For Gina–and for James.

But your great sadness will join the stars,
a new star to wound and outshine the skies.

Frederico García Lorca, Elegy

Look at this, at this, my heart; wherever and however you are now just look at this terrible tangle of thorns. The skin has been split into shivering parts: hips wrapped in rosebuds and ribs in barbed wire, the blood thins again, the white wrists fold like paper. But this is not about me, not really; there is precious little left of that to write about. (I wonder how it felt, to break me down and bleed me out. Can they still sleep at night? Does it matter?)

Even before the worst occurred, when this was all just radio silence–for I had not yet come home to find the bodies of people I loved turning cold–I spent the past two months in a semi-pathetic state of despondency. Upon losing what little affection I thought I had found in that ancient, fallen city, not to mention every friend who proved worse than faithless, I was submerged once more in the astringent madness that always arrives, like a bloodlust, with the winter. I frequent my own blog rather often now, unconsciously revising previous pieces on suicidality and my own forsaken flesh. I read the language of my earlier days, consume it almost obsessively–considering, elaborating, re-assessing again and again.

I still stand by what I said. Yes, I maintain what I have written before, and with all of the conviction I managed the first time. I do not believe that any death is as simple as a tragedy. I do not believe that every life ends before its time. But two gone–two, in as many months, and both of them scarcely as old as me? Their absence feels so much more lucid, more real, than the blood that dries between my teeth or knees, than the knotted nightmare of scars that fire and ink could not purge. Why am I still standing, me, and not them? Two. That soul-numbing number devours raw life like locusts. Two, two–how many people have I loved and seen buried now? How many more are to come?

In some ways, it hardly seems to matter. My grief is so expressionless now, so solipsistic, so self-consuming; my vision silenced, I listen in compliance as the world crashes into verse all around me.

“I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

Another one gone, as if he had not been. The words that tore what remained of my strength apart, while former friends feigned ignorance or offered hollow apologies. Life support. No brain activity. He’s gone, Grace, he’s gone. And then another, just as sudden and as senseless, her lack of life waxing serpentine within me, like a lidless, venom-tinged movement beneath anemic skin. Another skipped funeral, in a week’s time or less. It will happen again, I am certain of it. And the next time won’t be any different.

It does not matter. I am barely there. I am the only thing left, and this is not real. A girl that I knew in some other life watches me closely, standing silent, my face alone not anointed by tears. She asks, “How are you staying so strong?” I do not respond. I finish my drink and turn back towards nothing, because any answer that I give is a lie. There is nothing strong about me. I am the fucking opposite of strong.

Because I knew, in a way; I have always known. I knew and I didn’t. The same could be said of others, I am sure. But I was selfish, I turned away from everything, from the world. My challenge and my subject, for as long as I can remember now, has been myself. But lately my mind has been devoured by this fact, by the question of my own trauma and self-loathing, by a narcissistic, dialectical curiosity about inadequate acclimatization and my specific relation to the ones who left me. Instead of caring, I brought myself to each new extreme. I became my own best weapon and worst enemy. I withdrew and watched. I held my tongue. I did nothing. My distorted fury rises like a scream. How could it come to this? Is your own life even yours to mutilate? Did you find peace at last, or did you simply find that there was nowhere left to go?

But then, in some ways, I think I do understand. Not what you felt, but why you did it. I understand that. Because once I dug a shallow grave for myself by the shoreline, and prayed that, in its gaping mouth, my body would decay and asphodel would grow in rivers from my skin. I remember the dark seduction, the macabre calm of it all. But I could still feel rainwater carving patterns through the soil, the paths of my sensation were elusive but inexorable, and I had to live. Somehow I knew that I had to live. Because I owed someone something: not my life, but an absence of suffering. I kept on. All the same, I understand. Because sometimes I still wish to be down there, under the earth beside you and sleeping as softly as new fallen snow.

This must be the second coming of which the old poets speak. Has there ever been a generation more shattered, more disturbed? Turning, burning, these wayward children that slouch across the sand-shore face of the Earth, in the clutches of silence and dignified chaos, we all await meaning. We keep our memories and take on your blame. We have bars for hurling words or fists, whiskey writhing in our time-coated throats, filthy oxygen in clairvoyant masks, IV needles sliding slowly into our veins: our survival liquified, our suffering unreal. We live. We fuck. We work. We disappoint. We bare our teeth and afflicted skin, we scatter ourselves across bedsheets and rooftops, we cast faltering matches at the far-off, slippery stars. We taste our own smiling horrors like a birthright: their false, sordid glamour, the electric notches of ferocity across our tongue. Of course we sometimes dream of dying while we’re still so young and beautiful.

