Month: August 2016

briefest thoughts on the shifting cosmos

I annihilate. I ash. I terrify.

Clementine von Radics, Sylvia Plath Prays to the House Above Her

i am worried, so worried
for it as well as me
out there, i wonder where he is

who he loves
why he went.

if he still hurts the way we used to.

i asked you once, a long time ago,
to take my organs, bury the rest in salt water

now I wonder if you will find us
at the bottom of the sea
meeting once more
in a haze of blue-green

eerie, ethereal,
seeing dimly, like a mirror,
no faces to be known

we will be voiceless

unrealized.

when I drink like this, and my pulse is slow
and the world goes dark like tinted glass,
it does not hurt at all.

it is as if i never knew someone with eyes
the same brown as my father’s
never sought him in each empty sin,

until the day that i bled him
like ink
from my skin.

i gave him half a year to degrade me.
you can’t say he didn’t make good time.

love is so hard to come by.
i loved, and now i want to die.

how could this happen,
how could it ever?

do you remember any of it? 

once upon a long nightmare, I burned myself.
now I am ready to burn anything.

starting with our photographs.

ending with the world. 

this how I live.
irredeemable. beyond health.

i am your inpatient miracle
your clinical subject
your dormant psychosis
your obedient nightmare
you hate me because i am you

 i never wanted to be this.

i wanted to be simple and good
not waiting for my heart to give out, or my lungs to collapse,
or my liver to scream through my skin.

i wanted to be small.

how can you sleep at night? or at all?

something is wrong so deep inside of me that it is probably never coming out.

so feel your heart break. try again.

kane
wallace
woolf
plath

did not kill themselves,
the world killed them.

will kill me if i let it. i won’t.
i understand.

know this in full.
the wound is cauterized, sealed.
open no longer, no part of me is:

closed off like an iris,
i healed.

i won’t do it again. not ever. for health

i’ll be something else
i’ll not be myself.

mars is in retrograde. so am i
the moon is new, and clean, unearthed.
my heart is unearthly

i writhe.

if you tore me open with fingernails now,
your shame would wrench cold stars from the sky.

the night is effaced.
i feel faceless, alive.

i am ready to gnaw my history to a pulse.
to die alone in a burning fall

because i died for love
and so i died for nothing–

yes, i died for nothing at all.

The Things We Do for (Lack of) Love

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

W.B. Yeats, No Second Troy

I am now nearly twenty years young, and all of them drenched in exhaustion. Simply and swiftly, I am running out of interest. Who would want any part of this? My life has not gone wrong, not much more so than anybody else’s—but even so, I am losing my willingness to engage. I am disgusted. I am disillusioned. I am another scorned and jaded thing. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what every person like me gets to be in the end?

I do not understand why we allow women to be treated like this. I do not understand why we provide them so little support. I do not understand how I, not even fully a women, have fallen into this paradigm so many times.

These people that I write of are not uncommonly vicious or cruel. I think this is just how most people are. I guess I knew better than to have ever hoped otherwise. At any rate, this feels worse than dying. Because it is so easy to be spurned or lost or left behind. But to be mistreated, to be stolen from in so many senses of the word, to face the sheer disrespect of apathy, and on top of it all, to be expected to stomach that helplessly, quietly, like the little girl whose father said he hated her—there are no words for that.

Understand this, please: the girl that I write of was a child. She was young and optimistic and naive enough to believe that the occupants of this world might hear her, and help care for her until she learned how to care for herself. So across this winter, she poured out whatever she had to offer, her time and her chemicals and her language and her skin, like offerings to an absent savior. She asked things of her body that it was not yet ready to achieve. She saw quite clearly each disappointment, each falsehood, each cautionary sign: but she tried anyways. What she was bartering for, with all of that unspoken sacrifice, was neither faithfulness nor longevity. She needed no endurance, no promises, no love. It was the mere lack of catastrophe she sought; the tranquil forgoing of malice or regret. She wanted to keep the memories clean. She wanted to recall, in peace, the clairvoyance of a body otherwise condemned to the wrenching aches of its grisly closure. What she did not understand (or perhaps knew, but did not want to remember), was that such a fate cannot always be prevented or foretold.

In a circle cast of salt, I saw iron links and fine-wrought silver: my history and my penance incarnate. Amidst clouds of heady jasmine, bright rosemary, astringent sage, I stared into the eyes of a half-dead talent. In a shower of crimson, from one clean incision, in ripples of water and tongues of pale fire, I asked for forgiveness. Then I awoke, really angry, for the first time.

