But I do adore you–every part of you from heel to hair. Never will you shake me off, try as you may.

Virginia Woolf, Letters to Vita Sackville-West

Dragging nails through close-shorn skin, I am disconsolate, deeply mad; subsumed beneath wordless loss, the disembodied howl. Those oaths now shattered, fingers which clipped my ashen wings: you were my best thing, my nothing, and so I know now that you were made for me. All Icarus and sun-splintered lips, the wax-kissed blistering scourge of the flesh, we are Daedalus, iridescent, unsmiling, unseated by  failures of our own design: our blistering topography that snarls like a past.

And so I swim again, so near, always soon to slipping under, disappearing, breathing less. I will meet you beneath the waters, find you where we cannot speak, and your dark hair and damp skin soaking through your clothes, fabrics gathering dust in a corner of my wardrobe–my lover, what have you made of me?

The furious, half-enamored leprosy: like stars or the sea, I wept and then froze over.  Every gentle sigh that clung with heady talons to my gasping chest, untangled its intaglios of ingratitude and held, vertiginous, to each length of skin I sought to burn or cut away. Declarations of your affections, unretractable, you lied: Medea’s child, nobody thinks of you now. But Oxford garlands hang heavy with your name, gasp with rainwater and pour across the cobblestone loss.  The strange old streets unspooling like reels of thread–I knew them so well until they crawled, and shuddered back, held beneath the shadow of your absent redemancy and spectre of your sickening doubt.

But I have made my decisions. I have chosen to nullify our history, that life we used to love. Where veins meet whispers of bone, I recall that you are not yet gone. I wish you were, or that I could not see. Can’t you just go off, and die without me?

I dreamed and dreamed of someday going there. I worked my fingers to the bone for years, just to gain a glimpse into some world I had never seen before, with no friends and no certainties and no knowledge of its culture, hoping to learn what I could become if my past and my plans and my home were stripped away from me. I found what I was looking for. What happened afterward is anybody’s guess.

It was hopeful and it was hellish and it was a prolonged, holy spectacle. I do not know if it will feel worth it, in the end. But some things were worth learning. I realized that I will never really be happy or at peace in this insincere reality. And stranger still, I learned that this knowledge does not hurt me; no more than do these spectres of feeling empty or alone. I am no longer afraid of such notions. I have grown into them: I wear them like a skin. Adjusted, at last, to this world that seldom wants me, I am as strong now as I can ever remember being.

Even so, even now, how many times has my mind flirted willingly with the edges of its own undoing? Some nights I cannot rest and I begin to think of every bad thing that has ever happened to me, or been done to me. It starts slow at first, comments someone made, a memory from grade school. Then it floods in, everything at once, things that happened when I was too young to understand; things my father said and that I thought I had earned; people that let me down, or took advantage of me at my weakest; what happened last summer; what happened in November; the lingering mutilation of my ability to trust; how I have to live with those people this year, the ones who watched it kill me and just did not care; every unanswered message on my phone; every promise someone made but could not keep; all the beautiful things I let go of because I thought I did not deserve them. Now I am beyond recognition or belief, alone sometimes with the sleepless spells and the panic attacks and the violent cycles of thought, and on those nights, yes, it still feels worse than dying.

I know that I am not allowed to have these feelings, because they make everyone uncomfortable, and devour me from the outside in. But still, I live, and so I feel them anyways. And I wonder if it really was so bad, or if I just retained it differently. But I know that I never fought back until it was too late, and the consequence is that now, for the rest of my life, there will be a pantomime, an extended act of pretending that much did not happen or did not matter, and that I never loved or hurt or felt or cared as deeply as I so often did. Because I cannot fix the past, and I cannot look back–and even if I tried, I might be too ashamed to speak honestly of what I found there.

What a life I have fallen into. I never meant for it to happen. Sometimes I am a narcissist, enamored of the world, enraptured by my own existence. Other times, I can scarcely live with what I am. I want to feel good about myself. But even if people were to let me, even if the whole world let me, what if I didn’t?  What if I can’t? What if I just don’t have it in me, to be at peace with what I am, have always been? Would that not be enough to make anyone jaded and angry at the world?

But it cannot be too late for me. Because I still know moments of stolen conviction, and their beauty and their chaos takes root and unfurls like a stillness in the soil. And so I am altered, but never really change. I still speak. I still desire. I still feel a lack. Each turbulent night is still swollen with rainwater or falling stars: those sensations that linger on undersides of memories scarcely retained. I forget what I am until I have no choice but to remember. Then I slip into that strange invaluable melancholy, that current of wordless sensation that means I am still alive. I cannot write what I feel then because I am notes on a twelve-bar staff: I deal in music and memory, in clefts of endurance, in harmonious grief and blistering arpeggios of the most exquisite longing.