But nobody is okay anymore. Not one of us. Our lives, once bared, are just long shrieks of protest: against the world that taught us to hate ourselves, against the blood and ink spilling from speechwriters’ pens, against the calamities to which we bear an ever-present witness. We’re half-sick of shadows and lost possibilities, of candlelight vigils, of endless catastrophe. We reject the culture that failed us, that starved us, that tried and tried to “fix” us until we finally destroyed ourselves. We must now engage in the violence of becoming, the nameless acts of destruction and resurrection that tear back the curtains through which senseless life is framed. “The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.” But not yet. Not yet. We are still alive, and we have work to do.

In the corners of our culture where we presently inscribe the sentiments of the still-living–what we should have seen coming, what we might have done differently–we must now lay the foundations for empathy, for solidarity, for something, anything, better than this. In the wake of horror there must also be solace, textured though it will be by the grief that is necessary for loving or living in the first place. There must be some comprehension of the inimitable displays of devotion and selflessness shown by these people who survive for so long against impossible odds.

The end cannot be what matters, lest we all come undone beneath our own despair.

We have, and must enact, the knowledge that they have not suffered needlessly. They loved, and were loved. They stayed with us for as long as they could, they endured, they seared the snarling rhythms of their pulse against an intolerable world. That alone is a victory. To live at all is inexpressible triumph. We must recognize this. We must understand this. We must reframe the discourse that surround our losses and longings. Can we do it? Can we love each other? Forgive each other? Watch out for each another? Can we care? If so, then the grief is not futile, the tragedy not insurmountable. To create the world wherein a life seems worthwhile–is this not the possible future whereupon our better efforts must reside?

You, my love, have done your part. You two are two, and one, at once, inexorably, and recoiling in your Janus-heart the sacred scripture of a twin silence resounds. My words are formless, grief-infused, but by own principle, how am I to mourn? You lived, and lived well, for so long. You are where nothing can hurt you any longer. Your resistance was so realized, so unearthly, so saturated by love. How can one not find some solace in that? Yes, I miss you. I miss all of you who are lost to me now in this way. I want to believe in some other place and time, some holy refuge, somewhere to find you. But in truth, my hopes are scarcely reliable. Wherever my fragmented faith may still lie, it was never to be found in a Heaven or Hell. This is the last life we all had to live. I do not think that we will meet again.

But we live through one another other still: in the brightly burning echoes of a future those of us living can still form. So rest easy: do not ache any longer. We will carry this on, this purpose informed and enriched by the long triumph of your efforts to remain attached, as it were, to the world that failed you, and that we aspire to recreate. Sleep well beneath the silent stars, and in my own time, I will join you there. We all will.

For now, though, we must live. We must give rise, within ourselves, to the possibility of a world worth living in. It is the final respite that I can think of; for I am so very tired of goodbyes.

Do I not live? Badly, I know, but I live.

Sophocles, Electra

Forty-nine seconds to midnight. Skin more pale than the new-fallen snow. Tremors still echoing through my right wrist.

” …It is very hard having and loving a friend who seems to be perpetually on the verge of a cliff.”

With one last breath, one last glass of red, one last re-reading of these words, I bury a history that never should have been. Here, on this blog, I put to rest an assertion more worthless than a cast of bones, an absolute fiction of who I am, a half-comic parable of sanctimonious virtue, a self-righteous tragedy of failed human care. I expunge myself of its hysteria and stale hypocrisy. I exorcise its existence, because I do not believe them anymore. I do not believe anyone. I have no one left but myself.

I have always been a nostalgist, drunk on the impossible past. So this has always been a space for lamenting, embalming, yearning, recalling–but never for being. And certainly not for becoming.

This should not surprise you, reader. I spent a year dying, accepting misery in its every form. I spent a summer powerless and praying that the world would somehow become kinder. Matthew 5:8. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God–but I saw no such animal. I only saw me. Slashing and burning and slicing away, hating myself, blaming myself, atoning for crimes that I did not commit. I wanted to be different and I was too afraid to stop, to breathe, to remember what I really am, and now I feel nothing, nothing, nothing at all. Just plain, flat, unremarkable anger. Oh god, I will be howling for a long time yet. Is there any action more intoxicating than the willful suppression of the past?

