Month: October 2016

sometimes, i dream of forgiving you

Nor love, nor hate, how then? what will you do?
What, will you keep a mean then betwixt either?
Or will you love me, and yet hate me too?

Michael Drayton, Idea’s Mirror

What tangle of limbs, once forsaken, foregone, accounts for the foreign misery of one’s own self-loathing? Those tendrils of recollection, those sinews of remorse, when smoke curls from my lips and I eat air like essence, drink wine like holy water, drown myself in a life prescribed, a life not mine: my blood boils with unquiet desire until beneath my splintering bones, the nightmare starts. Commence, then, my manifest unrest: I am ready, as ever. Of course. A heart left bare in no one’s keeping, every piece wrenched back in savage indictment–even still, I writhe. I blister, always, or splinter like glass. I strive to live like my own smoke, insubstantial, exhaled. I kill and keep what is not mine: in gradients of redemption, redemancy, recompense, my muscles seize at the sun-scorched sky. What splendor, what valor, is to be found in this? I burn and sigh and slight my own regard. I disavow my own memories, my own efforts, my own love.

Even now, I recall glimpses of that which my remorse has yet wrought: those slipping, sordid whispers in the silence of the night. I see, so very clearly, that by which I wish to have been blinded: no dimly mirrored reflection, but myself, my self, and him, alive, when he told me what I wasn’t, what I was, and when I wondered, when I tried. There have been so many others since those strange, regretful hours: already, the touch and smell of him has been wrenched from my limbs. He is only a horror-show memory now. I am forgiven. I am clean.

I still, sometimes, find a moment worth living for. My body tastes like music then: soft and shivering with the pleasure of its own sensation, the hallowed, searing underside of every stolen touch, the warm and living movement of my strange, desirous skin. I must look so wrong, to all of you. So unrepentant. So unwell. The bruises are livid between my thighs: in screaming patterns of shifting weight, I ache. I sense my own suffering. The savage purples and the brilliant, snarling shades of red; my hair is shorn and uneven against my scalp, pale patches of skin showing through. I am so far from whole. I think I always will be.

But my scars are fading. So, too, is my wild, tameless fervor, my lovely burning melancholy, the rapture of my joy. I am trying to be quiet and good. I am trying to be normal and safe. I am trying to be better, but it just feels like dying. I resent this. Does no one else know the sensation? That insufferable boredom, tempered only by that which you fear becoming, the wrenches of discontent, the vicious onslaught of untempered disrepair? The rapid intake of each cold breath, the sheer helpless fear of this world? What is it, this longing, this lack of mine? This nameless want is easier, so much easier, to ascribe to some living soul, but I do not have that any longer. When I sleep, if I sleep, I sleep alone. When will all that utter emptiness, those ruptures in my soul that I fill with cheap spirits, and rough affections, and letters, books, words–my hallowed floods of text–fade into a memory I might withstand? What happened to me? And why?

Ghosts of this past year are returning still, in every form I know to seek. Accusations and atonements, arresting brown eyes and a guarded, despicable mind; a heart self-slain by such unfathomable apathy, and the memories by which I now make a name. I still taste blood upon my lips, his fingertips, our clothes; the specter clings; he haunts me still. It is not a question of affection anymore. This is not longing. This is the sheer consequence of what a single presence has done to me.

I was left in so much pain that day, a stricken shape of singed, sliced skin and twitching limbs. Not a person, not even a body: just a mutilated mass of misery made manifest, barely conscious of each hateful breath that I drew. Even now, I am unable to endure the very notion of his presence, never mind the physical truth. Mistake me not, I feel no loss, no sorrow: only shame and savage loathing and an ever-present, sickening fear. His memory will plague me until I learn why I allowed myself to be treated so in the first place. No action could have undone me more–not even the one that I made possible myself, in the dawn of that cold grey morning, when I wondered if he might find me down among the concrete, his bedside windows opened wide, his drapes imbibed with prisms of wind. I wanted so badly to lay it all to rest. But it never happened. It will never happen. It could never have happened. And so here I stand, still alive, seeking respite. It really isn’t going to get any better, is it?

I wake up each morning, try to keep it all under control: take the fabric of another fucking day into my hands, and piece together ways to render the time more endurable. I am working cautiously to build, from the wreckage of what I really am, something steadfast and worthwhile. But I wonder if it will serve me any better, in the end. Disparate and hesitant, desirous and afraid–sometimes it feels like I am dying as I write. And yet, I am alive because I choose to be. How many others can say the same? And the first month is nearly past–so very nearly past.

