I exist in two places,
Here and where you are.

Margaret Atwood, Corpse Song

It was a Thursday. I am almost certain of that. I was thinking about wars. They are everywhere, they were on my television set today. I struggled to engage, to endure the blank truths of the living world, but apathy dripped like static down the screen. I tried to care all the same. I want you to know that I tried.

And I missed you–I want you to know that, too. I felt your absence like a stillborn limb. That day, the white rooms were as quiet as light on water, and I missed you. The astral core of an iris contracted, and I missed you. The birds recited some babel-tongue song, and I missed you. The ocean gnawed at a cliff’s edge, and I missed you. The fireworks bloomed and I missed you. My brother smiled and I missed you. It was raining and I missed you.

I have always loved the shadows in my mind. But you, all of you, recoil: you draw back from the very mention of them. How can you hate such vivid parts of me? They are not always trying to kill me off. They can be so wonderful–you would not understand. It is hypocrisy, I think. You see these things hurt me. You feel that they should not. You protest their harrowing presence, and so hold the harbingers of my insanity to a higher standard than your own compromised selves. Stop trying to decide what to make of this flesh, this me. You know, in your heart of hearts, that it is not possible. Look closely at what I am.

Just the other evening, after yet another trying session, my senses became confused. They bit like frost and boiled with their own incoherence. So I wrote. I wrote about everything. I wrote about bed sheets, and their velvet felt lilac. I wrote about a girl I knew, and heard a softness like rosewater. I wrote about the piano beneath your window, and felt the winter I spent with you in gradients of E minor. I wrote about sex and it tasted silver. But when I tried to write about myself, about everything that happened this spring, I could only hear the shape of my bruises. So I stopped. I had to stop. It hurt too much to go on.

How can I learn what I am, when what I am is all that I ever thought I knew? There is still so much left to understand. What makes me feel like this? Why do some people stay? I sure as hell never planned to.

I am immersed in the caustic Atlantic: its eerie green-blues curl in toxic, foam-tinged tongues of brine. My consciousness drifts between two broken nations, seeking solace in both, finding respite in neither. I am disparate; separated, as they are, by ringing chasms of salt water and wind. There is not even the faintest hope of a homecoming for me. But sometimes it is all right to be here, in this place, where I am restless, reverential, half-haunted with the memories of some strange other life. 

Exhausted, always, by this mind that flips like a tarot card, I watch the tortured dusk of the past take form. I feel you emerge, a chameleon: lips curled, air-eating. Your stomach glows the burnt-gold of embers that fracture under your skin. I cannot recall my own father’s smile, and yet I remember, with perfect clarity, the way your hands moved when you rolled cigarettes on the streets outside of a bookstore café. Your joints unfolding like poetry, the lightness when you laughed, the invaluable instances of tenderness, our apologies, my convictions, your entropy and bright, bright eyes. I know how these things felt, but I am already forgetting your voice. What does it matter, anyways, if I loved you at the end? Contention, contentment, condemnation, contempt: now I just want to drive my teeth into your throat and taste the warm-as-salt miracle of your skin once more. And I want you to want me to.

All of that time I spent fear-filled, striving to achieve some fiction of normalcy: those were the moments that I could have spent loving you. I am sorry for not knowing that. I am sorry for knowing it now. I am sorry that you loved a virus. I am sorry that I let you. But sometimes I think that I should hold your mind to the fire: extract a confession, a catharsis, a promise, a penance, from the tongue that I once held like communion between my teeth. Are you blameless? How can you be? I was dying, did you fail to notice? Sometimes, when I am scared or sick or sleepless, I ask myself, wretchedly, if perhaps you preferred not to look. For if you had, you would have seen me, you would have seen how unhappy I was. Deep in the innermost core of me, I suspect that you were too clever for your oversight to have been a mere carelessness.