I lie back in a clean white bed, the surgeon’s palms run slow across my form–outstretched, stripped bare–they slide between my clenched thighs, my gritted teeth, my cringing ribcage, my weeping spine: probing and caressing every shivering inch of my being. I am searched, I am scoured, I am drunk on my own violation. I no longer bear any traces of the scourge we call memory. I am clean. I am done trying to be better. I am done trying to fix myself. I am done trying to “heal.” It is someone else’s turn; I am standing, toe to toe, with the very world that mutilated me. I am subsuming the narcoleptic savagery of what one might call a past. I am burying my own heart.

So what remains? Only an inked, shaved, writhing form, with scars and cigarette burns where the wrists should be. A woman, half-alive: not nightmarish, but new. A vacant casket for the peace I’ll never know. A walking testament to unwilling existence. The same empty phrases on a snarling shred of paper. A child still screaming for help; for a miracle; for mercy; for life.

These marks mean nothing if I forget their source. Without a history, I can remain pure.

I have no purpose, not yet, but I retain some inclinations of the person I used to be. There is a woman, half-remembered, in an alchemist’s haze: Ophelia’s daughter, her velvet-dim eyes and reams of blonde hair, the water flowing like a sunrise along her neck. It was only this winter. I remember her burning words, when the paint slipped like confession from my skin, and the world around me glittered with an iridescent brilliance: a radiance that spiraled like currents of the air. I was translucent, un-become: I could have stayed beside her in the dark of that morning, and roused her waking form with the waning of the moon. But I did not have the courage, I was bound to my own perception of myself. I felt too forgettable, too undesirable, too repulsive, too unwell–I felt, in every fiber of my being, the image that they had constructed for me, and spread like toxins through the city streets.

I have never allowed myself to be loved. I have attached myself instead, with uncanny precision, to those who can or will not adequately care for me, whose unattainable affections suspend me within a comfortable and constant state of uncertainty, self-loathing, and desperation. I do not quite know what I am worth yet; but whatever is to come, it will surely be better than this.

So I resolve to find people who love me. I resolve to find people who stay. I resolve never to crawl. Not for anyone. I resolve not to forgive them all, not ever, but to simply and mercilessly forget. I resolve to never revisit the hell that I have found on the underside of my own adorations. I am more than ready now. I am resolute. I will take this year by the throat, work my fingers beyond the splintering bones, drag my teeth across twin hearts of desire and decision, and stop caring, stop caring, stop caring about any of this.

Every drop of blood I waste on their irreverent memory, they whose erasure of my existence stripped the very essence from my flesh, whose cavalier indifference all but killed me in the end, is far more insidious than grief. I am well beyond hatred now. I am beyond contrition. I am beyond disbelief. But somehow, I have survived the procedure. The year is new. And I swear, as I forget them, they will come to remember me. They have only earned as much.

I resolve not to open my skin. I resolve not to try to die. I resolve not to surrender my own sense of conception. My single resolution is to live, and to live well.

Because I want to write something wonderful now. I am tired of writing myself.

But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

This year has taught me that there is always more to lose. This year has taught me that no vow remains unbroken. This year has taught me to hate myself, completely. This year has taught me the twisted art of nonbeing. This year has taught me that to trust anything other than myself is to risk the wretched slew of disillusion, the eventual, crushing disappointment of being turned away or cast aside. I have become so afraid of being hurt, or left, or humiliated that I can no longer fathom who or what I am—other than some formless shade of imperfection, aggravation, and pale, infected love. This year has taught me a thousand ways to die without slowing my pulse, or stopping my breath. And I am grateful for it.

After missing the funeral, I was certain that things could not get worse. And then, of course, they did. For days, I did not eat. I did not drink. I did not speak. I did not sleep. The times I have striven to engage here, to exist, to mimic normalcy, have all but undone me. So this is my new way of worship, my Eucharist, my consecrated mass: every step that I take from this room, I regret threefold. Instead I lie here, still and without self, only worth what I can salvage: my work, my sobriety, the fragments on this blog. I am a divinely lifeless thing. I starve and sedate myself in the hope that, someday, I might be made pure.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, utterly uncaring, I watch the hated flesh hang strangely off these battered limbs. I spend entire days in a dissociative fog. I wake up in bizarre places. I am haunted by unusual thoughts. Last night, I dreamt that someone carved my name into the door of my closet. I dragged my fingernails across the surface until it all seemed like chaos, a bloodied cross, a star-strewn sky: no meaning to be found. Then I looked again and there was no name, no me, just claw marks and shredded wood. Out of my mind again. My senses were laced with benzodiazepine. My flesh was filthy. I should have died.