Is this it? Will this be the year when I finally revive, when I wrench each past misery like a new shard of glass from my skin? If I do, will it heal me? Will it hurt? Will I still know the difference then?

It does not matter. I have time.

It does not matter what was done to me. It does not matter that I have been like this, at such a cost and for so long. None of it matters, because this history has not ended yet. There is still time, there is still time.

It cannot be too late for me.

She carries the coastal wind in her teeth
and the furious sun in her mane.

Annie Finch, Rhiannon 

It was twenty hours on that open road. Petrol rain, torn muscles, sharp grit and silver dusk. The engine gasped to a halt and I paused at the edge of a neon skyline. I met a girl in a bar with pale hair and eyes like jade. A girl with an old guitar and a voice like running water. She played her songs, on that city stage, with a handle of whiskey and the strange lust of summer. I never caught her name. When she asked me home, with no mention of morning, I said yes. I always do. I like knowing that I still can.

In a depilated motel room we shared a cigarette, an evening, a lifetime or less. Then I climbed into my car and set Nashville behind me in the rearview mirror. I hurtled towards an amber dawn and left her there alone, with a tobacco tin, an ashtray filled with matches, and all of the faded scriptures of my longing. When I met her, I was already gone.

And what of you? I loved you so briefly but somehow never stopped. I know you could never believe that. You must think that I remember you differently; because I hated you, for so long, and so sincerely. Some nights I still do.

I adored you, I despised you, I lost you and I left you. But I never felt nothing for you. Not ever.

Is that not strange, miraculous, and terrible all at once? After all of this time, after everything that has happened, after all of the hurt you caused–I am lost, I am etherised, I am dead to the world. But when I think of you, I still feel. I always feel. 

Are you the love of my lifetime? In truth, I have my doubts. We were kids when I first met you, first kissed you, first let you in. But the love of this time in my life–I think so. The love of this moment, of the person I am now. Yes, of this lifetime—of this three-year, nine-term, two-summer nightmare of a lifetime—you are the last and most clairvoyant thing.

Do you remember watching that movie I sang from, and both of my arms were wrapped around you on an ash-stained bedroom floor?  I know you do. You must. I loved you then. I don’t know what you felt, I never did, but I loved you. And now that memory slips far from my medicated mind: like every other godforsaken recollection, it is lost. But still, I see a single night–yes that night, the one when I began to lose my mind–and I was alone, I was crying, everyone was acting like nothing was wrong, but I heard your voice behind the bedroom door. You were singing. You were playing my guitar. And as I listened, as every note fell soft like rain across my bare skin, for the swiftest and most shining instant, I was close to whole.

Our terrible, thankless past–you are its keeper. All of its pain and its promise and its prophesy belongs to you now. You took it on when you cast off me. And I am sorry for that; just as I am sorry that I left my bones bare and my troubles unconcealed. Just as I am sorry that I did not lie when I should have, and that you might have liked me better if I had. But you must never doubt how I felt about you. Whatever else you may think or believe or become, you do not get to do that. You do not get to shed all that I lived for like a skin.

I am waiting for this chapter of my life to slow and splinter to its close, so that I can start again somewhere new. I want to be a stranger. I want to stop knowing you. When I try to sleep at night (and I can’t, I still can’t–you know how I never could) it is your name that burns on the underside of my eyes. Darling, I want this to be over now. 

I could love you until the day that I die, but that will never make you good for me. Nor I for you. So fuck it. Let’s both forget, and disappear, and start again. 

In the bitter end of our lesser days, it stopped being easy to tell where the cycle ended and my life began. Because when people keep leaving you, you start to anticipate their failures indiscriminately. And you prove yourself right–that part is crucial. You dig your nails in so deep that people pull away and they never look back. This is how and why what beauty I find in my life always fades.

You know a life has lost its meaning when victory and surrender begin to feel the same. But I spread my palms and let this body bridge the distance. After all, there is nothing left of us to save.

I was a writer before I lost you. Now I just bleed, and let the words fall where  they will.

I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.

Vita Sackville West, Letters to Virginia Woolf 

Why are you so in love with
things unbearable?

Sophocles, Electra

In my dresser drawer today, tucked beneath stubs of charcoal and reams of paper and packs of stale Marlboros, I found a small pile of photographs. They are the last remaining relics of a living nightmare: some languishing artifacts I haven’t yet found strength to burn. Only one seems real. It is a dimly lit, faded polaroid. A date is marked on its back in smeared lipstick. It shows what is, what could only be called, a most peculiar bedroom scene.

