in my Orphean state, I can see the subtle movement of each bone beneath my skin. Every time I lose myself in these bouts of paranoia, someone inevitably offers mundane consolation: You will survive this. But perhaps I do not want to survive. I have been surviving all my life. Perhaps I am ready for something else, anything else, something more than survival. After all of these years, I am nourishing myself still.

So if ever I was thoughtless, or distant, or withdrawn, please know that I never chose to be. I will always remember you fondly—those nights of shared cigarettes and unending conversations, your unconscious earnestness and quickness to laugh, how strange and sweet it felt to finally kiss you on the corner of that silent street. My mind retreats often to half-imagined visions of the history we have shared: I can still recall those inimitable rushes of fondness and fascination that flooded this body on clandestine evenings, as I knelt among the rattlesnakes that fell around your feet.

But in some ways you are so very like me; you are suffering, you are not whole. On a bridge above the nighttime currents of the Thames, for a handful of five-pound notes and a few quiet words, you gave me consecration in its chemical form: that folded piece of paper, so small and nondescript, that would undo us both in time. You ran your hands through my shaved hair, along the lines of dark ink that moved across my skin like the waters below us, and I became exquisitely aware of my own living form: shorn and scarred and still so beautiful. In some ways, I think I always knew you. I think you have always wanted to be known.

But I cannot remain in stasis any longer; I cannot cheapen my existence, cannot limit the potential of this body and its longings. Just the other evening, I came to learn the language of yet another form that was not yours, watching and loving the helplessness of his pleasure as I manifested quiet, coiled desires upon his skin. I made myself alive again in each rapid breath he drew, in the mouth that moved beneath the tips of my fingers, in the rose-damp parting of my thighs. Too often, we define such acts in terms of penetration, but this is the fallacy of a misinformed world. The experience is one of envelopment, of consumption: not an entering, but a taking in. With violent affection, I took him apart with my teeth, decided to suffer so that I might heal—and how wonderful it was, to feel those muscles move again. As the sun began to rise, I lay entwined in his limbs and waited for the morning. A cold light fell across the bruises on his neck, running down over the lovely shoulders, where my mouth had left impressions in the skin.

This is how it always begins. I have a beautiful, damning habit of loving many people—loving them deeply, ardently, differently, and all at once. Even now, I have not forgotten you. There are still so many ways in which I wish to know you, so many questions I never thought to ask. Are you lonely in the winter? Are you afraid to die? Perhaps, in time, you will overcome what has happened to you, and awake on some far-off morning to find that you are whole and strong and ready to try again. And if this should come to pass, then I hope you will return to me, no matter the place or time. You have suffered enough, my love, and so have I; but this existence is cyclical, and I am never hard to find. So if you ever heal, come back to me. Perhaps I will still be waiting.

Oh, indifferent soul, how I could have loved you. Maybe there is still reason to try. Maybe this doubt will fade with the winter. Maybe you have yet the time and tenderness to unearth the obscured, lovely parts of me, to make me clean again.

But it is too late, I am afraid. I am not blameless anymore. I do not have ambitions. I do not have ideals. I live for those evenings of rushing pleasure, when this body is roused like a rainstorm and I feel real again. I am moving towards a willful apathy, so that when the time comes I might look readily upon the falling world. It is better this way. So allow me to take leave of this, to live indifferently on—and until the night comes howling, may I never write of you again.