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 Withdrawn and wretched though I may have become, my flesh remains a sanctuary upon which tenderness is still possible.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.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Every time I bleed myself out in front of a blank page or a computer screen, I am reminded that it is damn near impossible to communicate fully, to forge the connections and the intimacy that I crave, when writing so directly and consistently about myself. But I continue to do so, for now at least, because for all of my confusion and my restlessness, I am something that I know. There are worse things to write about than that, I suppose.

Ghosts of my past reemerge with the dawning year. There are bones that I never put to rest, and people I could not keep alive; yes, that beautiful girl died, with white roses in her hair and eyes, but it was not entirely a tragedy. People change, after all, and what of it? If you do not know what I am writing about now, it is because you were never intended to understand. But for the briefest instant in our burning worlds, she was mine, and I was hers. That will always be true, it could never be anything else. What more can I really care to know?

How long do resolutions last? I am impractical, but not entirely naïve. I understand that a turned page in a marked calendar bears no real significance. I have never had the constancy or the resolve to keep the commitments I devise; but I will make my promises, all the same.

In 2016, I will remember, always, the treachery of pleasure: the unspoken wariness of anyone whose love, for as long as they can remember, has been mingled with trauma and directionless sorrow. I will remember that I am a body in need of protection, and that this is a beautiful thing. I will remember to stop projecting my fierce and nameless needs onto sites of imposition, be they desirous figures or gentle minds. I will remember to find secret, tender parts of myself and keep them very safe: to give less love where it is not wanted, and so carve out a space for myself in the world.

In 2016, I will find more spheres of women, queers, and people with complex identities that may include “woman.” These communities love deeply. I want and need to be cared for in that way. I will touch and be touched, I will write and remember; I engage in these acts already, but I will try to spend less time fretting over inevitable endings. Perhaps this is the first step towards finding a kind of love that does not devour me, towards knowing the value of my life and mind.

In 2016, I will live fiercely. Where I walk, I will strive to be remembered. With passion and precision, I will fall in love with what I am. I want to be adored: I want to suffer and survive until no one doubts that my resistance is also liberation, and that I am the the better for it. When I lose myself within a labyrinth of my own conflicted desires, as I always eventually do, I will be more and less than Icarus, still alive, still in flight, and burning, burning, burning; they will call my name on raucous evenings, and remember me on city streets when the night is gone.

As I write this, I am filled with a quiet joy. The ocean breathes, thirty feet below me. The stars blaze softly. This, right now, is one of those moments when I am really present. There are no barriers, no secrets, no lies left to tell. I am not distant. I am not guarded. I am whole. It does not matter if I keep these resolutions, because I have written them, and so have willed them into some sort of existence.

Maybe if I reckon with my pain instead of avoiding it, I will have nothing left to be afraid of. I know that I cannot have everything, but if I can create so much, and feel so deeply— even if I cannot necessarily survive it—then maybe I can start to make some sense of this inane world.

I will move slowly and determinedly towards a more harmonious state of being. The entire endeavor is cyclical, of course; I will inevitably become bored again, live within those psychological extremes that most people will never know, and when my mind and body have sufficiently consumed one another, I will ease myself out of insanity and adjust once more to the rational world. Maybe some part of me simply does not want to be sane; maybe that is why I am so incredibly inept when it comes to healing. But the present task is simple, an effort towards stability. I want to believe that I am capable of that.

I will try to remind myself that, in instances of loss, I am not always entirely at fault. My world changes, I grow older: the person remains, but the feeling they inspired fades to memory, and then to nothing at all. So I will refrain from crucifying myself, over and over again, on the transience and the tragedy of those pleading words—I need you to just hold on, until I am sane enough to love you again.

Am I really so alone? The only one grieving gently, the only one who retreats from the indifferent cold of an empty bed on sleepless nights? The only one who tires, at times, of being so deeply alive? Surely, somewhere, there is someone just as conflicted and impassioned and flawed as I am. Could we teach one another to feel more completely? Could we heal whatever mutual wounds our histories have inflicted? Could they make me feel safe again? Could they tell me who I am?

I will always be strange and I will always be displaced, because so much of my existence is determined by the perception and conclusions of a thousand other minds—such is the tragedy of the social world. But that is not so terrible: I can withstand the voyeuristic impulses of the culture I engage with, I can survive the stigmatization that I learned, in my early adolescence, to simply expect. And I can do so alone, if I have to.

Let me remember this moment. I love to know that I can feel this way. It is so rare and so strange, that I should exist and be heard. I am not sure who or what I am writing for now: lovers or strangers, confidants or companions, the woman I eulogized or the self I have yet to fully understand. But I will not apologize for this most recent engagement with the language of my own mind, however discursive or self-indulgent it may seem. I will not waste another year killing myself off for the respect of an audience that hardly exists. I will be different, and I will be better, for as long as I have the strength. I will write, and feel, and love, and burn, until there is nothing left to save.