If this is your model of health, then I do not want it. I have nothing left to desire, or to know. I built a life on false affections and manufactured bliss, and now I have found the bottom of the glass. And my god, how fucking empty it all seems. But some small miracles still work their way into the world, pushing up like pale green things, like life through the cracks in the asphalt. I could count them on a hand, of course, but they matter. They must.

Frigid and shivering, fingers wrapped in shreds of cloth, cigarettes faltering in the wind, breath that mingled with smoke on the air. Words that drifted across the frozen silence. There was one living thing that still sought meaning, one body that was not mine, I tethered my mind to his, I reached out, I held on. Each thread was alight and I could feel a life somewhere far beneath the cautious words and silver-tinged pulse. And there it was. Something striving for a reason to be. Like me. Like me. Not a false friend or a worthless lover or a prying gaze. Just a glimpse of elsewhere. A flash of thought. A small miracle.

And then again. Staggering down tear-stained suburban roads, blind and numb with shock. Hollow with remorse, my mother’s screams following like scalding knives all the way across the threshold of the door. Walking fast towards the midnight streets, seeing streaks and blazes of light, like falling stars, whistling engines of sound, waiting to be struck, waiting to feel—to be found. It was in my mind and all around me. But then someone did find me, curled up against the darkness. Someone did come, in the end. And I was huddled in the passenger seat of my best friend’s car, chain smoking old Camels, half-dead with the cold, and there was no music playing, the silence murmured like a crypt, and there was nothing around us but memory and motion, and a blank expanse of highway, stretching out towards unreality, no way to be stopped, to be placated or constrained: a small miracle.

Today, I found her notebook, from when she loved me, or at least gave a damn. I haven’t the faintest idea when or how it came into my possession. But I knew its owner at once, recognized the reams of poetry wrought in emerald ink: “alchemic lips,” “crystal crust; depressed with snow…” how wonderfully she wrote, so very long ago, before she decided—or they decided for her—that the love of one half-mad girl was not worth her worthless time. The very thought of her mouth in mine makes me feel sick now, infected, like some parasite’s unwilling host. And I found the residue of that other one, too, more brutal than the first and yet less memorable, with her colored pens and her foreign postcards and her Bashō haiku, all as hollow as her apologies, her promises, her feigned concern for me. I let the flames wander up each sheet of paper, licking and snarling; the slow, toxic consciousness of consolation; the grim satisfaction as every edge curled and burned, and the tips of my fingers burned too. A history crumbled away with the embers. I owed them nothing, I was violently exonerated. A small miracle.

These are the moments I have found amidst the frozen soil, the fragments of life made incarnate even as I sought to unearth my own grave. But I, myself, am no miracle. I am just smoke, and some blood, whatever you make of that. I am frightened and keep no promises. I hold no mastery over my own mind: I am not in control of its meaning any longer. The me you know now is still bitter and vicious and yearning for retribution. I tore through shreds of skin and scar tissue to seek my forgiveness. I found none. I reject you still.

I have been lost for a long time now; so long, in fact, that I have surrendered all hope of being remembered. But my god, my god am I alive. Against my better judgment, no less. I am blind and feral and crawling across the raw face of the world. My mind is slipping and splitting, the brain tumbling out across the tongue, breaking my teeth in its final exodus, while my words strike like diamond against an uncaring audience. And because I do not want to, I will outlive you all.

I need time and I need care and I need someone who will not turn away from me. I need to be heard. I need to understand myself and the source of my misery more fully. I need closure. I need forgiveness. I need guidance and I need goodwill. In this nexus of desire, decision, diazepam, disinterest, I must find some way to keep going, to stop breaking myself to bits upon the world, to become as immune and refined as a machine, a glistening engine, a triumph. Until then, I have myself, and I have moments. These wondrous instances, these small miracles, they do not save me, not even close—but they keep this flesh from going cold before its time. And I suppose that’s something, after all.

There is no freedom on earth like being uncared for. You taught me that before I learned my name. Even now, I would still come if you called.

So I will not be safe until I have nothing left to save. I must replace each of my losses with nothing. And there really is beauty left, somewhere in this dying world. There is respite. There are people worth staying for. Perhaps I will seek them again when the time comes, when my body is stronger, when this anemic season bristles and fades. Even now, the world is whiter than leprosy; the snowfall is breathless and still. Even now, some bloodless beauty remains.

But I am not a miracle. I am not a beautiful thing.

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. But people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that pain was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret to not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.

