The obscure moon lighting an obscure world…
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be.

Wallace Stevens, The Motive for Metaphor

I am sitting on my bedroom floor with a half-lit cigarette and a pair of shaking hands, listening to childhood records and writing about the person I used to be. Someone shouts outside my window: I flinch, then cower. My fingers grope and probe at my own cringing spine. The ridges snarl like kerosene beneath my touch. My body is turning feral again, I can feel it–but I resist. This is what the pills are for, the little communion tablets, white as narcissi, the ones that tear me to seizing pieces when I neglect to take them. This how I live now; forgetting, sometimes, that I am alive.

Too many times this summer, I awoke in tides of fresh despair; when the chemicals consumed my senses, and my own mother’s name evaded me; when she seized me by the wrist, by those awful yawning sores, and asked me why? Even recently, I spent hours inconsolable, solitary in bed, for my father had forgotten my birthday. I am not exactly living a satisfactory life. I am aware of that. But who is to blame, really? When I wandered away from my history of toxins and unrest, the cradle of my childhood burned all away, and I found myself here, like this. Alone.

I was dead in the beginning.
I was not ready to live at all.
I was irreverent.
I was invalid.
I was impaled upon the world.

I thought the best way to live was to care for people, to love them in any way that I could offer. Such naïveté was, perhaps, my earliest mistake. On the eighth night of October, I woke up from three months of uncertain misery, felt that anger and life inside of me at last, took to task the person who denied me the respect that I was owed, who egotistically reimagined my trauma as a love for him that I never felt. And it hurt, it seared like few things I have ever felt, to see him before me, remorseless, and understanding that nothing could ever make things right again, not ever, and wondering how two people could share so much and change so entirely, and marveling that any man could fail to care even faintly, and knowing with such certainty that I would relive that moment in my nightmares and my dissociations and my long dark moments for so many years to come. I hate this feeling, I hate having to know such a flat, hard, faceless anger. To see how much time I wasted being so certain of my own lack of worth. I accused him of these sins directly, demonstrated his own fraudulence, marked every score on my skin where his arrogance had bled me out. He asked, with false repentance, what he could do to make it better. I told him never to look at me again.

I might never recover from the shock and the repulsion of that, his reimagining of my illness as some signifier of his own desirability. The sheer presumption, the complete delusion, the utter lack of care it must have taken to know me for six months and never have learned to know me at all. But that is not my albatross, not anymore. I will not cower at the presence any longer, nor retreat within a diazepam-laced haze as the daylight drips away. This city is mine now. You will know it when they scream my name in the winding streets, the voices imploring the waning pallor of moon. My name is gouged into the skin of this world, where stars shriek and bones plummet burning from the sky; wherever I walk, I feel it in the currents of the air.

You say that I’m not trying, but I am, I am. I spent a whole summer trying. I am trying, my god am I trying, and every day is easier and more difficult than the last. You say I can come home if I want to, when I want to, but I can’t, I cannot, for that home isn’t mine. You say let it go, your father left and what can you do about it now, and why punish myself for his crimes, but I don’t know, I’ve never known. I simply have to live this out. It’s not that I’m ready. It’s just that it’s time.

So I implore this place to be more gentle, this time around. It is a terrible thing, to be so exposed. To walk like an ingrate, my ribcage cracked and my heart flung open towards the unknowing world; to be whatever the hell it is that I am, and always wondering whether everyone else might prefer if I were to be nothing at all. Redemancy is a virtue that I have never known.

So let there be no more memories. No more sobs when you see the mangled skin of my arms. No more static silence. No more bandages and rust-red stains. I have drawn my last blood. It is finished. It is done.

I have vowed this all before. I said I would come back, and with scarcely a memory of the health I once held, I have. Know this now: I will always come back to you. I’ve never been less certain of what a year might hold. But let it come. Maybe this time I will not cry each night, when the bedsheets cling cold to my skin, and I am alone, and afraid of it. Just let it come. I know what I am, and I’m learning to live with it. So let it come. Let it come. Let it come.