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.