None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom, the last.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

We spent the spring together in our solitude, our uncertainty, our grief. The room was a crypt for the broken but still-living, a printing-press of sorts for the reams of fabrication that we spun for an outside world. The fibers of our being could be found in book-spines and memories, in scar tissue and chips of glass along the filthy floor. There were empty bottles and fraying bed sheets, shivering limbs and bloodshot eyes. We were young, we were broke, we were violent, we were restless–and by the end, we were jaded as all hell.

Survival is a savage sort of thing: it is always the rats that run first, the wretched who endure, and I have never been the kind to die. I gnawed marrow from the bones of discontent, sank my teeth into the throat of my own misery, left claw marks in the concrete of the blind and listening walls. I promised I would survive the summer, and whatever else you may think of me, I was steadfast in this. I loved them, I loved them beyond my own description, and so I wrestled health from the ashes of a life I longed to abandon. In the end, I was the one who endured.

There was so little good left in my world to squander. I thought her the most beautiful thing to cross my path in a lifetime or less–she was the last, best thing I had going. Sometimes I still peruse the strange sinew of her desire, still run a cold finger across lines of early poetry, still hear her voice break like a rainstorm across the underside of my mind. She was the most wonderful goddamn part of my salvaged world. How could she prove such an absent, mundane love?

But the vitriol was imprecise and meaningless. There was nothing left to miss. And so I stopped wondering, and then, it stopped mattering. Those lovely, strange, and sorrowful days, when the sordid evenings wept and murmured into rust-stained tides of dawn, have left me now forever. Whatever I am, or am to become, there is scarcely a history to recall. I know that I should not have given myself so easily to such faint echoes of desire. I should not have loved him, or her, or them, whose worth was as that of a slowing pulse. I would have done better to have loved myself instead.

Now I exhale the recollections of that year like celestial dust. Disillusion wrenches soft, sweet yearnings from my skin. I undo each memory of ill-founded love like a bandage from my arms, my hips, my ribs. I pry the knowing fingers from my mind. I am still wading through the dark, still waters of quiet endurance, the faint dream of purpose. I am wonderfully alone amidst the tangle of lips and eyes, the trail of promises that yearned to be broken, the shadow in the doorway when I turned, at last, to go.

To live is not an easy thing. To live in the state that I too often have is still more damning, more inane. I am a disconsolate aggregation of shrewd and disparate parts. I feel them in succession, like slow fragments of a suicide. Entropy. Apathy. Liquor. Cigarettes. Coffee. Self-absorption. Bloodlust. Real lust. Disinterest. Sanctimony. Desolation. Shame. There has been a note taped above my mirror for three weeks now. All it says is, Stay Alive.

And yet, I am more than alive now. I am burning. I am striving. I am not afraid to be. The future unfurls without form or composition, an iridescent expanse of possible meaning, a darkness that longs to be shaped into a world. Through the veil of a nascent conviction, I have learned, at long last, how not to care: how to seek pleasures that are not penitential, how to sell an affection that ebbs away with the morning. Sometimes I still feel the dull pull of catastrophe, like a far-off shriek in a forgotten life, but the immutable vanity of the present has already bled through whatever remains of the inexorable past. There is nothing left for me to fear. I love sparingly, I live viciously, I trust no one at all.

I once endeavored to tame my heart, but it does not know itself anymore. And so, I suppose, I am untethered at last from the bonds of an earliest yearning. The astringent energy of desire is murmuring beneath the surface of my conscious mind: I think that I am coming back to myself once more. The best and the worst of my days are still to come. I live and dream by the rising of the moon. As its pallor wanes, I see shadows on the surface, and there lingers, in that dark brilliance, the final image of those I once loved. But they are fading now, dwindling slowly into nothing more than another set of bones to lay to rest beside my father’s.

Perhaps I was meant to survive this after all.