Oh, my love, take me there.
Let me dwell where you are.
I am already nothing.
I am already burning. 

Sophocles, Electra

Mild December mornings find me listless and on edge, smoking cigarettes and drinking weak coffee in New York’s East Village. Listening to shit jukebox pop songs, avoiding street cabs and strangers’ eyes, I adjust to the insincerity of the city, immersed all the while in the dim paranoia that colors the wary reintegration of an insomniac into the waking world.

There are always days or weeks or months, impermanent instances wherein I begin to wonder whether or not I have lost my mind. Every time, I worry that I will not recover, that maybe this time, it is for real. And there is a certain joy in the reckless interest with which I navigate these temporary bouts of instability—cynical and strangely high-spirited, quick to laugh and slow to focus, I live like an exposed nerve: vulnerable, feeling everything.

I am always between worlds, haunted by that selfsame specter of displacement that strays through each new city at my side. I long for home, return to realize that it was never truly there to begin with, that it left with my sanity and my father on a cold grey morning so many years ago. It seems like a lifetime now. I spend holidays reliving each whiskey-dimmed wandering down the silent streets of England, dreaming of that directionless respite where my second life lies.

Just the other day, I decided that I had witnessed enough, and drove two hours north down a narrow highway until I reached an empty town at the edge of the Atlantic. There, a friend and I watched beneath saturnine skies as the ocean heaved against wind-chilled shorelines. We spoke in misremembered lines of poetry, for we had no language of our own with which we might express the enigmatic beauty of those waters on a moonless night. Our recitations perforated the silence, each word rewriting the margins of measurable time, and we returned home again in a haze of joyful abandon: smoking cigarettes, driving too fast, shouting the lyrics to old rock songs as they rang from a broken-down radio. Sometimes you have nights like those, and you understand that it is not so very terrible to live, to think, to feel. You remember that you have the constancy and love to form relationships that endure. You find solace within, and in spite of, a world that offers none. You live on, and on, and on.

I realize now that I may well be within the sensual bloom of my own existence. Am I entering it? Is it waning? I attribute my sexuality, my singular and self-contradictory identity, in large part to the fact that I am practically crawling out of my skin with fascination for the bodies of others. I do not accept the politics of compulsory heterosexuality. I am too passionate, too sensuous, too curious, too undone: I refuse to limit my experiences to any one gender. I want to be young and half-mad with desire forever. Live fast, die pretty—right? But I do not want to die at all. Not anymore, at least.

But there are times, I must admit, when I feel exhausted. Is it possible to reckon wholly with the impulsive passion of our own histories, without inevitably feeling older than we are? It would not be so tiresome, if I could only see these dimming years as inconsequential: if I could allow past lives, and loves, and losses to fade away into obscurity. But I have never known how to lie to myself.

Sometimes it simply does not work. Sorrows that are the most insurmountable, the most exquisitely damning, are always conflicts of positionality. Sometimes someone gives you everything they have to offer, and it still is not enough. The timing is wrong, your body is wrong, you need something that no one could ever give to you, and it makes you so happy and so sad at the same time: because you know you are as content as you ever can be, and you realize that maybe you will always feel this way, and you wonder why life at its best is so sweet but so sorrowful. It might sound pretentious, or even maudlin, but there it is. Perhaps in moments of melancholic stasis, we catch glimpses of who we are.

So how can you explain to those that love you, that remembering them is more difficult than catching smoke between your fingers? Nothing is sacred, not anymore. Every time I start again, another person, another place, it always ends with the same banal sentiments: I want you to know that I really did love you. That I really did try. Self-preservation becomes its own peculiar form of cannibalization: I lend my mind to intrigued strangers, and forget them all just as easily. How on earth could I have allowed myself to become this way?

In those rare moments when I am fully present, I find a peculiar comfort in feeling deeply: in eclipsing all that the other has to give. How many times have I lived over that stripped down bedroom scene, enthralled by the very futility of our efforts? Two uncertain strangers, wide-eyed, afraid of our own bodies’ desires, sharing nothing except a sense of fascination: intrigued by one another, by ourselves. Satiating nameless needs, engaging roughly in acts of tenderness: I will always remember the sweet and violent words you spoke, in the blush of that fast-approaching morning, when I found myself at your feet. You asked me to stay, pushing tendrils of hair out of my eyes: and what a choice I made that night—you still do not know the courage and carelessness it took.

