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.