Two women sprawled atop a bare mattress. It is stained with ash and something darker, dryer, more deadly. Books and pencils are strewn across the floor. The curtains are drawn, but hints of dying light filter through them, dappling our bruised white skin. I am younger and stranger, more ragged and more radiant: so awake and yet so dreadfully thin. She is slighter still, with dark hair and half-closed eyes. Her face is thrown into shadow, the outline sharp and fine against the window: as if someone had taken a blade to the sky beyond the fabric, and carved blissful darkness into its pallor. We are a mass of undone sheets and tangled limbs, our two faces and four hands, our legs, our teeth, our entwined fingertips. My lips are pressed against her cheek. Yes, I remember that night. I remember it all.

Gnawing away always at the cartilage of my life, is the etherizing question, the opiate, the scourge. What did I become when my words no longer mattered? I was nineteen years old and I was resolute, reckless, cruel to myself. I was also (for whatever it may be worth) singularly, indomitably, unfathomably alive. I miss that with every bone in my body. And I loathe it as well. Because I am the only one who really knows how it ended. And if it had not come to this, if I were treated differently, would I still be as driven, as damaged? And if I wasn’t–would I ever have gotten out? 

I cannot be sure. But the saddest, sickest part of it all is knowing that either way, it was not worth it. Not the clandestine joys. Not the terrible moments. Not the poetry or promises. Not any of it. Looking back entails the nauseating realization that I would not have done anything differently. I only wish that none of it had happened in the first place. This was not a once-beautiful thing, not a thing that died or changed or went went wrong. It was simply a waste from start to finish, a self-immolating era, a cannibalizing year. 

They say that even bad experiences teach you something. But what did I learn? That I am deficient in my own ways, that sycophants are more dangerous than narcissists or narcotics, that honestly kills swiftly, that non-normative mentalities are a cancer that no one will support you through, that cliff-edges are just things you get cast off of eventually, and people can lie and then leave with impunity. But I already knew all of these things. I learned them in childhood. I learned them in hospitals. I learned them on my father’s knee and on the undersides of my wrists. Why, you might wonder, did I choose to live them through again?

I believe that I made the same mistake twice because the second time around, I was actively choosing to do so. It was six months’ willful suspension of disbelief with a lifetime’s worth of possibility on the line. I had to believe that people could be better, despite all evidence to the contrary. I had some vague, unrealized hope that things could be different. That I could be known and loved, at the same time, indiscriminately. I don’t have that anymore. The hypothesis is tested, disproved, and I have next to nothing now. Not suffering. Not sadness. Just knowledge, some blood, and a sense of weariness I can never quite place. 

People behave in the strangest ways if you tell them this. They feel sorry for you, or try to change your mind. They say don’t give up. They say it gets better. They say you have plenty of things to stick around for. You have drive, you have purpose, you have ambition, you have a future. The very generous might even say you have talent. But what does that matter? These terms are irrelevant. They are all things that I can tell myself. Hell, I like hearing them better when they’re coming from me. So why do people think I need my own self reaffirmed? After all, it is not me that’s wanting.

I wanted to keep clinging to the last shred of naïveté I had left: that some people stayed, or if they didn’t stay, they said goodbye properly–even if no one had ever done that for me before. But I knew better. I have always known better. And why can’t someone else have this terrible knowledge, so I can just be vacant and vapid, swollen with the comfortable notion that I will not end up crying in a locked room, chewing on words that disavow my humanity and my worth as surely as they affirm what I have always known? Why can’t somebody else have my ambition and my convictions and all of my fucking medication, and I can just have that? 

In the end, it was not the transience that undid me; nor was it the oaths or ultimatums. As far as I’m concerned, love should be conditional. But you don’t tell someone you love them and then just leave. The retroactive sapping of meaning, the amputated limb, the loss that tore backwards through my past and left us all with nothing to show for it–that was it. That was the worst sin. That they caused all of this pain for nothing, and that I took the bait and the blame because I wanted to keep loving them anyways. 

So I wasted a year of my life in violent stasis. I tasted blood and bliss and the beginnings of a memory I thought I’d never take a match to. I flirted with death and a dream of something better. I went to hell and halfway back on a rough-edged hope for human decency. Now I do not write anymore–at least, not the way I used to. Just like I do not feel in any of the same ways that I used to. The passion, the consistency, the urgency, is all gone. It is scarcely worth the effort anymore. This lacking language is hardly fit for regurgitation. It is barren, disconsolate, an absence more than an art. Is this the unnameable tragedy of which White once wrote –that difference between planetary light, and the combustion of stars?