I wonder and I wait, as patiently as I can, for the nameless expression of an answer I still seek. But there is no end to any of this. And what becomes of us, we who wander the prisms of unrest, striving for a love we will not find?

Carpe Noctem

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world…
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be.

Wallace Stevens, The Motive for Metaphor

I am sitting on my bedroom floor with a half-lit cigarette and a pair of shaking hands, listening to childhood records and writing about the person I used to be. Someone shouts outside my window: I flinch, then cower. My fingers grope and probe at my own cringing spine. The ridges snarl like kerosene beneath my touch. My body is turning feral again, I can feel it–but I resist. This is what the pills are for, the little communion tablets, white as narcissi, the ones that tear me to seizing pieces when I neglect to take them. This how I live now; forgetting, sometimes, that I am alive.

Too many times this summer, I awoke in tides of fresh despair; when the chemicals consumed my senses, and my own mother’s name evaded me; when she seized me by the wrist, by those awful yawning sores, and asked me why? Even recently, I spent hours inconsolable, solitary in bed, for my father had forgotten my birthday. I am not exactly living a satisfactory life. I am aware of that. But who is to blame, really? When I wandered away from my history of toxins and unrest, the cradle of my childhood burned all away, and I found myself here, like this. Alone.

I was dead in the beginning.
I was not ready to live at all.
I was irreverent.
I was invalid.
I was impaled upon the world.

I thought the best way to live was to care for people, to love them in any way that I could offer. Such naïveté was, perhaps, my earliest mistake. On the eighth night of October, I woke up from three months of uncertain misery, felt that anger and life inside of me at last, took to task the person who denied me the respect that I was owed, who egotistically reimagined my trauma as a love for him that I never felt. And it hurt, it seared like few things I have ever felt, to see him before me, remorseless, and understanding that nothing could ever make things right again, not ever, and wondering how two people could share so much and change so entirely, and marveling that any man could fail to care even faintly, and knowing with such certainty that I would relive that moment in my nightmares and my dissociations and my long dark moments for so many years to come. I hate this feeling, I hate having to know such a flat, hard, faceless anger. To see how much time I wasted being so certain of my own lack of worth. I accused him of these sins directly, demonstrated his own fraudulence, marked every score on my skin where his arrogance had bled me out. He asked, with false repentance, what he could do to make it better. I told him never to look at me again.

I might never recover from the shock and the repulsion of that, his reimagining of my illness as some signifier of his own desirability. The sheer presumption, the complete delusion, the utter lack of care it must have taken to know me for six months and never have learned to know me at all. But that is not my albatross, not anymore. I will not cower at the presence any longer, nor retreat within a diazepam-laced haze as the daylight drips away. This city is mine now. You will know it when they scream my name in the winding streets, the voices imploring the waning pallor of moon. My name is gouged into the skin of this world, where stars shriek and bones plummet burning from the sky; wherever I walk, I feel it in the currents of the air.

You say that I’m not trying, but I am, I am. I spent a whole summer trying. I am trying, my god am I trying, and every day is easier and more difficult than the last. You say I can come home if I want to, when I want to, but I can’t, I cannot, for that home isn’t mine. You say let it go, your father left and what can you do about it now, and why punish myself for his crimes, but I don’t know, I’ve never known. I simply have to live this out. It’s not that I’m ready. It’s just that it’s time.

So I implore this place to be more gentle, this time around. It is a terrible thing, to be so exposed. To walk like an ingrate, my ribcage cracked and my heart flung open towards the unknowing world; to be whatever the hell it is that I am, and always wondering whether everyone else might prefer if I were to be nothing at all. Redemancy is a virtue that I have never known.

So let there be no more memories. No more sobs when you see the mangled skin of my arms. No more static silence. No more bandages and rust-red stains. I have drawn my last blood. It is finished. It is done.

I have vowed this all before. I said I would come back, and with scarcely a memory of the health I once held, I have. Know this now: I will always come back to you. I’ve never been less certain of what a year might hold. But let it come. Maybe this time I will not cry each night, when the bedsheets cling cold to my skin, and I am alone, and afraid of it. Just let it come. I know what I am, and I’m learning to live with it. So let it come. Let it come. Let it come.