But how can I ask you to suffer this: how can I want you to know, for any reason at all, what it feels like when the doctors cut into me? I could not even bring myself to make you look. I never wanted you to see what was happening to me. And how can I hate you, for not engaging, not trying to save me, when I would only have consumed each earnest effort, and become some parasitic thing: leech-like, useless, hateful even to myself? But look at me, really look. It is safe to look now–for I am irreverent, and I am far away, and you could not help me if you tried.

It is my fault too, you know. After all, I let it grow inside of me. Childless mother, nightmare that I am, I should never have tended to it. I should never have made it love me. And I never would have, not ever, had I known that I was to love you. I still remember that morning: the sky was clouded, shrouded in white. White like the narcissi, white as blindness: the flames licked at my wrist until I was cleaner than snow. But why did I hate myself so? Maybe some part of me knew. I wish that I had murdered it then, this thing that now murders me.

You never ceased to confound me, with your lovely brown eyes and your arresting phrases and your aimless wants and your steadfast ways. But you loved what I wrote, what I am. I should have held fast to that.

So what does it matter, really? You are not as she was: she had a a way of making me want her, of wresting form and expression from my reluctant heart until, wary though it had become, I felt willfully and ecstatically, imbued with a passionate vulnerability that all but silenced my astounded soul. And when she seared and scalded me, I knew her too well to draw back. I understood quite clearly what I had to do. It was not my love she needed. It was my language. And that was fine. I have enough words left to give, I think. I can barely face each day upon waking, but I could write for a lover like that until the night waxed sanguine and the stars fell burning from the sky. I could do it for you, as well. Do you want me to? Have you ever? Have you always? It could be both or neither. How very sightless I have become.

It matters not at all. This endeavor bears no purpose. This is a simple meditation on distance, on loneliness, on longing. Who is to blame for what I am? The soles of my feet are harder than cypress, and my soul is a diamond, corrupted by a spectatorial gaze. I enter the world like a lidless iris: a naked pupil, incorrigible and obscene. Drink, then, the pure blind blankness of my exposure. I am utterly lacking, I am as faceless as the moon. The eye, this eye, it is me: I am and am. So love what I forgot to be, this relentless, searching self.

Someday my mind will return to me–and I, my love, to you.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is.

W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

Precious little time remained before I was to put the tides of an echoing sea between myself and this strange world once more. But in the hallowed space of those seven hours, it was finally worth it. I felt wanted. I was wanted. In every moment of that bittersweet night, I was precisely where I desired to be. The city was shrouded in starlight, imbued with the kaleidoscope of a stained-glass coming dawn and the effervescent fragrance of a champagne bottle between my lips. I was keenly aware of how wonderful it felt; the dew-garnished grass beneath my stirring form; the rain-washed pathways, sorrowful and glistening; the hands that ran along my shivering skin; the mouth so warm and sweet and familiar; the bed unmade with fingertips and teeth; his sighs like reverence, breathless and heady; the hushed velvet stillness; the dampness and heat. Spires climbed skywards, and diaphanous morning unfolded like an eyelid: dimmed with rose-quartz and rust. This was harmony at last, we had found the balance I had so long sought after, and it tethered us fast to that scene. I derived from his movements no intention that was not also my own: no desire but that which I felt as well. And so we moved forward into the exquisite, unknowable expanse of the night. We sustained something more than mere illusion. We learned the rare pleasure of forging a memory that quickens my pulse even now.

I was most alive when you were inside of me, not only in my body but in my mind and discourse. You calmed the part of me that makes me hurt, the part I am afraid of, that causes me to lose control. You did not cure me of my affliction, but you blunted its edge. Your presence was a sedative: I felt safe and calm, not narcotized but beautiful, insouciant, unmarred. It took half a year, of course, but it has come at last to this. I loved feeling you speak my name, watching your voice move across my half-shattered skin, breathing your final phrases as they carved patterns in the crystal refuge of my memory. And I liked your mind, so different from this which writes for you now: the gentle, pragmatic inclinations, the soft edges of sanity whereupon my caustic intemperance burned and curled. After every confession I offered, you kissed me. In our mutual acts of forgiveness and atonement, each glance resonating like a caress, we learned to know each other: we loved gently, recklessly, and all at once.