We never left that labyrinth, though I have long sought for an escape. I always knew myself to be Icarus; but to him I was lesser, a mere Ariadne. In the brine of that Naxos-shored bed, I was a useful and knowledge-bearing object. But I was stronger than what he made of me. I always have been. I would have won out in the end, if I drove my teeth into him, made manifest my longings, instead of holding back and holding back and restraining what I really am. My madness would always have overcome his weak desire. Is this the truth that Theseus saw so many centuries ago, reflected in the foam of the Ægan? Is this why he allowed an ocean to come between them in the first place? Back then, Ariadne slept on; of late, I seldom have.

Whatever becomes of this body now, our history will favor my fate. He can have whatever else of mine he likes, and he has so far taken plenty. But this scarred, disfigured, fighting body, and all of the healing we learned it to be capable of—that is mine to keep now. Moving on is easy. I felt so fucking little to start with. But I still have not learned to swallow the fact that there is nothing left that I can do. I do not know how to live with the incessant, maddening knowledge that, once more, even with my father gone, I have been wronged and mistreated and lied to without any hope of any recompense or retribution. And I am expected to survive anyways, with no consequences and even less support, when the selfishness of careless men has endangered me once more.

It burns beyond all reckoning, to lie the precious memories of this year to rest beside some fucking parasite, who made of me another Penelope, who watched me fill a garden with moths. But the cast is changing now. I will learn a new desire: find a new fate. After all, not every woman left the ancient world unburnt. I am ready for a second Troy.

More Thoughts on Forgiveness

It’s okay. But even if it wasn’t okay, what am I supposed to do?

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Tonight, I will try to write my own body apart. It is tired of waiting. It wants to belong. Perhaps, in mere pieces, it finally can.

Fingertips stained with nicotine: grown tough like cypress. Jaded lines of a knife-point along my hips. Half-healed burns in a cosmos up my arms. Hair torn out at the roots. Guitar strap slung like an albatross around my neck. Crescent scar on my upper arm. Eyes like a child’s, lashes growing in a rusted tangle. Bones that shift like a scourge beneath the skin.

Even now, like this, I am better off than I was however many weeks ago. My skin feels less bruised and fragile. My veins drip no ichor, but still thrum dimly. My form curves like music, a notation: I command more attention, demand more space. These wounds are closing off, retreating. With nothing left to dampen my pulse or thin my blood, I walk through the world like an ordinary woman. I go to work. I read the papers. I think of my friends in faraway places. I linger and exist, wishing that my heart could ring out in pieces, or echo like so many shards of light.

I have been left disappointed and resentful and, above all else, alone. Whatever was wrong with me before is fastened to the underside of my mind. Try though I might, I was unable to exorcise its presence. I can still feel it breathing inside of me. Honestly, I am beginning to think that the only thing to do now is to go back and try again. Perhaps I can find some strength this time around; recall the weird luck of my childhood; live. 

In the dim reflection of the doctors’ frightened eyes, I can see plainly what was done to me. If I forgive them all, for everything, can I mend my troubled ways? Before I try, I should focus on making it through tonight. 

It has just been too hard, remembering all of the things that I had buried so effectively, laid to rest like bones still aching with unrealized breath. When I was twelve or thirteen, scarcely more than a child, I fell down the unpolished wood of my garage stairs, trying to escape my father’s wrath. I had sought to wrench away from his horrible words, the livid vein that pulsed in his temple: but my foot caught fast on the threshold of the door, and I crashed down like a small burning star, frightened and hurting all the way.

Those were the days when there was a child left to save. But she died, you see. The girl that I was, she expired swiftly and painlessly, inspiring my present self to try for the same. But all of us know how this story ends, or doesn’t. I will not ask you to read it again.

It is so hard. I can taste the bitterness and grief rising up in me like bile. I write for the people who are not listening. Can I forgive the ones who shattered my tedious self-assurance? Can I forgive the causal figure of that scar on my arm, where it was dragged along the memory-edged stairs? Can I forgive the community that left me stranded on its periphery, driving its edges into my skin? Can I forgive the thing that fed from my mind and my chemicals and my body for half of a year, and then grew disinterested and departed wordlessly, leaving me with a catastrophe that he never cared to learn of?

These, all of these, are acts of violence. Sometimes I feel like people around me are letting me exist this way: because it is convenient, because they know that I can withstand it. Whenever they expect me to suffer quietly, and I do, it feels like proving them right. That makes me want to stop surviving. You who did this, who let me down, who disappointed me, who made me feel like shit about myself, who left me to hurt myself and recover on my own–what are you thinking now? Who among you will read this? Do you count yourself among the number?

I am trying, I am trying to forgive. Because maybe then, I can be forgiven too. I did what I thought I had to, and then ran. I am not sorry yet, but on the day my life and my habits catch up with me, I will be. And I will need forgiveness then, like a scorched forest needs the rain. I never learned to look after myself, to walk like something precarious and rare. Because some part of me will always be twelve or thirteen, and falling down that flight of stairs. Someday I will lose what little of my health remains, and that deterioration will murmur like a toxin through your veins. When such a time comes, it should bring you no surprise to find me down among the ashes. Go on, then. Let’s see just how much it takes.