In the weeks that followed, I dreamed vividly of a strange and hallowed place. There were garlands of asphodel in juniper branches, and mirrors imbued with prismatic light. You were there with me: you were nowhere else. When you spoke, you did so in gentle words tinged inexplicably with remorse. I understood you then, as I never have before or since; your clandestine yearnings, your hushed apologies as you took my fingers in your mouth. I felt the rhythm of your throat, those softly moving muscles that make your voice so low and sweet, and the strangest longing blurred my vision as from above you I glanced down. I wanted to inhale your waking consciousness in my memory and flesh, as your abandon breathed dimly through the twilight of my stirring form, submitting to my impulses, subverting what we understand to be the natural language of our desires. A silent pleasure nearly deafened me when your mouth moved in mine; I could know greater joy than the murmur of your heart beneath my hands.

How lucky I am to have found, in this absurd existence, such wonderful ways of passing the unwanted time.

Do not misunderstand me: I no longer have the patience for imprecise, diluted love. That is the best you could offer, I think, and so this feeing of mine is merely fascination, infused though it may be with tenderness and a certain sorrowful pleasure. Do I know you? No, of course not: I never really desired to. But there are facets of being that evade your waking consciousness. I learn to understand what requires distance to be known.

An absence bleeds within and throughout you, coloring your countenance like memory running through a living mind. Once, and never since, you gave that absence form through the parameters of your susceptibility and the language of your grief, reminding me of one who, in another time and place, did the very same. Hers was the body from which I learned my love and limitations; is it so surprising, then, that I should react as I did? My mind met yours in a flurry of misrecognition: that was the moment when I decided not to care about practicality or consequence, decided to survive whatever comes of this. That was the night I let you in.

I will not love you, but I like to know that I can; and that I would heal you, if I could. I give this potentiality less threatening form through a sort of detached curiosity: could I bring a person such ecstasy, evoke such adoration, that they never wanted to leave? It may seem callous, but I have been left all my life. I seek respite in these urges, but they manifest, at times, in fixation, and I simply cannot allow that. I have too much to think of, too many things to create.

So I turned once more, in your case, to the confines of my mind: I framed you within my gaze, false remembrance serving as my means of forgetting, and regarded the visual construction of your form as I might an exorcism. You bled from my hands onto the blank page, leaving stains of charcoal along my fingertips, my wrists, the skin on my forehead where I pushed the hair back into place. Everything I touched, I marred as though with ash.

I chose the wrong person again, I am afraid. I always do. But then, don’t we all? And what does it matter anyways, when a thousand forms and figures pass through my periphery? Even now, another soon-to-be memory strolls through Oxford shops and alleyways, evoking all of the opportunities I never took. In the morning, her name is everywhere: it floods my mind in a thousand strains of music, running like rain through the cobblestone streets.

So where do we go now, what do we do? This cannot last, so want me now, and I will do the rest. Abandon your inhibitions, silence your lingering doubts: I have never cared much for complexities of circumstance, and I am never hard to find. I will remember the good days, and forget whatever else I can. When I write too often, it all starts to feel the same. I knew you, my darling, I knew you, I loved you, and I will remember you. I will, I will, I will—will I? Will you? What a strange and terrible thought it is, that I may wake tomorrow feeling nothing at all.

But fuck that, fuck all of it—I have too much left to write about. I am alive now, and two years ago that is more than I ever could have hoped for. I write for myself now, because in this senseless reality, I am my own best subject. I refuse to be remorseful, to water down my own existence to some self-effacing apology. Why be selfless where you can be satisfied? Everyone is surviving something, after all, and I am not even sure what it really is that I write about now. My hands shake with a thousand unnamed longings, but I am not suffering, not anymore. I do not want to die: I burn and burn and burn. This is what I am now, this is where I stand. It is precarious, it is absurd—but I love it, all the same.

Were you exasperated and disgusted by her, as an extreme form of yourself? Your wild talk, your turbulent moods, your ‘dark places’? Mental illness frightens you, like a contagion.

Joyce Carol Oates

To watch me love another is to gain insight into the many complex ways in which I may still hate myself. I am reckless. I am desperate. I am provocative. I am extreme.

I know a capacity to give myself away that transcends age, gender, circumstance. When I do so, I crucify myself on each detail: in rushes of intolerable empathy laced with egoism, I impale myself on the subtleties of another’s existence. I feel everything. I have to. Why else would I climb each cross so willingly?

Maybe underneath it all, in the secret core of our cowering souls, we all crave subjugation. I dread every new morning, every self-reproaching glance in the mirror, my own chastising gaze. I navigate convoluted prisms of desire, performativity, and shame. What new horror have I inflicted upon myself? What will I have to live with today?

To reduce my writings to “commentary” on any one person, place, or event, is to misconstrue entirely the nature and the purpose of my work. To speak more clearly: I do not write this in response to any particular element of my present life. I am as happy now as I ever have been, or perhaps ever can be. The plane upon which my writing operates differs greatly from whatever reality textures my daily existence. This is not simply a piece about “my life.”