Of course, it could never have lasted any longer than one night, for that is the nature of what we are. In the early hours of morning, we met our end together, and I took my leave exactly as I had after that first, fateful evening: turning away from your watching form and wandering down the winding flight of stairs. You stood, for a moment, silhouetted in the doorframe, and your eyes cut into the very heart of me. How very different it felt, this time around. A lifetime or more had passed in the intermittent instances between our first and last goodbyes. Almost before you were gone, I was already remembering you, and melancholic, trancelike, I stood outside those doors and watched the solitary sunrise. I think you understood at last, that night, how I loved you in my own strange way—and that if I had ever hurt you, this alone was why. But what a pyrrhic victory it seems.

If you ever felt unwanted, I am sorry, I am sorry. I liked you. I admired you. But sometimes I hurt the things that remind me of me. I never meant to be this way. When I love a thing, it leaves me. When it leaves, I start to love it. I do not know which comes first. Can I only really care for that which makes me suffer—am I inflicting the horror upon myself? Is this paradox rooted in the fact that the things I love have always, eventually hurt me, or does it stem from my own unspoken love of hurting? My only conclusion, tentative though it may be, is that I never learned the difference between what loves me and what leaves. If my pain and my affection seldom seem separable, it is only because no one ever taught me how to distinguish one from the other. This is not my natural state. This is not a choice that I remember making. This is an ongoing act of mourning: a lived eulogy to my childhood, my father, my sanity, myself.

But this undifferentiated nexus of agony and adoration has wounded more than me. It is what allowed me to act, on occasion, with such obstinance. It is what drove me to recoil from moment after irretrievable moment. It is why I could not love you when I wanted to, when I could have tried, when there was still time, when you might have loved me in return. I cannot remedy that now—I can scarcely even learn from it, I fear. And therefore I am sorry, I am so entirely sorry; not just for failing to love you, but also for how very much I think I might love you now. I do not know when or how this happened. I have always been predisposed towards infatuation, unsustainable bouts of augmented feeling, but this took place so slowly, so naturally: it grew like ivy in my veins, it blossomed in my lungs, it took root in the history that we will always share. I never could have expected it. That garden that you realized, and that I wrote, has at last taken its full form. I found parts of myself there that I had believed were lost forever. I was the life in that nighttime, I was the growing thing: somnambulist, child, lover, transgressor, repenter, votive, desecrator—not just unhinged but unknowing, unknowable. I was living always in the liminal periphery between two worlds, purgatorial and profane. You witnessed within me the ineffable lightness and the enigmatic fire of my own being—for I was, in many ways, the object of my own impalement; not simply the crucified body, but also, perhaps, its cross.

I am crying. Finally. It has been so long since I have been able to feel in this way. I may regard this, always, as the year that consumed me—but I know that I am healing now, however slowly, however belatedly, because yesterday, I remembered what the rain feels like. In some ways, I am grateful that you were not always there to witness the fracturing of my health. I was not necessarily successful in surviving these months. I fell to pieces about as often as I endured; I was sometimes strong, and sometimes I was very weak. I am happy that you were able to experience, in our earliest days, the better parts of of me. I am thankful that you did not see me shatter. There was another for that task, and it only grieved her. I lent her, a while, the misery of this skin: she bore it well, but can I ever forgive us? I was so wounded, so undone, that I allowed myself to bleed out carelessly upon her hands and mind. She still believes in me, even now—but how can that possibly be? Sometimes I think that I should do penance for this, for showing her a love that I was not well enough to keep. I knew better than to feed off of a thing that could barely sustain itself.

