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.