On Mercy’s Heels

Apologies for such a brief and grim post. I wrote this upon waking from a nightmare. It should not be taken too seriously. I will probably delete it sooner rather than later. 

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.

Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

No one is reading this. I am in a crypt. Inverting like shrieks of a memory-shell, these locusts move soft across the underside of my mind. The result is headless, and bears a kind of flesh: its image festers like carrion. My bent chest cracks with each whistle of breath. Skin, skin, skin, skin: I am writing for the birds now.

Here, in this moment, I am not getting better. Only more scared. This shouldn’t surprise us. Because you can’t spend half your life in the talons of an undue virtue and come out the other side feeling okay. You just can’t. And who knows–maybe we all hold this truth for a reason. Why should my lot be any better?

I write for all of you. How do you feel? Are you well? Is anyone fucking well anymore? Some of you have to be, because I gave you my health, I scattered it upon your minds like leaves on an autumn grave. Surely some difference was made. I lie where the vines clung in crimson-wrought tides, and rifted the bare iron dusk of your eyes. Come on, please: be all right for me. Live gladly again, because I can’t now.

I still love you all. There is no cult of madness more inane than these people, these nets of souls and human society. Every selfless display of concern becomes a sort of violence: sympathy is a more virulent indictment than any barbed rebuttal. It is all so simple and sentimental and cruel: why are they asking this of me? If I were a dog, they would have put me down by now. I have given them cause. Why can’t I just go?

But I stay and I stay. So stop worrying about me, for god’s sake, stop worrying. I am the farthest thing from fine, and yet, by their standards, it is all just as well. This culture does not care if I am merely a corpse reanimated. So long as I walk and I speak and I breathe, so long as I lend them my obedience and language, so long as I pour words across the empty pages of their lives, they are satisfied. By those principles, the crisis is over, my tragedy averted. I am fine, I am fine, I am fine. I am alive because that is what you need me to be. I am not going anywhere. I am not breaking stride. This is just a bad hour. A bad week. A bad year.

And besides, I still have a few deaths left to spend. Who knows what vampires stalk even now through this childlike nightmare of a mind? Maybe another dark-eyed man will come to drink love from between my lips and lifeless thighs. Maybe another faceless god will bleed me of sight and sanity. Maybe another crowd will jeer at the smoke of a witch’s burning. Maybe another thoughtless friend will tear each tenet of my trust away, seizing upon my faiths in sequence like a set of severed limbs.

To keep the impression of harmony, you need me to hate myself. Right? Maybe not. I don’t care anymore. I am simple and effaced. I want to be purer than the winter. I want this feeling gone from me. I am eating my own darkness: it is tougher than a deadened heart.

And what does it matter? I am remote. I am remiss. I am untouchable. Here is just now. No one is reading this.