It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name

Last week, I took a holiday that wasn’t good for me. And I mean really wasn’t good for me. A perfectly horrible nightmare to round off a perfectly horrible term. An absolute, undiluted regret. I wish I was exaggerating. Or kidding. I am not. But if one single, worthwhile thing came out of that trip, it was when someone showed me an essay. This essay, to be exact. And as I skimmed it, I fell in love.

“Survival is not inspiring, it is repulsive, and it is always the rats that run first, the cockroachs that survive. I am a rat. A cockroach. A parasite…. And Charlie crawls around the sewers of Philadephia with no clothes on.”

(The spelling errors are in the original piece and I refuse to let autocorrect change them).

Yes, I fell in love, though I’m not sure who or what with!

Because like Charlie, our irredeemable hero and perpetually undermined Rat-King of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and like the author of the original article, I am a survivor in the most parasitic, depressing sense. I drink too much. I smoke too much. I sleep too little. I forget to shower. I forge relationships with unreliable, compromised people. I have a lot of daddy issues. True, I don’t hide dead pigeons under my army jacket, but once I kept a live mouse in my car for a period of time that I still refuse to specify. I, too, have difficulty navigating the admirer-stalker divide. I am similarly prone to the excessive employment of keyboards and crayons, and not always to the desired effect. I like words, but they usually come out in the wrong order. I’m notoriously hard to get rid of. In fact, I am such a relentlessly present presence, regardless of whether or not I am wanted, that I strongly suspect that I would also have survived my own abortion (and yes–that is a canonical fact of the show). I mean, who fucking knows? I don’t have a goddamn clue what’s going on most of the time, I find that I have more in common with spiders than with people, and I would absolutely bring spaghetti into a movie theatre in my purse.

But it’s also more than that. Like Charlie, I seldom feel welcome. I love too sincerely and usually at the wrong times. I keep unacceptable habits and I hurt people in all kinds of ways. I cry and scream and hit things and bleed. I storm out of my house with two packs of cigarettes and no shoes on. I feel lonely. I love cats and small, dark spaces. Sometimes I panic, and when I do, I fuck up everything.

If there’s one mistake I can’t seem to stop making, it’s that I never admit how disgusting my own existence feels. I usually try to aestheticize everything, especially myself, but no amount of charcoal sketches or feminist photoshoots or verbose writing has ever made me feel any cleaner. I went back to Oxford all full of hope and excitement, and by the fourth week I barely spoke to anyone. By the fifth week I was losing my memory. By the sixth I had forgotten how to spell “forgiveness.” By the time I came home, my family and my health were in total disarray, most of my relationships were worth next to nothing, my friend was dead, my dog was older than I ever remembered her being, my body was in wretched condition, and I had an uncontrollable nervous tremor in my right hand. Even now, typing is difficult.

My present life feels so despondent, so unfortunate, so perpetually disappointing, that at some point I have to stop pretending that it is beautiful or sad, or beautiful and sad. I have to get my hands dirty. When things get ugly, I have to match them. And I will. My survival is abject because of course it is. This is the form that survival takes. It is filthy and uninspiring and we all get fucking tired of it. Not all of us will make it, but I am going to, and it probably won’t be pretty. I think I am okay with that.

That is why I love the damn show, and the bizarre little man who informs and invigorates it. Survivors and narcissists and sociopaths and episodic tragedy abound—the only difference between their lives and mine is whether or not I can find some way to keep laughing. (Of course, sometimes, I remember that most of the people watching Always Sunny are not like me, which is fucking terrifying, but that’s a topic for another day.)

For me, Charlie is a mimetic horror, he is all the weird, gross parts of myself that I cannot admit: my dermatillomania, my PTSD, my addictive tendencies, my obsessive compulsions, my social ineptitudes, my delusions of grandeur, my occasionally questionable standards of hygiene, and my very, very low opinion of who I really am. Charlie is everything I am most reluctant to acknowledge or explain to you, and laughing at him is laughing at myself, is finding something worth smiling at in this absolute shitshow, this tired and half-assed existence I’ve salvaged from my many skirmishes with illness, abuse, suicidality, mania, and lots and lots and lots of disappointment.

I might not be slithering naked through the sewers (yet), but if that is what it takes to carve a life for myself, or a home for myself, then I’ll do it. I’ll fucking do it. I am desperate for something better than this: I don’t care what I have to do to get there, and I don’t care what form it takes.