But what did I expect, having fashioned myself an existence of such profound isolation? No one waits out the long nights with me anymore. They cannot, because I will not let them. I resolved to be something different, and swore to myself that no would ever again see what I might really look like, if I were to fling my bare heart against the skin of the world. I chose this because I had to. That has not changed. 

So here I am. It’s been a while now. So long, in fact, that it feels like a lifetime. It must not really matter anymore, in the trajectory of regained sanity wherein those scenes were framed. But perhaps I learned something from them after all. Because now, for better or worse, I do not turn to face my past. I do not try to know the loss. Instead, I try to live out what I have witnessed in all of them. I eschew my promises, I swallow my tongue–and when my history comes howling, I lock the fucking door. 

Can anyone deny that we are haunted?
What is it that crouches under the myths we have made?

Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries 

Sunrise, cold sweat, chemical haze. Bare branches caress a chrome-smooth underside of sky. I am restless, trembling, iridescent, obscure: I am dreaming in the morning light. Has this garden been rendered obsolete or desirous, violent or sublime? How long has it been since I left it untended? Ivy garnishes crystal-shards of feigned remorse, found, shared, scattered, lost: hidden scores of half-gnawed bone that underpin what has been sought and then forsaken. I forget what you have done to me, how very much I still hate you. My mind is tangled in holy catastrophe, whatever lingers of your skin. And of course it is not real, but it does not matter, it does not matter—I am down in your arms again.

So I wake up, I draw back, raw sensation limps away again. It is the only way for me. Because I am dead tired, you know, of mourning these mistakes. It is terrible to be the one who remembers, who grieves. It is mortifying to admit that this still matters, to know that I still linger here even though all the rest has gone. Rinse, repeat, I scrawl. If they act like they care, they’re humoring you. If they ignore you, they’re being honest. Close your eyes and pretend it isn’t real.

One last evening breathing this in, especially that one that I might have loved—though he was never one to understand, to recognize the implacable desire that snarled beneath my topography of skin. I said goodnight and stumbled to bed, my tongue still swollen with words I have long forgotten how to say. My final night was lovely, sanguine, but there was something unsettling, even disturbing, in my farewell. I was laboring on the cusp of that deep, lost tenderness when I realized how long it has been since I have properly felt anything at all.

We, all of us, live within a glance. People look, and see themselves, see what they want or fear or expect to, see only a relation to themselves. But a self in a mirror is organic, pure: the only unadulterated gaze. When I try it myself, I see an almost-girl, all ruined makeup and exhausted, myopic eyes: she glances back, almost smiles, and it is plain that she will never be right again. I look at myself and every time, as if for the first time, I see the damage that was done to me: first in my childhood, and then again in this past year. I see the shell of the self that I could never truly be—not if I want to survive in this world. I understand that the reality of my past is that I can endure it, perhaps, but I will not recover from it. Not ever. Not really.

These weeks have been brief, drunken, avid, beautiful. I regret that they are over, and I regret that people in a distant past have left me so damaged, so deadened, that I mistrusted so many clandestine moments of now. But the truth is that I did not believe that I would make it this far. And now I have to find out what to do with myself, this improbable body, this could-have-been corpse. The wounds open with arbitrary impulse, the ichor drains, but I am not empty. I am never empty. I am alive and alight with confused sensation.

If I flooded my past with kerosene, took a match to the manuscript, would I be able to feel again? And if so, could I survive it? I cannot be sure. Before, I only wanted this, the oblivion of immolation, a somnambulist’s darkness tinged by tongues of crimson, a fire by which to erase my own name. And, after all, I had a talent for the craft. Now, I want the opposite. I want to remember everything, I want to be known. My skin is spidery with scar tissue, the rhythm beneath it is strong, but the sensation is lacking. What could possibly have changed since, but that apathy replaced my self-appointed amnesia? Is it worse to feel everything, or nothing at all?

Sometimes I think that faith is a symptom of those who are weak in their minds or hearts—but other times, I wonder if maybe everything that has happened to me was leading me here. Because at least I know now that the most authentic, effective form of survival is remembering that what you love will always eventually leave. Because I would rather be sardonic, impervious, then suffer again as I have. Because I am not much, but at least I am alive. I am more and less than a miracle: I am a result.

And already, the new recollection dawns. All I can do is rise to meet it.

I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation.

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Trigger warnings for mentions of ableism, suicidality, self harm, abuse

Your disbelief cures nothing. 

Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

Nowadays, we are all more or less familiar with the trope of the crazy woman. I have written about it before, and will undoubtedly do so again. “Crazy” is a cultural phenomenon that linguistically fuses the erasure of abuse narratives, the infantilization of women, the latent anxieties and misconceptions surrounding mental illness, and a whole host of similarly unpleasant tenets of Western thought. “Crazy” is a word that exonerates its user. Call a woman crazy, and you do not have to explain your treatment of her. You do not have to give a reason for why a once-meaningful relationship fell apart. You do not even have to acknowledge her account of the hundreds of ways in which you treated her like shit.

But the communities with the largest penchant for formulating trenchant (if occasionally slightly self-righteous) critiques of the ableism and misogyny inherent within the use of the word “crazy” are also, more often than not, precipitating their own form of this rhetoric. We tend to perceive ourselves as subversive, radical, and painstakingly careful in our applications of language, but in my communities–feminist communities, queer communities, trans communities, disabled communities, academic communities, and so forth–when we do not say that a person is “crazy,” we say instead that he, she, they are “toxic.” And that really is not much better.

I will try to make this unmistakably plain: I am not arguing, would never argue, that toxicity does not exist, or that anyone is under any obligation to accommodate toxic or abusive people. Toxicity is everywhere, all of the time. This is something that I understand far better than I would like to–believe me. I knew someone who routinely left unmistakable evidence of their self harm on my bedding and on the floor of my room. I had a girlfriend who routinely threatened suicide. I had a childhood that I still cannot fully remember or talk about. I know how bad toxicity can get. I know how agonizing–indeed, traumatizing–it is to lay down boundaries and enact separation from people you love because their behavior has gone so far beyond what you are capable of coping with. Time and again, I have been there. I know how important it is to be able to get out, to save yourself. I am not criticizing that. How could I?

What I am criticizing, though, is the strategic and contrived use of “toxic” as a modern analogy for “crazy”; that is, as a short-hand term used for deflecting awkward questions. Colloquially, “toxic” almost always implies a kind of mutual trauma, which makes people less likely to criticize your actions. This can be extraordinarily helpful if the person(s) in question really is/are toxic, and their actions really have resulted in traumatic experience. But if you use accuse someone of being toxic as an easier way of saying,  “I had been worried about us for a while, but was too afraid to confront him about it”; or, “I was unable to cope with her mental illness in addition to my own and thought we could both benefit from distance”; or, “They asked for support and I didn’t feel willing or capable of giving that to them”–then things start to become difficult.

First, and perhaps most obviously, this casual application of the word “toxic” makes it nearly impossible for survivors of abusive or mutually destructive relationships to adequately describe their experiences or identify their abusers without becoming lost in translation. And when you bring questions of preceding traumas and (dis)abilities into the picture, the term can become violent. Because if you slap the label of “toxic” on a human being, and fail to properly address their status as disabled, traumatized, or a survivor of abuse, then you become complicit in the incredibly harmful social practice of construing certain trauma or disability based behaviors as ‘choices’ or indicators of our failing health, when they are in fact permanent symptoms of conditions or traumas, and need to be recognized as such. 

It is absolutely possible to reproduce patterns of oppression even as we seek to eschew them—oftentimes we share the very facets of identity that we reject or marginalize in others.  A persons’ pre-existing disabilities must never be subsumed by a projection/displacement narrative in which trauma and disability related behaviors are only considered in their cultural reframing as ‘trigger points’ for other people (yes, even if said other people are themselves coping with traumas or disabilities).

For instance: if dissociative or spectrum-based behaviors make you inherently uncomfortable—so uncomfortable that you endorse, defend, or participate in acts of alienation and aggression towards an individual on the basis of their having demonstrated dissociative behaviors–then even if you suffer from similar issues, and even if these behaviors upset you, you still need to critically consider your own attitude towards people on the autistic spectrum, people with post traumatic stress disorder, people with dissociative identity disorder, and so forth. You need to hold yourself accountable. You need to take a long, hard look at the impact you are having, and the priorities you hold.

If you have ever considered, even for an instant, using someone’s own disability or mental illness against them in order to make your treatment of them seem more credible, then you are a part of the problem.

The thing about radical, empathetic communities is that they do not work properly without humility, mutual respect, and basic compassion. Having your own history or trauma or disability does not give anyone a free pass to weaponize ableist structures for the purpose of treating other disabled people like shit when it seems more convenient. That goes double for anyone who claims the label of ‘ally’ in a marginalized community. Because whatever effect someone’s disability may have on the people around them, the one who suffers the most from being disabled is always the person experiencing it.

To pretend as though certain conditions associated with trauma and (dis)ability are somehow innately toxic is reductive, violent, and inhumane. That kind of thinking prioritizes certain forms of trauma over others, and comes dangerously close to suggesting that certain kinds of people (or people with certain disabilities) are inherently unhealthy, and our marginalization justified.

