What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Sylvia Plath, Three Women

A balcony in Rome; a desert in Egypt; two cities in Palestine; a café in Venice; a Garden

Let the wolves cry out and the loss subsume itself; let the last light falter in fixity and the mountains emerge like a cipher when the rain subsides. Writhing spires give way to weeping tides: ruins mutter like smoke beneath the rising Tiber. Salient currents flood the silent streets: ivy clasps and climbs. I am iridescent, etherized even now. But I am less undone than I have been of late, and not so disconsolate as I often used to be. This is just another kind of loneliness—another ancient city and another Troy to burn. So I grapple, and I grimace, and I bare my broken teeth. I try to be all that is asked of me. When the dawn light falls in daggers, I try to smile. When the night comes howling, I try to sleep.

It has been a long time. It has been such a long and thankless time. Maybe I am maudlin, melodramatic, obsolete. But I fear sometimes that I can no longer write; for my work is my blood made legible, and lately I seldom open the vein. I think I am afraid to—after all, it nearly killed me twice. I felt and I felt until I barely knew myself. Until I forgot what it was to be intact. And in the end, it never really felt worth it.

In the far, forgotten refuge of some city astride the Nile, in houses of red clay and sun-burnished gold, I resided for a time. I waited and wondered until my countenance changed utterly, my waking mind mired in torment and talk. Then reverent, trancelike, I set off once more. Barefoot in the burning olive groves, I dragged my ruined carcass and my self-appointed cross down the narrow streets of Bethlehem, the caustic stones of Calvary, the gardens and the glory of a land I was not promised. With my pride and my memories and all my fucking medication, I walked for as long as my health would allow.

I strayed far from time and intent, lost utterly my self and my certainties, until I came to rest at last, asleep upon a sea of sand. There, through a half-mad poet’s Spiritus Mundi, and the thirteenth verse of a forsaken story, I saw a beast sedate in stone. I watched its barbaric splendor: dim with prowess, drunk on saints’ blood, drenched in holy water. But in that waking nightmare, in the thrall of a prodigy awaiting its genesis, it was I who committed the cardinal sin. Crowned in the dark glamour of Babylon, baring each inadequacy like a prophetess of false pretense, I kept my eyes open. When the world turned away, I looked on. I bore witness.

At first, I tried to atone for this, to exorcise my fantasies and phobias like confessions. I wielded the pen like a craft-knife, its barbed diatribes, its poison and promises. I took my long-festering vitriol and turned it upon myself. But when I carved the memory back out of me, all the secrets and untruths, the vicious multitudes, the visions and consequences—it all amounted to nothing more than the sum of my scars and the stains of a history I scarcely recall. I wanted to move past it. I wanted to start over. But I am condemned, all of us are, to live in the worlds we have built.

So in the end, I let it happen. When dry sands gave way to Venetian canals, and desert winds to the sensual bite of warm summer, I knew I had a choice. And under the sputtering gas lamps, in the sordid splendor of a silk-strewn café where the moon hung low above clouded waters, I made it. In foreign muscles of finality, I leant back, gave myself over, became myopic and mundane. I lent myself and my longings to those eyes—that scourge, that purgatory, staring back into mine. And what a resolution it was.

Hands moved soft across ivory keys—like Camelot, Troy, Pandæmonium before us, this world of ours was built to music. I wrote into the dawn when she slept, filling that room with growing things: lotus boughs and reams of ivy, garlands of juniper and night-blooming jasmine. Threatened with the specter of inevitable expulsion, we endured. And in that quiet chrysalis of thought, we created a kind of folklore: crystallized and bound to an irretrievable past.

And yet it felt too soon, to feel so gone. Losing with conviction, with precision, with wonder, I grew weary in the far-flung fields of starlight. I only ever wanted to hold you; to drink of your shadows and dance in your tangles; to rove the hazes of hyacinth, the woodbine and myrtle; to swim the wandering rivers of my Theanthropic lover when prisms of light adorned your opened skin. Our courtship was realized in the taste of bare flesh—sweeter than virtue, riper than knowledge—and the blossoms and briars of our Eden, raised again. But when the season faded, I dreamt alone in the dying light—I mourned the dusk of the girl I had loved, with a faded crown of asphodel and one foot forever in the earth.

They say that women change the world with their grief. In what little remains of our garden now, I recall Demeter’s last prayer. Hands unclasped, eyes upon the quiet earth, palms clenched like trowels, she digs: down below the surface, down towards the god she seeks, down to the lover and keeper of her last, most desperate desire. I will follow for longer than the sinew allows, scraping my knuckles to the bone, breaking my hands against the surface to attain my object. When the Earth withers and dies, when the grain weeps its last life away and the doves fall silent in the heather fields, I will take no notice. I will brave the barren lands where nothing grows. I will find my way back to her beneath the fertile soil.