I am not going anywhere, and you better fucking believe that. I am surviving. It seems disgusting sometimes, or hopeless, or inane, but I am surviving. I am not a fiction, but my god do I feel like one. And sometimes a made-up, semi-maniacal janitor at an indiscriminate Philadelphia pub is exactly what it takes to remind me that this is what my survival looks like. And every time I find myself I find myself sitting alone in an empty bathtub filled with bottles, or dissociating on a home-bound train, or pouring mouthwash on the floor because cleaning it up gives me something do–I try to remember that, if we ever met, Charlie and I would have a lot to scream about.

Psychosis on a London-Bound Train

 Maybe we will wake up to the silence
Of shoes at the foot of the bed not going anywhere.

Richard Seiken, Dots Everywhere

The forlorn shores, salient, grey, where I once walked hand in hand with my father, my small feet bare, coated with sand and nascent brine. The snarling, curling waves, the screams of the salt-bitten wind: my mind is an open grave. I am awake.

Yearnings that tighten like a noose, a flood of flesh, that scalding choice. And gone. Another thread is wrenched from the loosening fabric of this sanity, this will to be. No time to think, not even to mourn, no, not with the fighting and fucking and burning and dying–

I haven’t felt like that, no, not ever, no never again, and again, and again, always, my head collides with the unforgiving floor, again, again, this is my fault, chunks of hair are pulled out, she excoriates them, my forearms torn and howling beneath her teeth, her nails, my exposed back covered in strange, dull impressions of high heeled shoes and accusations—they drag her off of me, still screaming.

The scene fades. I am awake again. Alone. In a bathtub filled with little white pills. No. No, it is empty. The bathtub is empty. A trick of the half-light. Empty. Knees pressed to my heaving chest and cigarette ash across my lips. Empty.

This blood that stains me is not mine; but it is everywhere. The floor, the walls, these clothes, under my fingernails. It will not come off. Now it is me, screaming wordlessly. I wake up on my side, the floor is cold, I am three paces from the bathroom door. I do not know where this dream ends and the real nightmare starts. I somehow claw and crawl my way into an unmade, unfamiliar bed. I disappear.

Yes, I vanish with the sun, I do not look back. I do not pretend to care. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know what is real. Everyone can see me, wherever I am. They are watching me now. I catch a glimpse of you at the train station. Younger, like I remember you. Oh, god, I am losing my mind. My hands are trowels, for all the good it’s done me, shoveling back bits of rock and bone, I claw at the earth, break my knuckles against its surface, I dig deeper. I want to get back, back, back to you, I want to join you there, but I am bound to this life like Prometheus to his fate, and you are the chains, the best and most savage ultimatum.

There is a pressure above my forehead: a dawning, livid bruise. I remember my head hitting the floor. And again. Should put concealer on that. Hide the mark. Keep hiding. Always hide. Vanish. Un-become. I am in free fall. I am falling always. I keep dreaming that the skin has come off of my hands and face. That is not at all what it feels like, but it comes far nearer to what I really mean.

I wrote the letter, you know, my love. Expect it soon. I will not burn this one before you wake. Those days are over. I will leave it for you, unaffected. And then you will be gone and that will be everyone and I will be alone. The way I am supposed to be.

But this did not happen, no, none of this happened, the friends I once had are still with me, his death was a dream in the underside of my soul, the scars and the bruises and the claw marks are mere fiction, her vicious attack a faint shriek of nonbeing, the funeral time is not ever, the train will stop at no station at all, and nothing is real now but me.

Not long now: the blazing dream of my head is crawling out.

Sophocles, Electra

Your body curved like a vow, and it broke, and the voice cracked like bone, the pale hair hung past your throat. I dragged you from the water and was sorry that it happened.

The person you used to be, I cannot remember. There are angels and monsters and malice inside of you now. The ashes found their way beneath your skin. I heard that you will change your mind, and your name, again, rather than lose each one in its turn. The underside of your wrist, paper-thin; the pale vertebral ridges; the softly feathered cicatrices of bone–the parts of you I used to love are fading fast. I will not delay them. You are less than memory; you are mere metaphor now. And you do not know me anymore.

Once I awoke in an anemic bliss, the tangled bedsheets soaked with blood and brine, just in time to watch the shattering of my warped and lovely world. It could have been simple, if I could have been strong. But I do not have desire any longer. I am repulsed by everything. There is no wanting. No pain. I have begun, once more, to consume myself: to satiate my writhing mind with limbs, with holy water, with rust. Useful, used, or using–the fractured crystals that sharpen my teeth, that enervate fragments of my skin–I am indifferent to refuge. There is not room enough beneath the earth to hold me now.