No, this is the litany of a violent soul in stasis and a mind only slightly unhinged: with no circumstantial catastrophe to engage it, such energy inevitably devours itself. Unexpectedly, but not inexplicably, I am reckoning with the turbulent forces of a mind and a conscience that I always thought I understood. My work is antithetical to my sanity; my art enters into a conflict with myself.

I am thinking on symbols and sensuality: I must live within a language that is no longer my own. An ancient sacred agency was taken from me, while rhythms and rituals recall what I am. And what I am is a neurotic, in the most organic sense. I wish to be open. I want pleasure, tenderness, and melancholic dissonance to infuse my volatile soul. I am not adjusted to the world—I am adjusted to myself. I crave ecstasy, and when this life offers less than I can endure, I engage in relentless acts of self-consumption. I am both satisfied and insatiable, drenched in a certain desirous impulse, the specter of which haunts this visceral consciousness.

How, after all, can I experience an entire world, so vast and mercurial, through a single body? The inimitable allure of literature and of music in the streets: the sheer stimulation of these people, this place. I can play a guitar until my fingers bleed, but sensation still boils beneath the surface of my skin. Self-mutilation is only a memory now, never to be revisited—but in moments of almost unendurable ecstasy, I sometimes imagine that if I were to open my own skin once more, my inner self would be revealed not in anemic drops, but in radiant prisms of light.

I will never love anyone the way I loved my father. No one will ever love me the way my mother has. Some people are intrigued by what I present to them: they want to interrogate it, engage with it. But who would ever stay? What person could reckon, willingly, with the violence of what I am? At the extreme risk of self-debasement I engage wholly with my own passionate impulses. If I do not take myself seriously, who else will or can?

And so I am, in some ways, a narcissist. It is not the person that matters to me, but the figure: its relevance, its positionality and calibration within my life. My egoism is empathetic: my love is rapid and deep, but directionless. I cannot yet (or can no longer) emulate that mature, private, constant adoration that constitutes a “stable ideal.” I cannot always feel this way. I will forget this sensation, but will remember experiencing it. And then I will forget that too. My present self will be explicable, but not justifiable, to whatever I become.

In the ardent haze of summer, I knew an artist, and in an erotic act of desire, decision, and resilience, she painted me. This was a piece about womanhood, about ecstasy, about me. Across the top she wrote “Always,” and being who I am, I believed it. Sometimes I still do.

But just months later, I wandered autumnal streets slick with rainwater and lamplight, with a young man who was both disarmingly vulnerable and fascinatingly inaccessible. He had a mind that was captivating and disarrayed, and expressive, deep-set eyes the color of morning. In his sanguine, gentle consciousness, I misremembered myself. I knew a different kind of tenderness than that which had preceded him.

One morning, I awoke  to glass windowpanes slick with frost. On the floor beside the bed, pale light had fallen across our garments. They were strewn across the painting, which lay on the floor where I had left it unfurled. I stared at the soft, stained fabrics that belonged to me: fragile lace, crimson in color, precisely the same shade as those tenderly bleeding words. Always.

Beside me, another body, the geography of which I had explored beneath my fingertips like every one before it, was sleeping soundly, breathing softly, knowing little, caring less. A sensual dispersion of paint across canvas, that passionate memory of lesbian desire: it seemed so strangely at odds with the cast-off clothing of the woman it had memorialized, and the young man now asleep in her bed.

It was pretentious, it was absurd, but for the briefest moment I felt older. Like I had lived and loved a lifetime’s worth. I felt tired and I felt alive.

Then I realized that I had forgotten the precise color of her eyes. Well fuck, what then?

Yes, it fades, it always fades: all I ever need is another figure, another body, another site of imposition for the discursive passion that colours my mind. Sometimes these desires replicate in my own physicality: another cigarette, another skipped meal, another sleepless night. I pace the silence at the edge of my bed until I hear my name drop softly from another’s lips. It is as beautiful as it is damning. I remember everyone that I meet.

Ancient cities of intellect and romance constitute a peculiar sense of home for the woman who wanders their capillaries. Spires dream and I am wide-awake with the morning. Cobblestone streets work their way into the contours of my soul.

I am growing, changing, becoming. I feel too deeply. No body can contain me. I cannot be alone—not ever. Except that I already am. I always have been. I consume (and in doing so nourish) myself.

The sun had not yet fully risen in the sky when I locked the bathroom door behind me and stared hard at my reflection in the mirror. His breathing fell like rain against windowpanes, echoing through my mind on that cold grey morning; and as I slowly took in the guarded eyes, half-shaved hair, and scarred skin of the girl standing before me, there was nothing left to do but wonder what the hell had happened to her, and when.