But maybe not. When I was young, I used to love the autumn. It is the only season by which I can really abide. That time is coming fast, coming now. I am wringing out these hours, like bed sheets drenched with blood. And he knows what that looks like: what I gave to him. When I lay back today in the hospital bed, my thin gown and thin form all restrained, the doctors came to know what he and I had made of one another, in the days before he let me fall.

This is all that I have left to work towards now. I will try for the impossible, I will try to forgive everything. Because in spite of all my anger, my adoration, and my pride, I never belonged to you–not any of you. I will not be enthralled by your apathy any longer. I will not yield, nor accept the harm that was done to me at your hands. These costly mistakes will be repeated no longer. The cycle ends with him and me. Either I am courageous, or I am very, very weak.

I cannot forgive you yet, but know this: I am trying to. You were as clever as you were cruel. You might have anticipated all of this from the start. But for myself alone, I must do this. I must forgive it all. I must find some way to love the memory. I must find some new way to feel.

Just remember this, darling– you never owned me.

And I?

I do not kneel.

Chances

I have had my chances. I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare organ,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural.

Sylvia Plath, Three Women

I have spent some time traveling, existing in untethered motion, that old respite of my childhood. I reduced my world to the backseat of a car. I saw everything. I felt whatever I could. Such perambulatory endeavors, like the events that precipitate them, are scarcely new to me.

I have walked, in my short and troubled life, the winding alleyways of a thousand vivid cities. New York. Paris. Boston. London. San Juan. Honolulu. Oranjestad. Dublin. Toronto. Oxford. Amsterdam. Los Angeles. Chicago. Montgomery. Phoenix. So many others, now forgotten. Back then, I was restless and always awake. I was invisible and engaged. Now and then, in such places and times, I met those who lived fully and well. They knew a peace that I had never believed possible. And so I gained my glimpse into worlds where people did not hurt as much. And eventually I came to learn, as I would time and time again, that this bored me. There are some things you can only feel alone.

Those were the strange and lovely days of my earliest imaginings, when my world was all rainwater and starlight and things still to come. Every day, those memories fade out a little more. I lost them to tongues of flame and keen silver edges and rich, low notes of scotch: to the nicks and scars along my hips that now forge a kind of quiet farewell to unsustainable instances of fascination and false joining.

It was a long year. They were not right about me, and him least of all. I was flawed and I was wanting, but I was worth more than nothing. I was strange and unearthly and harmless. I loved well. I did not deserve to be cast off once more, left alone on the other end of an ocean and a discourse, with half of my memories and all of their horror, with madness and some life inside of me, with decisions that nearly undid my form, with things he should know that I can no longer bring myself to say. This is my virulence, my insurrection, my voiceless indignation. I deserved better. I owe him loss.

Wretchedly grieving or righteously incensed: I could be either now. Those are the boxes that I am meant to curl up in. But I will not comply. Instead, I will just be this. I am not okay with what was done to me. I cared, and even now, I can barely bring myself to stop. But that was known. It was always known. It was exploited. Why ask to stay in touch, after all, when it would have been more practical, more humane, to remove my efforts with surgical precision, to undo me like a lobotomy, rather than leave me to wait and wonder and write down reasons to freeze to death until I was as stoic as ice, with nothing left to obscure or defend? I should have been left alone from the start. It would have been better. So I will remember, and I will move past this, and I will hold fast to the forlorn conviction that not every figure I care for will follow the subhuman path of my father—even if this one did.

I had a dream, just the other morning, when my mind was cold and still. Even now, I cannot remember what it was or what it meant. But I know that it mattered. I know that it left me with some fortified conviction to live more adamantly than I have of late. And I know that I awoke to a wild summer storm, the lightning hissing and crashing, the world turned silver in driving sheets of rain. I was alone. It was mid-afternoon. I realized then that I was not designed to survive a world such as this one. I want too much. I feel too much. I live too sincerely. People like me do not die when we want to; nor do we exist in perfect motion. Instead, sometimes, we linger on, waiting for better and more painless days. That is what I am doing now.

This all might be reduced to a sort of ongoing, answerless question. How on earth do we determine who is worthy of our love and endurance, and what exactly we can justify forgiving, when our suffering comes at their hands? And how do we manage such forgiveness, when they have hurt us with such deliberation? Maybe I was right from the very start. Maybe we really must wait until all of our scars and our memories fade—until either our wrongdoers die, or we do—to find at last the peace that eludes us in life unending. And until that sweet and far-off day, maybe we simply learn to withstand the lovely and remorseless methods of those we live alongside. I do not want to be angry anymore. Not at my dad, not at anyone. But unrepentant fury is how I survive. I have never known redamancy, and I likely never will. I have all but stopped hoping. I do not cry anymore.