What happens to us, who have faced stranger odds? What happens to the woman who takes a knife to her own mind? Maybe we will awake to silence at the foot of the stairs; maybe it will soften us, and we will both be healed. More likely, though, I will someday cease to stay, and you will feel an absence in the corners of your soul.

After all, I’ve found my hate again. No credence binds me here. The flesh still stretches thin across the bone, the joints still move like memory, the tongue still carves verses between my ribs. But underneath, I am unrecognizable–an unfeeling darkness when the tide comes in. There is mere acedia behind these eyes: no burning to rift the iron skies of a life. My fingers will not grasp blindly at desire any longer. My faith has at last fled its long-faltering host. Each day, I care a little bit less. It is better this way.

Nothing will hurt me now, and I can meet the world unscathed.

do not think
you are safe because
you love her.

do not think
she will not stain her mouth red
with your blood too.

Madeleine Christie, Atalanta

The first tinges of earliest winter work their way into my skin. Sometimes, I am all right. I am awake. I am engaged. I am efficient. I am resolved. It does not matter that the hours of silence have stretched horribly on into days, into weeks, until a month has passed and I have shared the time with no one. It does not matter because I am fine. I promised that I would be, so I am. I am fine. For a month, I have done precious little other than endeavor to prove just how mistaken they were; just how capable, how fine, I am.

Other times, it has not been so manageable. I am lost and confused, abandoned and alone. I am the child who cannot find her father, who cannot keep a friend. I do not have an adequate language for what those times feel like. I come so tantalizingly close to surrender. On evenings when I see these people, I commence a ritualistic communion of sharp whiskey, cold showers, little pills that blunt the edges of my grief. I spend nights wandering through empty streets or emptying bars, entire days pass where I cannot face the sun. I have broken down a fair few times. Have retreated. Cried. Sliced my knuckles on shards of plaster. Written long, impassioned letters, nonsensical apologies and half-hearted farewells, tucked them away within a pile of birthday cards, polaroids, drawings, and memories, and burned them all in wordless exorcisms of a reality I cannot face.

Even at my best, my strongest, there can be no denying it: I have had a miserable time. Each day has dawned like a deferred suicide, faithless and forlorn, and there is no consolation that anyone can offer. I have tried. I have tried. So in the end, I have resigned myself to apathy, replaced my appetite and empathy and affections with stale packs of cigarettes and hours of painstaking academic work, with bitterness and solitude and some reluctant purgatory between devastation and disgust.

Sometimes, I find that I cannot withstand it anymore. So I recommence my wanderings, find a love to sell within the confines of dim vanity and a handful of stolen hours. I shivered, last night, back into the familiarity of an ancient, sacred art: those burning moments of sanctuary, of unfettered life, of knotted limbs and hair, of hands, of hips, of knees, of tense and tangled words. And suddenly, fleetingly, my life was shining again, my pulse was strong, its rhythm was welcome. I was laughing as I have not laughed in weeks, a cigarette locked precariously between my knuckles, ash dispersed across the stained mattress, as we moved in ways that I can scarcely recall, my heels pressed hard against his waist, the pleasure running hot and fast, like blood or breath or constancy. The teeth that I had sharpened on discontentment were good for something now, tearing sensation from the savage flesh of November, and my desire was a triumph, I was feral, I was alive, I had managed to recall some final, defiant echo of the willful, half-wild person that I used to be.

Always, the specter of his absence remains, when I try to feel in these ways. Yes, yes, I hate myself for it, but in truth, I have missed him quite sincerely of late. After all, was he really so much worse than what came after? Rejection, the silence, it is always the same– he was just more honest about it.

I am learning now, albeit slowly, what I expect from the people I care for. I have no patience left for weakness and apologies, for half-hearted defenses of others’ cruelty, for those content to watch mistreatment and the infliction of suffering so long as they, themselves, remain unaffected. I do not accept, should never have accepted, the professed affections of anyone who would sanction and witness my misery rather than defend me. Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli, né lo profondo inferno li riceve, ch’alcuna gloria i rei avrebber d’elli.

If there is some other side to this, to all of the interspersed vitriol and cowardice, then I am having trouble seeing it. And is that really so surprising, so reprehensible? I challenge anyone to live as I have these past four weeks–cowering in my bedroom, too frightened to answer the knocks on my door, feeling unloved, unwell, unwelcome, unable to escape the radio silence as it cleaves my mind like a knife’s edge, abhorring my very existence–and not feel the uncompromised contempt that sustains me now.