But you told me not to live looking backwards anymore. I think, in this case, you were right. This world will not change. Not for me. And if I seem wistful or repentant now, it is only because I refuse to lose another beautiful thing to my tainted conscience or my guarded ways or my fading recollections. I have no pride left. I have conviction, desire, and defiance, but no pride. Not anymore. I am a nerve exposed. I am going to feel everything, if I can—I am going to feel it entirely and unashamedly. And so I will honor and write our final moments: because that is as close as I can come to recompense, to redamancy, to loving you in the way that you have deserved for so long now. I cannot retrieve what time and circumstance have now rendered a part of the past. But I can mourn this history, find beauty in its ephemerality; and above all else, I can remember you well. A kind of immortality resides in all language: it is what I have to offer in my body’s stead. And offer it I will, because at long last, I am on the way to knowing love, to knowing myself again. Those dusky, tortured, ocher months, when I was dragged back to life from its unwilling edges, are finally coming to a close. I am ready now. I want this.

These are the days of my healing. They entail so much more than any one person, time, or place. But they will always have been made possible, at least in part, by you. Because for one night, beside you, I felt fondly again. I remembered how you saw me, and so remembered who I was. And I am certain that counts for something.

If this was my baptism by fire, then I have survived it all. I will bear the scars and the scourges and the burns of these past six months for the rest of my life. But I will not atone for this any longer; instead, I will invoke the fortitude that you yourself taught me. I will requite the clemency and the empathy and the mercy that I have been shown—by you, by her, by all of them and more—not with penance, but with the restoration of my own health. It is time, I think, to rise once more, in tides of a burning lucidity, in clauses barbed with the bliss of a second coming. Whatever it takes, I will revive this body, this skin like a mutilated miracle: I will repair the branded arms and shorn hair and genderless desires. Eye my scars, then, and hear my heart. I will find life in exactly that which has consumed me: in the melted gold that floods the crevices of my bones, in the ash that trails from my fingertips. I will do more than just survive this. I will emerge, and I will enthrall, and I will make myself a thing worth knowing once more. So remember me, revere me, and watch what you have helped me to achieve. Watch as the consequences crystallize. Watch as I forge, from this grim history, something caustic and new. Watch as this promise takes on, like daybreak, another beautiful and terrifying form.

Watch me unfold with the smoke of my own burning.

Watch me begin to live again.

“Go back to sleep,” she murmured. “These aren’t times for things like that.”
He saw himself in the mirrors on the ceiling, saw her spinal column like a row of spools strung together along a cluster of withered nerves, and he saw that she was right—not because of the times, but because of themselves, who were no longer up to those things.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

This is not a story about anything I have ever loved. This is a story about my illness, my undying anxieties, and the people I lost or never really had. This is just another chapter of the strangest year of my life, and it ends, as ever, with the specter of my earliest abandonment. But there was love there once. I did not always know this, but of late, I certainly have. So I am writing now in the sleepless delirium of another soon-to-be morning, with an overflowing ashtray and an onslaught of unwanted memories ringing through my tired mind. I am writing when I should be healing, because I am afraid that I have finally run out of time. After all, the spring has ended. I am crossing an ocean soon and leaving all of this behind.

Some of my best moments, the most clairvoyant and frankly erotic instances of my life, were spent in an unmade bed and the garden of my own discontent, where this branded body, all burned and scarred and wary, unfolded at last like a miracle or a mercy: engaging me, absolving me, rendering me close to whole. Those were the times that I never wanted to end, gazing down upon the form that I had come to regard so fondly; the two faces held between our four hands, knuckles entwined in tangled locks of hair; the mouth that moved in mine, tasting of something more permanent than pleasure; the ecstasy that echoed in reams of flesh, grazing against the sheltered depths of my self and my soul. I remember the abandon with which I allowed my spine to arch, arms crossed above my head, mind empty and fingers outstretched–and between my knees that half-crouching form, singular and impossibly beautiful. I felt then an elation so simple, a want so uncontrollable, that I scarcely recalled how to speak. My pulse was rapid and absolute: my body was singing that name. Does it matter what language one ascribes to such a sensation? Must it necessarily entail obligation or resolve? All I know for certain is that I was happy then. I was so entirely happy. It was one of the few things left here that could make me feel happy, that could make me feel anything at all. And I wanted to keep it until the end.