If you ever find yourself in a community where exclusionary, abusive or ableist practices are considered defensible because your disabilities are visible, or the effects of your own conditions are somehow only significant insofar as they affect someone other than yourself, then the best thing you can do is recognize this for exactly what it is: vicious, toxic thinking that you do not need to put up with. Cut it out of your life. Protect the people you love from it. Do whatever you can to avoid replicating it yourself.

I have had the immense privilege, over the past two terms, of finding myself in communities where I am surrounded every day by extraordinary people who work their asses off to fight internalized forms of discrimination, and do everything in their power to protect me from the people who have attempted to use my disabilities against me in the past. But not everyone is so lucky: it honestly makes me sick, and sad, to consider what it must feel like to have to face this world, or this culture, or this university, alone as a disabled or traumatized person.

At the end of the day, there are a million and one appropriate ways to use the word “toxic,” and one decidedly inappropriate way of using it. So the next time you find yourself excusing your treatment (or someone else’s treatment) of a disabled person by labelling the latter as ‘toxic,’ just take a moment to check with yourself that you really do mean toxic. Double check that you are not just using toxic as a broad, deflective, misleading buzzword, to avoid saying “he/she/they are living with a disability and/or mental illness, which I don’t want to properly acknowledge in this conversation because that’s more effort than I am willing to expend: so instead I’ll rely upon known evidence of his/her/their disabilities, and the internalized cultural view of disabled people as sub-human, and leave the rest unacknowledged, because my own convenience takes priority.”

If the answer is ‘no,’ and you really mean toxic, then by all means speak on. If the answer is ‘yes,’ or ‘maybe,’ or ‘a little,’ or ‘I’m not sure,’ then pick a new goddamn word.

Things Our Bodies Used to Know

people go
but how
they left
always stays

Rupi Kaur, milk and honey 

I will never learn to love that way again, so reckless, so irrepressible that I lost all demarcation, found sinews of my soul enmeshed in the form of another. Caressing that calamity of famished flesh, of tongue to skin, sketching half-shadows in the syntax of her gaze: what remained of our gutted life trickled from between her teeth, dripped down my chin, until my chest was all soaked with her screaming, salt-crest genesis. I removed my sodden shirt, unpeeled her fawning hands. I left her alone on the wine-drenched mattress: her frailty repelled me, made me wonder, made me doubt.

It stopped mattering that she left me. It stopped mattering that she was my best thing, then my nothing. For six months, I suffered and dreamed. But then I bled her, like ink, from the bedsheets. I burned every letter. I pawned borrowed clothing. I tore pages from books. I withdrew into my rage, my words, my inexpressible solitude: I emerged victorious and alive. So our long strange history died, unrealized. Will she ever find liberation from this sin? Or must she always live with this, the knowledge that she tore into another’s life unbidden, wasted my time and then destroyed it all for nothing?

I am still this, I am still me. But the wound that I was has been cauterized now, and the new skin spreads unrepentant, beguiling. Stained shades of corrosive liquor and glass-panelled bones, strains of battery acid and the battered neck of my guitar, every new, nebulous bruise where the knuckles wound their way around my throat: I seek comfort where I still can. Crouching, like an animal astride the four-wall shoreline, still seeing dimly that seraphic face beneath the waters, feeling the whiskey-tinged howl of the currents, clawing up across the muddy banks into knife-shards of moonlight: I salvage solace where it has not yet died out.

You can still see her impact in the edges of my eyes, but only rarely, in the half-light we used to share. I was so much younger then, enraptured by the ocher dusk, as poems and promises met like bodies, and every note of Calvary seemed sweet. She was an orator, an oracle, an evening in early summer. She was jasmine and hyacinth, sweet wines and badly rolled cigarettes–those heady, rose-damp offerings for false idols or docile gods. But I was the real thing. I required blood.

Did she think that, because I loved her, she was safe? That I would not tear her apart with my pen: that I needed her tongue between my teeth? Perhaps I will always be abhorred and estranged, when the glamor fades or the passion wanes. But at least I am an experience. At least they will remember me. At least they will talk about me after I have gone. I will not fade away like some sycophant, prostituting my own inadequacy. I know now, with certainty, that what she called my madness was only the slew of her own sensations, the life she was too frightened to face.

Whatever else I may be, at least I never asked another to climb the cross in my stead.

Dispossession, hunger, alienation, hurled abuses–I have learned to see and feel my way through the dark waters of a world that is so much more dangerous than my own mind could be. And there are others like me, others who have managed to survive and yet still feel keenly, feel utterly, feel indiscriminately. The strength we practice, we who face the world unflinchingly, is enthralling, anointed, instantly recognizable. We are a fragment worth exalting, a contrapuntal clashing of flesh and fractured light. We have no use for weakness or denial. We know no patience for the faint of heart.