What a wretch you all made of me. I cried. I begged. I crawled. Every night for the past four weeks, whenever I lose consciousness and vision, I am visited by the same nightmare: reliving my history as warm blood drips down my arms and from between my shaking thighs. I stagger through the silence, seeking respite. I see them, I call out, I implore them to answer, I tell them I need help. A lock clicks. My fingernails break against the door, leaving claw-marks of crimson and gouges in the wood. I wake up shaking. So now, I hardly sleep anymore–I lost that, too.

But not everyone was taken in. Just a week ago I spoke with a figure who could have said nothing, who could have remained impassive, who could have dismissed or ignored my pain, but he simply chose not to; he chose, instead, to care. I winced with realization at a single word he used, as he dragged the dark hair back from his eyes–“It isn’t fair. You’re being dehumanized.” Dehumanized. I loath those connotations, those undertones of victimization, but I could not deny or reject the phrase. He knew. He saw. And he was not the only one. I have felt alone, yes, but I have not entirely been so, for a handful of others have enacted those efforts towards empathy that their predecessors withheld. What a life I find, however fleetingly, however inconstantly, beyond the narrow binds of rejection. How many people have reached out to me since then? How many drinks and confessions and cigarettes have we shared? Reams of advice and tattered books of poetry, comfort and patience and moments of fleeting happiness, contentment, even belonging; in some ways, I think that I am finally found. 

And when I ran away again, it was into a wonderful haze of smoke and sunlight, into the company of a woman who knew I was still worth something. In the lilting taste of Spanish wine, in azure waters suspended in perfect stillness, in rich patterns of shadow across glints of burnished gold, in foreign tongues and flavors of thought, in haunting dreamscapes of lamplight and mist, in her lovely hands and softly burning eyes–I sat in silence, the resplendent city blazing far and bright below me; I chewed on the end of a cigarette and swore never to allow a person to hurt me again.

These people, these places, have loved me at my darkest. We share no history, no obligation, but they have done so anyways. Heaven knows what it means when strangers and strange places are kinder towards you than those by which you thought to establish your long-desired home. But there is, always, a world elsewhere. And I am finding it now.

There will be no more postcards, no more tears of consternation, no more belated explanations, no more prying eyes. You will not waste whatever time I still have. The photographs have peeled like raw flesh from my walls. The images and letters have all been burned away. The broken glass is strewn softly across the threshold of my door. The room has been stripped bare, reduced to a pale, watchful iris of exposure, and your scalding words and fabrications, the livid tapestry of accusation that you wove, are all I will keep to remember you by.

You should be afraid of me. I do not forgive you.

I was worth more than this, and you could not make me forget that. You could not drive me away from this place. You never had the strength, not any of you, to bleed me out. And you will never again have my yearning, my commitment, you will not even have my hatred. I will strive to feel nothing. But for as long as I live in this strange and violent place, this city of entropy and stone, I will remember what was done to me. And I am not the only one. My continued efforts to communicate, to survive, to heal, to hold myself accountable, have not gone unnoticed. I am a walking testament to deficiencies that are not my own. It never had to be this way–but this is the choice that you made.

So I accept it. I accept it all. I have no sympathy, no willingness to understand anymore. And I am not sorry for generating, on my own terms, the discourse that I have lately been denied. I have faced a month of silence, of denouncement, of ludicrously imagined false crises, of inexplicable narratives that would have damaged most people beyond repair. I have faced, for the first time in a long while now, a horror-show of instability that emerged not from my own troubled mind, but from the callousness and cowardice of others. I hope that they feel every promise they broke, every lie that they told. No, I am not sorry for writing this. For a month I have faced the wrong side of their whims; they can deign, now, to face the wrong side of my pen.

And does it really matter, anymore? Does any facet of me still truly care, except for,  perhaps, the part that bristles with frustration to remember that I ever believed that I deserved such degradation, such disrespect? I think that it is time to write of something else. I have done it. I have survived. The treatments must have worked, because even at my worst, I endured. And I have my work to show for it, and my writing, and the bonds I have forged with so many brilliant, fascinating people who I am so eager, so privileged, and so excited to know more fully in all the time to come.

I am alone now, they have made certain of that, but I will not always be. And I am ready, at last, to see this all for what it is: to condemn, to atone, to resist, or walk away. It took their every effort against my health to remind me just how badly I want to live fully, to be whole once more. On the underside of my ambition, my disillusionment, my contempt, there emerges the inscriptions of real possibility. I think I am finally awake again. I feel remorseless. I feel strong. The obscurity of my own regret is lifting. I am inexorable. Complete.

My father has taught me so well.

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.