Then that time passed suddenly–two days, nothing more. All of the worst things happen around Father’s Day, I have found. So I expected something, I think, but certainly not this. That night was one of the worst in my memory. The catalyst does not bear retelling, but its consequences were instantaneous. I still do not quite understand what occurred, or why it so thoroughly undid me, but I could never have anticipated the sensation. I felt as though the utter heart had been ripped out of me. I was butchered and desperately hollow. I had seldom been so shaken, so confused, and there was nothing left to do except feel everything at once. I tried to reason with my own dissociated consciousness, but my mind had turned upon itself. I heard a laugh, a sound that scalded, and it fell like madness upon me–Left again, so soon?–until I finally slept, unquietly and afraid. That night I survived, if you may call it survival, the careless massacre of some precious drop of vulnerability that I did not know I had left to lose. I had not been aware, however scarcely, of its presence, until he bit that pretty thing in two and left me in an empty bed, drunk and dripping crimson.

Did I exasperate and disgust you, the furthest and most extreme form of what you fear yourself to be, laying bare your limitations in the extent of my insanity, the purgatory of your own conception of a self? Or perhaps I bored you, my eccentricity only amusing for so long, its value now exhausted in your unconvinced mind. Were you always too altered, too consumed by chemicals or reckless desire, to care what remained of me in the morning? But why call a thing incredible, when you no longer want it at all? Your intentions were never decipherable, never spoken. Was I simply not useful anymore?

“You’re a special person, Grace Tully.” Those were the last words you spoke in the first hours of knowing me, on that beautiful and perhaps regrettable night when I first let you make love to me, and began to understand that I was not yet ruined or damaged beyond repair, and that there was something left for me to strive towards. I have remembered those words ever since. Maybe they were true. Maybe you believed them. After all, I was so alive and extraordinary and strange back then, with my shining eyes and my half-starved frame, irradiated by the incandescent recollection of my better days. But I have been fighting for my sanity for a long time now. How can you be horrified to see that I am losing? Of course I am not the person you used to know: that person faded with the early winter, she choked on every plea for help that went unanswered. So do not be too critical, or unsettled, or confused, by whatever it is that I have become. This change was not a thing that I could have prevented on my own, and although I tried and tried and tried, no one was willing to aid me.

I will find another figure now, and learn to love it all the same, until this matters less than a memory. If you have not already, then you must forgive me–but I doubt that will be necessary. I have been given little cause to believe that this absence-riddled grief is known to anyone but myself, and I truly do hope that I alone should feel it, if that is the choice we both made. I always fall a little in love with the things that I am soon to lose, and this was never going to last. I knew that, we both did. It never unsettled me. I just did not expect the end to come in so thoughtless a form.

But you saved my body. Of course that mattered. Try though I might–and mark me, I have tried–I could not make that meaningless, not ever. I just wanted one thing, one stupid, useless fucking thing: I wanted you not to hurt me. It is not complicated. I cared for you. I thought you understood that. I might wonder, sincerely, whether I had asked too much of you. But even now, I will not debase myself in that way. I have to know my own value. I have to know that I am worthy of the tenderness that I strive consciously to offer, and so expect in return. I have never pined for anything that I was not also willing to give. I have to believe that counts for something. So I will take this, all of this, everything that was done to me, all of the people who left me alone, who made me ashamed, who watched me cower. I will wear this upon my failing body like an albatross–and then with chemicals or electric currents, I will burn it out of me. I will purge my mind of its own inclinations, and make myself clean again.

But I will leave claw marks in the flesh of these unforgettable days. I still recall when they began, and what that felt like, and how much I learned and grew and healed. I know that this meant something to me. I am not sure, in fact, when or how it came to matter so entirely: the change was rapid and sentimental and scared me. I am still so afraid to feel this way, and I cannot pretend that you have not given me cause. I am not in love, I am never in love, I am too far gone for loving–but still I adore you, and I will miss you, and I am sorry. I want to remember something better than this. I want there to still be a chance. I will want that until the very last. But I have so little desire left to spend.

