“Go back to sleep,” she murmured. “These aren’t times for things like that.”
He saw himself in the mirrors on the ceiling, saw her spinal column like a row of spools strung together along a cluster of withered nerves, and he saw that she was right—not because of the times, but because of themselves, who were no longer up to those things.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

This is not a story about anything I have ever loved. This is a story about my illness, my undying anxieties, and the people I lost or never really had. This is just another chapter of the strangest year of my life, and it ends, as ever, with the specter of my earliest abandonment. But there was love there once. I did not always know this, but of late, I certainly have. So I am writing now in the sleepless delirium of another soon-to-be morning, with an overflowing ashtray and an onslaught of unwanted memories ringing through my tired mind. I am writing when I should be healing, because I am afraid that I have finally run out of time. After all, the spring has ended. I am crossing an ocean soon and leaving all of this behind.

Some of my best moments, the most clairvoyant and frankly erotic instances of my life, were spent in an unmade bed and the garden of my own discontent, where this branded body, all burned and scarred and wary, unfolded at last like a miracle or a mercy: engaging me, absolving me, rendering me close to whole. Those were the times that I never wanted to end, gazing down upon the form that I had come to regard so fondly; the two faces held between our four hands, knuckles entwined in tangled locks of hair; the mouth that moved in mine, tasting of something more permanent than pleasure; the ecstasy that echoed in reams of flesh, grazing against the sheltered depths of my self and my soul. I remember the abandon with which I allowed my spine to arch, arms crossed above my head, mind empty and fingers outstretched–and between my knees that half-crouching form, singular and impossibly beautiful. I felt then an elation so simple, a want so uncontrollable, that I scarcely recalled how to speak. My pulse was rapid and absolute: my body was singing that name. Does it matter what language one ascribes to such a sensation? Must it necessarily entail obligation or resolve? All I know for certain is that I was happy then. I was so entirely happy. It was one of the few things left here that could make me feel happy, that could make me feel anything at all. And I wanted to keep it until the end.

Then that time passed suddenly–two days, nothing more. All of the worst things happen around Father’s Day, I have found. So I expected something, I think, but certainly not this. That night was one of the worst in my memory. The catalyst does not bear retelling, but its consequences were instantaneous. I still do not quite understand what occurred, or why it so thoroughly undid me, but I could never have anticipated the sensation. I felt as though the utter heart had been ripped out of me. I was butchered and desperately hollow. I had seldom been so shaken, so confused, and there was nothing left to do except feel everything at once. I tried to reason with my own dissociated consciousness, but my mind had turned upon itself. I heard a laugh, a sound that scalded, and it fell like madness upon me–Left again, so soon?–until I finally slept, unquietly and afraid. That night I survived, if you may call it survival, the careless massacre of some precious drop of vulnerability that I did not know I had left to lose. I had not been aware, however scarcely, of its presence, until he bit that pretty thing in two and left me in an empty bed, drunk and dripping crimson.

Did I exasperate and disgust you, the furthest and most extreme form of what you fear yourself to be, laying bare your limitations in the extent of my insanity, the purgatory of your own conception of a self? Or perhaps I bored you, my eccentricity only amusing for so long, its value now exhausted in your unconvinced mind. Were you always too altered, too consumed by chemicals or reckless desire, to care what remained of me in the morning? But why call a thing incredible, when you no longer want it at all? Your intentions were never decipherable, never spoken. Was I simply not useful anymore?

“You’re a special person, Grace Tully.” Those were the last words you spoke in the first hours of knowing me, on that beautiful and perhaps regrettable night when I first let you make love to me, and began to understand that I was not yet ruined or damaged beyond repair, and that there was something left for me to strive towards. I have remembered those words ever since. Maybe they were true. Maybe you believed them. After all, I was so alive and extraordinary and strange back then, with my shining eyes and my half-starved frame, irradiated by the incandescent recollection of my better days. But I have been fighting for my sanity for a long time now. How can you be horrified to see that I am losing? Of course I am not the person you used to know: that person faded with the early winter, she choked on every plea for help that went unanswered. So do not be too critical, or unsettled, or confused, by whatever it is that I have become. This change was not a thing that I could have prevented on my own, and although I tried and tried and tried, no one was willing to aid me.

I will find another figure now, and learn to love it all the same, until this matters less than a memory. If you have not already, then you must forgive me–but I doubt that will be necessary. I have been given little cause to believe that this absence-riddled grief is known to anyone but myself, and I truly do hope that I alone should feel it, if that is the choice we both made. I always fall a little in love with the things that I am soon to lose, and this was never going to last. I knew that, we both did. It never unsettled me. I just did not expect the end to come in so thoughtless a form.

But you saved my body. Of course that mattered. Try though I might–and mark me, I have tried–I could not make that meaningless, not ever. I just wanted one thing, one stupid, useless fucking thing: I wanted you not to hurt me. It is not complicated. I cared for you. I thought you understood that. I might wonder, sincerely, whether I had asked too much of you. But even now, I will not debase myself in that way. I have to know my own value. I have to know that I am worthy of the tenderness that I strive consciously to offer, and so expect in return. I have never pined for anything that I was not also willing to give. I have to believe that counts for something. So I will take this, all of this, everything that was done to me, all of the people who left me alone, who made me ashamed, who watched me cower. I will wear this upon my failing body like an albatross–and then with chemicals or electric currents, I will burn it out of me. I will purge my mind of its own inclinations, and make myself clean again.

But I will leave claw marks in the flesh of these unforgettable days. I still recall when they began, and what that felt like, and how much I learned and grew and healed. I know that this meant something to me. I am not sure, in fact, when or how it came to matter so entirely: the change was rapid and sentimental and scared me. I am still so afraid to feel this way, and I cannot pretend that you have not given me cause. I am not in love, I am never in love, I am too far gone for loving–but still I adore you, and I will miss you, and I am sorry. I want to remember something better than this. I want there to still be a chance. I will want that until the very last. But I have so little desire left to spend.

Someday I will write this all, and honestly. I do not regret it, not entirely, not yet. But I need the space to hurt now. I believe that there is very little left for me to do. I am not sure whether or not you feel this way as well. I worry that, mostly, we need time, and there is no time left for either of us now–because I am going home, and when I come back, I might not be the same. I think that our days are ending. I am afraid that you might have wanted them to. I do not know how to feel about that, or how to survive it. But these things are always temporary. No one knows the same love twice. Nothing ever really lasts. So I think that our days are ending–and that maybe it is time for me to stop writing, and let them.