I dreamed and dreamed of someday going there. I worked my fingers to the bone for years, just to gain a glimpse into some world I had never seen before, with no friends and no certainties and no knowledge of its culture, hoping to learn what I could become if my past and my plans and my home were stripped away from me. I found what I was looking for. What happened afterward is anybody’s guess.

It was hopeful and it was hellish and it was a prolonged, holy spectacle. I do not know if it will feel worth it, in the end. But some things were worth learning. I realized that I will never really be happy or at peace in this insincere reality. And stranger still, I learned that this knowledge does not hurt me; no more than do these spectres of feeling empty or alone. I am no longer afraid of such notions. I have grown into them: I wear them like a skin. Adjusted, at last, to this world that seldom wants me, I am as strong now as I can ever remember being.

Even so, even now, how many times has my mind flirted willingly with the edges of its own undoing? Some nights I cannot rest and I begin to think of every bad thing that has ever happened to me, or been done to me. It starts slow at first, comments someone made, a memory from grade school. Then it floods in, everything at once, things that happened when I was too young to understand; things my father said and that I thought I had earned; people that let me down, or took advantage of me at my weakest; what happened last summer; what happened in November; the lingering mutilation of my ability to trust; how I have to live with those people this year, the ones who watched it kill me and just did not care; every unanswered message on my phone; every promise someone made but could not keep; all the beautiful things I let go of because I thought I did not deserve them. Now I am beyond recognition or belief, alone sometimes with the sleepless spells and the panic attacks and the violent cycles of thought, and on those nights, yes, it still feels worse than dying.

I know that I am not allowed to have these feelings, because they make everyone uncomfortable, and devour me from the outside in. But still, I live, and so I feel them anyways. And I wonder if it really was so bad, or if I just retained it differently. But I know that I never fought back until it was too late, and the consequence is that now, for the rest of my life, there will be a pantomime, an extended act of pretending that much did not happen or did not matter, and that I never loved or hurt or felt or cared as deeply as I so often did. Because I cannot fix the past, and I cannot look back–and even if I tried, I might be too ashamed to speak honestly of what I found there.

What a life I have fallen into. I never meant for it to happen. Sometimes I am a narcissist, enamored of the world, enraptured by my own existence. Other times, I can scarcely live with what I am. I want to feel good about myself. But even if people were to let me, even if the whole world let me, what if I didn’t?  What if I can’t? What if I just don’t have it in me, to be at peace with what I am, have always been? Would that not be enough to make anyone jaded and angry at the world?

But it cannot be too late for me. Because I still know moments of stolen conviction, and their beauty and their chaos takes root and unfurls like a stillness in the soil. And so I am altered, but never really change. I still speak. I still desire. I still feel a lack. Each turbulent night is still swollen with rainwater or falling stars: those sensations that linger on undersides of memories scarcely retained. I forget what I am until I have no choice but to remember. Then I slip into that strange invaluable melancholy, that current of wordless sensation that means I am still alive. I cannot write what I feel then because I am notes on a twelve-bar staff: I deal in music and memory, in clefts of endurance, in harmonious grief and blistering arpeggios of the most exquisite longing.

Is this it? Will this be the year when I finally revive, when I wrench each past misery like a new shard of glass from my skin? If I do, will it heal me? Will it hurt? Will I still know the difference then?

It does not matter. I have time.

It does not matter what was done to me. It does not matter that I have been like this, at such a cost and for so long. None of it matters, because this history has not ended yet. There is still time, there is still time.

It cannot be too late for me.

She carries the coastal wind in her teeth
and the furious sun in her mane.

Annie Finch, Rhiannon 

It was twenty hours on that open road. Petrol rain, torn muscles, sharp grit and silver dusk. The engine gasped to a halt and I paused at the edge of a neon skyline. I met a girl in a bar with pale hair and eyes like jade. A girl with an old guitar and a voice like running water. She played her songs, on that city stage, with a handle of whiskey and the strange lust of summer. I never caught her name. When she asked me home, with no mention of morning, I said yes. I always do. I like knowing that I still can.

In a depilated motel room we shared a cigarette, an evening, a lifetime or less. Then I climbed into my car and set Nashville behind me in the rearview mirror. I hurtled towards an amber dawn and left her there alone, with a tobacco tin, an ashtray filled with matches, and all of the faded scriptures of my longing. When I met her, I was already gone.

And what of you? I loved you so briefly but somehow never stopped. I know you could never believe that. You must think that I remember you differently; because I hated you, for so long, and so sincerely. Some nights I still do.

I adored you, I despised you, I lost you and I left you. But I never felt nothing for you. Not ever.

Is that not strange, miraculous, and terrible all at once? After all of this time, after everything that has happened, after all of the hurt you caused–I am lost, I am etherised, I am dead to the world. But when I think of you, I still feel. I always feel. 

Are you the love of my lifetime? In truth, I have my doubts. We were kids when I first met you, first kissed you, first let you in. But the love of this time in my life–I think so. The love of this moment, of the person I am now. Yes, of this lifetime—of this three-year, nine-term, two-summer nightmare of a lifetime—you are the last and most clairvoyant thing.

Do you remember watching that movie I sang from, and both of my arms were wrapped around you on an ash-stained bedroom floor?  I know you do. You must. I loved you then. I don’t know what you felt, I never did, but I loved you. And now that memory slips far from my medicated mind: like every other godforsaken recollection, it is lost. But still, I see a single night–yes that night, the one when I began to lose my mind–and I was alone, I was crying, everyone was acting like nothing was wrong, but I heard your voice behind the bedroom door. You were singing. You were playing my guitar. And as I listened, as every note fell soft like rain across my bare skin, for the swiftest and most shining instant, I was close to whole.

Our terrible, thankless past–you are its keeper. All of its pain and its promise and its prophesy belongs to you now. You took it on when you cast off me. And I am sorry for that; just as I am sorry that I left my bones bare and my troubles unconcealed. Just as I am sorry that I did not lie when I should have, and that you might have liked me better if I had. But you must never doubt how I felt about you. Whatever else you may think or believe or become, you do not get to do that. You do not get to shed all that I lived for like a skin.

I am waiting for this chapter of my life to slow and splinter to its close, so that I can start again somewhere new. I want to be a stranger. I want to stop knowing you. When I try to sleep at night (and I can’t, I still can’t–you know how I never could) it is your name that burns on the underside of my eyes. Darling, I want this to be over now. 

I could love you until the day that I die, but that will never make you good for me. Nor I for you. So fuck it. Let’s both forget, and disappear, and start again. 

In the bitter end of our lesser days, it stopped being easy to tell where the cycle ended and my life began. Because when people keep leaving you, you start to anticipate their failures indiscriminately. And you prove yourself right–that part is crucial. You dig your nails in so deep that people pull away and they never look back. This is how and why what beauty I find in my life always fades.

You know a life has lost its meaning when victory and surrender begin to feel the same. But I spread my palms and let this body bridge the distance. After all, there is nothing left of us to save.

I was a writer before I lost you. Now I just bleed, and let the words fall where  they will.

I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.

Vita Sackville West, Letters to Virginia Woolf