I’m with you. No matter what else you have in your head I’m with you and I love you.

Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

A solitary drink in this, the most silent corner of a dimly lit bar. Alone with my scars and my shattered sense of health, of self, I listen to the world. It echoes in my lungs. I draw breath, exhale, watch the impact fade. No one notices me. Of course not. Why should they? When people call you something, even something distressing, something terrible, might it actually become true? Can they change what you are? Can they undo all of your efforts? It has come close. I do not know. I hope not. We will have to see.

But how I hate this, this baseless fear, this horror-show of accusation that frames my untethered existence. I am trying, oh god, I am trying, but I am too afraid to even leave the miserable confines of these four walls. I am blind and I am faceless, so utterly effaced. I cannot see or be or become. I can only retreat, shamefaced, until my next fatal error, until the next time I am forced to reckon with how very despicable I am found. They know how to hurt me, even if they do not mean to. It makes me hate myself. It humiliates. And how it hurts. How I wish I could be numb. Disappear. But I couldn’t, not even if I tried. Oh god, I always come back in the end. I make my life possible, if not, perhaps, desirable. I have been left and left and left, but I still linger on. I don’t leave. Not ever.

This want, this lack, runs so much deeper than a tangled set of absent limbs, a breathing constellation of bruised or burning flesh, the unbearable turning click of a lock, the people who will not come back or care. I have lived with this wretched, gutted emptiness for as long as I can remember. But what does it matter? Whatever else I am, or have been, or may become, I will not die before my time. The sin, you understand, falls not upon whatever events have taken place. It was my own incapacity to communicate how my love transcends, renders cold and senseless, my own suicidality. This is what devastates whatever is left of the me they used to know. Did I really fail so utterly to show this, the affection that might assuage such a fear? Did they really think I would leave them, that I would leave them, me? Do they really believe the things that they have said? I suppose so. And since I cannot change that, can I at least live with it? I must. I must. I owe myself as much.

Make no mistake, I feel wretched now. I feel like a calamity. I feel subhuman. I don’t feel worth. And yet, I came back, didn’t I? Haven’t I always? How couldn’t they know that? It must be my fault. It hurts, it hurts beyond all reckoning, I am an architectural nightmare of memory and bone. My veins are knotted, my limbs are malcontent, my knuckles bleed with pale exposure below the vicious skin. I never knew that I could feel this way. I really didn’t know.

But I cannot remain in such a state of disrepair. I will be alive until life takes its leave of me. I will never die by my own hands–no, not these. Not ever. I thought, by now, that much had been made clear. I will it say it once more now, I will say it for the final time. Whoever you are, wherever you are–if you love me, I will return to you. I will always be waiting. I will always come back. This place has let me fall so fast, these people have made a nightmare of me, or the person I thought I could be, half-burned. But I will always live on, I will always endure, I will never fade out like a pale and senseless thing.

Whoever you are, if you love me, I will find you. I am here. I am breathing. I am okay. Yes, I will find you. I will always find you.

Find me.