Without warning, she was gone from my arms, a broken-winged dagger in desperate flight. But she left me with some sanity, and the promise of the springtime. I know the earth again and I recall the language of the mind that is half-mine. I am messy and monstrous and I am myself: I do not exist for your pleasure. Every night that I endure, I grow stronger. My self-sustenance is all the more formidable because it is denoted by a joy that predates those lost days.

I stand apart from my own grief, burning like something still lost: reckless and restless, insubordinate, sublime. Twisted well beyond near-recognition, I am history, trauma, possibility enfleshed. I am every oppurtunity that you were too afraid take.

And so, I am satisfied. Can you blame me? My survival is prodigious, improbable, stunning. Covered in scars, I am still on my feet.

And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Toni Morrison, Sula

My dreams are predictably nonsensical, now: apocalyptic, anachronistic, antagonistic, undone. When the night-panic returns, and my mind is sober, it betrays one vision, which lingers like a long scream. I close my eyes and the world dies out. I see things of terrible beauty, I see things you could scarcely imagine.

I see a mirrored face of not-mine. I see a single eye that blinks, tattooed across the night-skin of the sky. I see hands, so many hands, reaching 
out. I see buildings that leer like broken teeth. 
I see the rich, raw earth inviting me to coil myself in its chasms. I see the sycophantic glimmer of the blind, unfeeling moon. I feel that shame, the childhood shame, and it guts me as I glean and I gleam.

Perhaps this is why poets drink themselves to sleep, why prophets do not dare to dream. But then, maybe it is simply the season. I always go a bit mad in the springtime.

At least I am not what I once was–some undesired life compounded by attractions that nearly proved fatal, a mortician’s spectacle intent upon undoing itself. To read my journals now is to read the ravings of a child born wanting: a need incarnate, bound to the bodies that loved her own. Defenseless or indefensible, I was my own suffering’s source. My yearnings betrayed an utter lack of plain stability, and the horror was mimicked in the very fabric of my existence, in the structure of the world I created around myself—for those who build worlds are condemned to live in them, and this is especially true of women.

I hope I do the right thing, this time around. I hope I hurt less people. I don’t want to be this, exhausting, volatile, unpredictable, violent, extreme. I want to be closer to normal. I want to rest easy. But I also want to burn. I want to be beyond this body, to not be tethered to a thing that takes on scars so easily. I want to relinquish the pain but not the nightmare.

I read theses reams of ink that curled and dried, so long ago now, on the pages of diaries I still cherish and still loathe. I was so vulnerable then, so open, so strangely naked to the world. I hung my love and my self on the cross that was their faithlessness, their inconstancy:
 reaching between my ribs, I plucked out my own heart, the lovely, crimson thing. Like a fledgling bird, still fragile, it hardly had a pulse. Desperately, recklessly I offered it to whatever words or fingers happened to worm their way into my life. I hoped someone would care for it, because I did not know how.

Now I am older, and so much more a stranger to myself. No more torn clothes and bleeding soles, no more howling winter winds and screaming at the streetlights. Are there things that even I cannot forgive or outrun? Have I found them? Does it matter? Losing her was just the punctuation mark on a sentence my father started when I was nine years old.

I should have been a proper girl, with kissed lips and starry eyes and half-staged love affairs, sitting on the harbor docks and combing out my sea-swept hair.
 I should have been a woman like the ones I saw in pin-up magazine pages, back when I was growing young, the cheap lipstick and candy skin. I should have been an image to be flattened out, cut and pasted, then forgotten, with a glassy smile to break and fade with the last of the summer skies.

Instead I am genderless, purgatorial, impure, with my father’s blunted bones and caustic mind, and my own strange desires, and clusters of burns, and knots of memories altered by chemicals, and that grudging will to live that even the fires could not purge. I want to wander the alleyways of cities I’ve never seen.
 I want to dance on glass and live on smoke
 and dream new languages. I want to bear down beneath the breaking waves
, and lose myself to the dim Atlantic. I want to make love in strange places, to be desirous and dangerous, to be abhorred and enraptured all at once.

But it is a foolish, selfish thing, to wish for prolonged madness. I am still a part of some world beyond my walls. I owe it to the rest of them to remain sober, and wary, and comparatively sane. I have to feel my own affections move through me, like memory through a living mind, flaring then fading, and I must not try to keep hold of them for too long. I must wait for the day when I wake up and I realize that it feels better, that I have healed, and I can live as an ordinary person–not as the product of a past I cannot forsake.