Someday I will write this all, and honestly. I do not regret it, not entirely, not yet. But I need the space to hurt now. I believe that there is very little left for me to do. I am not sure whether or not you feel this way as well. I worry that, mostly, we need time, and there is no time left for either of us now–because I am going home, and when I come back, I might not be the same. I think that our days are ending. I am afraid that you might have wanted them to. I do not know how to feel about that, or how to survive it. But these things are always temporary. No one knows the same love twice. Nothing ever really lasts. So I think that our days are ending–and that maybe it is time for me to stop writing, and let them.

“…Only
we can regret
the perishing of the
burned place.
Only we could call it a
wound.”

Margaret Atwood, A Fire Place

I am going under the knife again.

I have often doubted whether, for anyone, such an endeavor could be necessary twice. But I think that this mind of mine may be dying now, undone by the discordant anxieties that roar through my body and split the searing soul.

I poured currents of salt water and measurable time between myself and my lived existence: the history that consumed my physical form, the paranoia and the people that broke me. I tried to purge myself, to burn from my skin the trauma of those who abandoned me, who rejected me by not being there, who left me impaled upon their absence. All of the empty promises, all of those beautiful lies: no one protected me this time, and so I protected myself. But no body can sustain its own worth indefinitely, whether it is driven by anger or by some horrible love. I have become emaciated, my flesh a grisly pattern of bruises, scabs, and scars. How the hell could I have allowed this to happen? I am afraid to leave my room in the mornings. I hardly even know my own name. And fuck you, fuck all of you, for loving what you thought you understood and failing to take care of it anyways. Fuck you for letting me adore you and then disappearing again. Fuck you for making me feel dispensable. You saved my life and you shattered my mind and you made me wish that I had been left alone from the start. This is your indictment, as much as it is mine. At long last, I am writing for us all.

At any rate, I cannot survive another year of this. So I am going back to my own beginnings, to those sterile rooms wherein shame and isolation drip like morphine through my blistering veins. Yes, I am afraid. But this time I will give myself up willingly. They can have everything, they can have my name, my clothes, my history, my body–for I have no health, and I want health desperately. I want to be new and whole again, I want to be better for the people who still trust me. So take it, please, take it all. Get this thing away from me, this flesh, this madness, this consciousness colder than surgical steel. I do not want it, not any of it, I never did. But I was not given a choice.

I sometimes fear that I am not a thing worth keeping alive. You liked me so much better before learning what I am. I opened my eyes this morning and you were already gone. I was surprised that I could still feel anything by then, but I woke up alone and I wished that you had stayed. Or maybe I just wished that I was worth staying for. But I will not crawl, not ever, and so when I stood at the world’s edge, upon that rooftop, I climbed higher than I ever have before. The morning light was cold. My arms were outstretched. My feet were on the brink of some limitless oblivion, some ineffable liberation, some chaos like surrender and some tragedy that might set me free. I understood, at last, that Icarus could never have been consumed in flames without suffering, eventually, his invaluable descent. But might it have been worth the fall, to burn so unforgettably? Some part of me wanted to learn this for myself. But instead, I stepped back from that compelling precipice. I called my mother, who sacrificed her body to bring me into this beautiful, terrible world. I told her at last, in my own way, how very much I love her. Then I covered my ancient wounds in something new. 

So many people fear their own fragmentation. But I was undone in the beginning. I have no interest in pretending that I am anything other than mercurial, impassioned, half-insane. This story was written long before I knew what form it would take. Tiresian in nature, my language has predicted it all–her empty womb, that false crucifixion, the genderless prophecies, the horror of my own burning. Maybe this was the inexorable trajectory of my existence. But even so, I have to be better than this. I love him, her, them, you: I used to love myself, but I cannot love what I have become. This is not me, it is not, I refuse to accept it, I am not like this and I never was–not this broken, not this wasted, not a site for senseless suffering. Please, please, forgive me for this, for making it all so inescapable. Give me time, and nothing more. I will be whole again. I will be better. It will not always hurt so much. 

