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?