To live or love at all, you must know yourself sincerely, must know your own strangeness and your own conviction. You have to understand what parts of you to cultivate, and which ones to fear. When the cold spring morning comes, you walk out and face it. You cannot consider it. You must not delay.

a confessional digression

Please. Don’t switch off my mind by attempting to straighten me out. Listen and understand, and when you feel contempt don’t express it, at least not verbally, at least not to me.

Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

Last night, I watched the silver floods encroaching, another dawn I could not delay, another figure beside me, drenched in brine, immersed in the stygian shoreline of my bed. My limbs all tangled in his hands, eyes as wide and as empty as the harbor, not speaking, barely breathing, just awake. The rain fell like glass, splintering against the windows: English spring swept past the curtains to croon against the edges of my skin. In my shrine to inertia, self-effacement, inundation, I sang myself silently, at long last, to sleep.

This city has settled into the contours of my soul, has gutted the body I entrusted to its keeping. I know all of its intricacies, the dark architecture of its desire. I know its need to categorize, glamorize, idealize the misery of the human mind, to watch its spectacular collapse without interference. This respite is condemned to its own solitude, subjected to the whims of the horrific and achingly wonderful history it retains.

I adore and abhor my own feral half-life. Insurrectionary cultures and radical ideologies lend themselves to this spectacle of difference, this specter of indifference, this paradox that prevails here. To be violent and reckless and insolent is less frightening than trying to stay healthy and sane. How many of us are ‘mad geniuses,’ and how many the wayward products of troubled homes: still subconsciously childlike, in need of the guidance we never received, facing the consequences of adulthood as we must? 

If I were to lay my own heart bare, at this moment, even I am not sure what I would find. There is still so much that I do not understand.

But what do I have left to be afraid of? I used to fear the loneliness of being left. I don’t have to be afraid of that anymore because I have been left. I have been left over and over again. Of course, I wish some parts of me had not been killed off quite so quickly. Those were some of the best and most tender ways of feeling that I still knew. I was never supposed to be like this: I was supposed to be normal. But when you are dissected and lied to and always so goddamn confused–you learn to sharpen your edges. Where they hurt the most, you leave them jagged. You allow the others to wound themselves against you, to break like ships against the face of a cliff–that cliff they were so sure you were always on the edge of.

I knew the choice I was making last spring. I knew what the consequences would be if my trust proved ill-founded. And it did. So I lost the faint hope that I had salvaged so lovingly, that had sustained me for so long. No part of that remains inside of me now.

In the summer, I told my therapist that I would die for my friends, that they were the family I had never had. By early winter, I had to look her in the eye and explain that no, no they do not talk to me anymore, not because of what I did, but because of what I am, because they have finally come to know me, and they have come to know that they cannot love me. Not with my nightmares and my episodic terrors and my horribly wounded mind. I have no one now.

So I stopped caring so much. I learned to just fade away. I compare my life to what it once was, what it has been, when I loved viciously, when there was something left to save. Where I once knew madness and joy, now I only have this body. I have blood and enamel. I have fragments of a family. I have a place at university. I have a prognosis. I have my language. I have a promise I cannot break. These things are all that I am. Everything else is transient at best. My history is a grave: it is best left undisturbed. All the same, I keep my ear to the ground.

I am getting healthier, but health does not feel robust, or vivacious, or restorative. Mostly, it lives in the quiet acts of endurance that I practice, and practice, and must not forsake. It is strange not to suffer. It is strange not to know the loss. Health feels like growing older, warier, more indifferent. Sometimes it feels like solitude and solemnity. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all.

Even at my best, my most sincerely content, I still feel that irrevocable distance between myself and the exterior world. I see all of the people who are not me, those harbingers of lived existence, and I am not like them, but I want to be. Their lives are written in a language I can scarcely decipher, my entire existence is an act of translation with which I can barely keep pace.

So yes, sometimes I am still strange, and sometimes I still frighten myself. But more often I am deeply and utterly and unconsciously in love with the world around me. Because I am lucky. I am lucky to have been abandoned, I am lucky that it has been so hard. Every day has become a refinement of, an engagement with, the conscious art of loving myself. How many others can say the same? 

Once, I was a universe that could not keep its shape. I was a nebulous dreamscape of scorched flesh, and bleeding wrists, and vague, unparalleled yearning. I was filled with that aching need to be formed into something new. Now I am nothing but a purpose and a vow. I have yielded gently to some simple, starless life. You could not bring me back now if you wanted to. And I could not love you again if I tried.

And there was no pain.
The wind
was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all.
It walked out of the light.

Anne Carson, The Glass Essay