Subject me once more to the scalpel, and cut it all away. Sedate, anesthetize, lobotomize me–do anything you like, so long as I am well again. I want to pull my own skin apart. I want to tear it back and I want you to dismember me and I want to feel no pain. I will not have any more of this: the sleepless nights, the horrors in my periphery, the bouts of paranoia that make a nightmare of us all. I cannot endure many more days like this one, exposed to the sunlight, eyes downcast, consumed with some wrenching fear that I am alone and relentlessly despised within the confines of this rough reality. Nothing ever really helps, for I was not made to be saved. But I do not want your concern or your sanctimony. I just want to write. I want to heal. I want to not feel scared. I want someone to love me the way my dad never could. 

How lucky I am to be alive in this miserable world. I think that it was always coming to this. It is difficult to feel anything but fear, but I have been steadfast in my endurance for a long time now. Surely, I can keep on for just a little while longer. Thank you for surviving me–thank you all. There seems to be nothing left within me that can justify this, that can make it feel meaningful, that can put me back together again. I have tried and I have tried and I have tried and I have tried, and this is all that it amounts to. But even now, I want to be well again. I know that I will continue on. No one should have to live like this, and maybe that place can set me free. What, after all, have I left to lose?

I miss you, I love you, I hate you, I am you, and so I endure us as one. Return to me, please, and be whatever it was that you used to be. I would give anything to have you back again. So forgive me. Please. I love you. Please. You could never have made me whole, but it means the world to me that you tried. 

I am going under the knife again. What more is there to say?

You hold an absence
at your center
as if it were a life.

Richard Brostoff, Grief

I should have known, I should have known, that even a nightmare ends. Things are still so difficult, but getting better now. I wonder if you will notice. I wonder if you will care. I hope that, someday, you read this and realize that I remember it all. I hope that you have not yet lost faith in my endurance. I hope that you know how brilliantly, unbearably alive I still am.

In the last act of our horror-show scene, what I saw nearly undid me: his skin, this skin that was not mine, had split beneath my fingers like a scream– the image runs even now like a needle through my mind. A baby’s breath or a barren womb could hardly have warranted that. But what a misery it seemed: he was impaled upon a loss that could not be. His grief was all stitched with the absence of a life that never was, and I could not put the body back together again. So I found myself half-anguished, later in the night, smoking and speaking aimlessly to her sleeping form. I am lost, I said, in my etherized state: I am lost and I am trying to find my way back to you. But she could not hear the madness or the music in my mind, and when I did what I thought I had to, it hurt beyond all imagining. I melted and seared, and layers of me fell away with the smoke.

Had I not always said that I wanted to burn? Did I know what it entailed? Have I always known? Maybe it was always coming to this. There was nothing left to expose to that flame but me. And what was I then–Icarus, now fallen? Electra, already consumed? The sacrificial compensation for some ancient, nameless sin? Or was I was only myself, a self that I had hurt, and if so, could I ever recover? When all of it was over, I was utterly devoid of thought, with no force and no fire to speak of. I was fifteen again. I was ashamed. I was an open space, a darkness aching to be made into something new.

I needed him more than ever then, the one who gave form to my solitary endeavors, whose loss I feel only in the half-light of morning, and in the deafening silence of that forsaken room where I used to feel beautiful when he moved in me. But I am tired now, and so undone: I can scarcely recall the hands that pressed against me, and kindled some dim fondness in my bare, still-beating heart. My face between those steady palms, each subtle, half-conscious movement of his form, the gentle hesitance that lent me the strength to continue–my body was a thing we learned as one. And in the moments when it turned upon me, and I recoiled with the soreness of a long-festering fear, he stayed beside me anyways. Even a mind as guarded as my own will know, one day, the wound of his absence: perhaps so profoundly that I will wish he had never found me at all. Beautiful things must always, ineffably, be mourned. His were not the hands that brought me the joy of some impossible desire: he was not the figure for whom I knelt beneath the surface of that foreign shoreline, and felt wonderful and helpless and alive. But he was the clandestine surface whereupon I grew less afraid, and whatever I am becoming now is stronger, mending, and imbued with some quiet gratitude. Those months were sacred: there will always be love there.

