Unless…

Nothing has happened. I have spent these hours besieged, alone, behind the locked doors of my room, the curtains drawn, the time passing like molten chrome: I have sealed myself off like a moving pupil beneath its lid. I will receive no one. Today, I did not eat. Last night, I barely slept. My head is riddled with pain, shadows forming under the bruised socket of each eye. I’ve ruined myself again.

Sometimes, I want people to be afraid for me because I want to hurt them. I draw them in with my half-conscious performance of mutilation, then start to hate them. I punish them for caring. I do not know when I became this way. I am so full of self-loathing and disappointment that there’s hardly any room left for love or redemption or gratitude anymore. I am beyond redamancy, beyond recompense. I am disgusted by myself, and by everything.

I really thought I could get better after last spring. But I was so naive, with my promises and my principles and all of my fucking optimism. I loved them so much. I was so sure I would be loved in return. I do not know how long I spent on the periphery of their lives, when I made them the center of mine. I do not want to know. The world was opulent and entropic and cold, and always I knew that, inside of me I knew it, but I kept my misgivings at bay. I should have been more careful. All of that trust and that hope and affection: I never stood a chance.

But I am a liar, of sorts, and always have been. Or at least, I think I am: I don’t often know what is real. I don’t know what is my fault, and what isn’t, and I no longer trust anyone to tell me. So I might be lying right now. Or not. I never really know. I am sure of my own history though, of this year spent in ashes, how I screamed out towards the world, how my cries for help tore through everything–the language of my writing, the scars all across my skin, every conversation I tried to start–and how it all echoed back to me again, unanswered. No one cared.

I was not even worth your consideration. You did not give damn what state you found me in, so long as I was not an inconvenience. The moment I became one, I became nothing at all. I was un-rendered. Unmade. And now, I do not matter. You said you loved me and you left me to die. And a thousand times over, I nearly have. I nearly have. I am so angry, I am sick. But I hate who I am, and if I could drive myself away, I would. So can I really blame any of you for doing precisely that?

Someone should have taken the pen from their hands. The fixed, formal clauses, the nonchalant accusations, these people that I once loved have wrought words more barren and forgettable than the way her lips felt beneath mine on the last night I spent with her. The ambivalence, the cowardice, the capricious faiths: her final phrases were an insult to everything that happened, to this unfathomable year, to everything that we lost.

It is not dying that I fear; nor is it depression, psychosis, addiction, mania. What I dread, above all, is that I am dispensable–and this year has proven that fear well-founded. The stalwart affections that I once waxed self-evident have eroded slowly beneath cool, dismissive tones. I recoiled from all of them, from their apathy, from the world, from my family, from myself. Those weeks were a nightmare incarnate: I wanted everything to end. But if I were to die, then I would die a failure, friendless and alone. So I had to keep living. There was no other choice.

But it felt like slow death without the promise of a funeral. So I drew the only compromise I still knew how to draw. I learned to stop caring at all. I live now with the paralyzing fear that I am no longer a person worth knowing; that all demarcation has ceased; that my countenance has become an oppressive plentitude; that what I am is indistinguishable from what has been done to me; that I am nothing more than the sum of their dismissal; that I am devoid of an effectual self. Who, after all, could care for a mere consequence? I offer nothing but vitriol and cynicism. Nothing of use remains within me.

I promised myself that I would stop this. Stop writing about him, about her, about the scores of friends and lovers who grew tired of me. Stop writing about my father. Stop writing, in short, about the people who left and did not give a damn. But sometimes I cannot. Sometimes I am too angry, I can barely withstand it, and then I am stricken, I am numb. Sometimes it is too much to remember. Sometimes I must remind myself not to feel.

I wonder, in spite of myself, whether or not I will ever open these curtains to the sunlight, ever unlock this unseeing door, ever answer the anxious calls from my doctor, ever endeavor to eat or drink or heal again. Sometimes I doubt it. I might be done trying.

But at least I can write freely, now. God knows there is no one left to read this.