And yet, I am the luckiest person that I know. I have not died. I get to try again. I still have my younger brothers, so full of life and promise. I know no silence to be sorry for. I have people who love me even now.

Yes, I have had my chances. My father had his too. And so have infinite scores of others. But I will not be as my parents before me. I will know myself better than that. And if I live to see the other side of this fast-approaching year, I hope to have more to remember than the people who allowed me to care for them, and then took their leave with the summer. Because I want something to matter. I want to matter.

This is the only promise I have left to keep. This is a dimly burning prayer. Hear it, please, if any of you can.

I am trying. I am trying. I am trying.

One more chance is all I ever need.

What Doesn’t Kill You (Someday Might)

Some things you’ll do for money,
And some you’ll do for fun.
But the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one.

(The Mountain Goats, “Love Love Love”)

HB and 6B graphite. august 15, 2016. (unfinished). 

just keeping myself busy with drawing

August Litany

Remember nothing; resist all. 

You have tortured me too deliberately for me to be able to forgive you at this moment.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I have spent much of this summer listening to the hum of my car’s battered engine, surviving on unlit cigarettes and stolen whiskey. My home is more disparate than I am. My indictments fall upon a blank expanse of form. I am so much better and so much worse than whatever I was before.

I am desirous life incarnate. I am a meaning without a cause. I am dragging myself out of bed in the mornings. I am confronting the world that makes me so very afraid. I am drawing, when I find the time. I am learning the violin. I am trying to write novels again. I only kiss razors in my sleep. Most peculiar of all, I have no one left to write for now. As I have learned at least twice before, you can amputate the things that love you. With precision and without mercy, you can render them so that they might never have existed in the first place. But now, I am not the surgeon; I am the severed limb. How very strange that feels.

It was exactly as I forecasted, in the depths of my language and my actions alike. Unexpectedly, inexplicably, I sensed that familiar radio silence. So I waited; then wondered; then grieved; then felt nothing at all. And so it was, that what no one should go through, I went through alone. Prescription doses and medical diagnoses and deathlike decisions became my bizarre and incongruous art. I had not even the crutch of the affection that I spent so long attempting to sustain. No desperation has ever seemed more misguided. I could only understand this once the final, silent indictment had been made.

In the bitter specter of an unrealized promise, I found what I could survive without. And I resent the carelessness and the callousness that he showed me; the necessary cruelty that such a realization inevitably entails. All vanity aside, I was worth more than this. Surely anyone is.

But enough of that impenetrable history. That time in my life is over, and lately, its futility and its imprecision and its aimlesslness bores even me. I do not know when I became this way, all language and longing and only worth whatever loved me. But it is a simple and senseless waste of my time. I did not lose my father, cross an ocean, shed my own blood, to grieve over the memory of men without conscience; of women without conviction; of living things that could not have completed me even if they had tried. I have other things to write about now.

On the final night of July, I left the turbulent respite of my home in thin grey underwear and a faded black coat. My feet were bare. I walked across the summer-dust roads, but no cars came. I lit a match, made to extinguish it against the underside of my wrist. But I did not. I knew the pain would sting like singing; the caustic crescendos; the disparate rise and fall. I wanted to let myself feel this. But I did not.

Then I went to Brooklyn, where meaning emerges like chiasmic dawn, where memories crawl like roaches in the streets. I stood solitary upon a friend’s balcony, the taste of liquor rich on my tongue. I could see distance and depth like a cradle of thought. I watched the lethargic haze of the Manhattan skyline. I wanted to step over the edge of that dim precipice and learn what freedom really felt like. But still, I did not. I did not.

Do you understand the triumph of these simple moments? Could you learn the brilliance and the unbearable enticement of a death so many times delayed? On second thought, I am quite sure that many of you can, and do, know the experience that I write of now. I have spent far too long pretending that I am the only one who feels this way.

I would rather be bitter and still-breathing, than grief-stricken and lamenting and lost. So fuck that. What is next? I will etherize myself to sleep tonight, and wake up in the morning feeling new. I will exist. I will engage. A day will come when this all feels better, and until then, I will try again and again.

I am writing too cryptically, as usual. So I will say this as plainly as I can. I believe now that I will make it through this madness, even when it feels like my own mind is killing me. Because nothing draws you back to self-conception like mutilating your own body for the forgotten sake of a person who, in all likelihood, never cared for you to begin with. I am not apologizing anymore; but I will not abstain from culpability, either. The madness of this year has brought hell upon us all. But this flesh is healing. Its history has lost its poison. The summer heat is fading fast.

I am healing, here and now. And I can say with certainty, for the first time now, that which, in truth, I was not entirely certain of at the start–

I will be returning to England in the fall.