What have I come to since the summer? There is no way of telling, not anymore, and maybe there never was. All I know for certain is that it has been a long year. I can say it until I run out of breath, but it is true, it has been so long, and how I have lived since I roamed the streets of New York City in wonder and grief. I now know, less than ever, where I am, where I may go. My father, my family, the girl I thought I could love: did I leave them all behind? Or were they lost before I crossed that sprawling sea? Her voice like raw silk, and all of the rough choices she made: for the first time in so many long and terrible months, I found her, really found her, once more. Those intonations reminded me, if only for an instant, of who I used to be, and all of the ways I used to feel. I met again the woman of these nine months past, whose specter lingers in each new bout of melancholy. “Always” was a handful unforgettable moments. “Always” was an ending that nearly broke me. “Always” was a promise we were both too young to keep.

Always. Always. That word belongs to her now, but its consequences are my own.

So when he wandered through my bedroom door, with the carelessness and integrity I had tried so desperately to forget, I reacted without meaning to, though I could never have anticipated the words that fell hesitantly from his mouth. I knew, with such damning sincerity, precisely that which I had been afraid to know: the feeling of having felt, of having loved and forgotten. It had been so long since my mind was one with his. Some half-recalled adoration stirred in my guarded form: the final evocations of the child who adored him, who still hoped that maybe his gentle consciousness could repair itself, that maybe late autumn was just a ruse or a terrible dream. That secret part of me ached to silence each lingering doubt, abandon entirely my better judgement, and try to love him one more time. But it cannot be about that. It will not be about that. I have no innocence left to give: and even if I wanted to, I could not endure our history twice.

I really think I like you. I like you, I like you, and your disbelief cannot cure me. I can only hope that you never begin to understand. In the horror of my last dissociation, I was sitting in the front quad, and I thought that I could see straight into the core of each ancient structure in my periphery. The frameworks were skeletal, all of their grandeur gone–I realized that a house of God, when not alight with song, is a hollow thing to witness. That day I saw through dreaming spires, and into the heart of some harsh and corrupt reality: the bare bones of a world where strangers and children play unforgivable games, and where I learned to trust no one but myself. This city has been killing me slowly, and for longer than I have cared to admit. But it does not always have to feel this way: and even now, I am not sorry. Not for what was done to me. Not for what I am.

My healing, my salvation, will be made possible by the very things that brought me here to begin with: the half-mad fears and longings that first reduced me to this state. For all of the reasons that I suffer, I will also, inevitably, survive. I am certain that I sound histrionic, and perhaps self congratulatory, once more. But that does not matter: it cannot matter. These are the things I tell myself because I have nothing else to say, and because I see no better means by which I may endure or engage. The dream of a normal death, a natural death, a death not inflicted by the hands that write this piece, has not always been more than mere fantasy for me. I have clung to it in desperation and desire when it seemed less likely than a miracle. If I was not ready for this life, it was only because I did not believe it was possible.

Someday I will write, in full, the history of this form: in gradients of desire and each forgotten cross I have climbed. I will give a language, at last, to whatever absence breathes and burns within me, to the specter of my wordless story, and to the child who I cannot mourn, having never learned her name. I do not know where it is taking me, this body that atones. I know that I am not well yet. To heal will require time, and even now, I feel listless and wary and disillusioned as all hell. Survival is the art of accepting nothing more or less than your own continued existence–and so I have always lived like this, because I knew no other way.

But I have done my penance, for now. I have taken measures that unsettled even me, and I have given months of my life to the people I am striving to love. So let it be over now, if only for a while. Tell me that I have suffered enough, and let me lay these ghosts to rest. I have always been peculiar and half-aimless and inane. I am disparate and I am flawed beyond measure. I am beautiful and strange. I am the blistering core of your discontent. I am the center that holds. But more than any of that, I am older now. I am stronger, I hope. I am finally ready to try again.

What will I become, now that I am no longer content to merely survive?

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?