Tell me, how does it feel with my teeth in your heart?

Euripides, Medea

I clawed my way back from a pulse’s periphery, bearing the visage of some creature far from health. I returned to an unwilling existence, feeling so selfish and so sorry. I took a bus into the city, found you amidst the shop-strewn streets. I walked you home. You slept beside me. I let the night run quietly through my mind.

In those hours, I thought that the worst must be over. But it was only beginning—and I, of all people, should have known that. Mine are the botched efforts of an unhinged, half-formed child: I honor my mother with callousness and a trail of broken things. Dim figures break their lingering promises; I break their lovely, blistering hearts; we break whatever sinew still tethers us to sanity; I break myself upon them. I have no innocence, no reverence, I am wretchedly aware of it all. But I am still willing. Oh yes, I will own this. I mean to be a horror-show lover, filled with half-furious remorse—but never to lose twenty-five years of life to a thing that means to leave me. Not another bastard God. Please, please, give me anything but that. I am sick half to death of failed deities and absent Fathers and false saviours: once, I imbibed his brutal adoration like a toxin, anointed in trilemmatic despondency, drinking each sacrament with consecrated helplessness; but I will not be mute or virtuous any longer. I will be faithless in totality. I will know no master but my own will to live. My efforts will likely be successful, but their victory entails my dissent, my infidelity, the unholy utterances of an absolute freedom. I will be secular: I, who wants more than anything to atone. What could be lonelier than that?

In the end, my love, when it all was said and done, I only needed a promise. I only wanted your mind and your time. I only drove you off because I hoped so desperately for to you to stay. Of this, I am unrepentant. You used to like when I acted that way, waking with the morning, pushing my fingers through your mouth, your throat: the muscles moved, the joints unfurled, and thereupon, a language lay inscribed. I wanted and wanted and wanted you: I engendered meaning in diacopes of desire. When you responded in turn, it was ecstasy, a miracle: those words were the genesis of our better days. I imagined, then, that I was free to do and to write as I wished. I presumed that I was justified by the mere act of loving you. I was not.

When the first blood of our carnal clauses was still drying like a cipher between my thighs, you lost the ability to read me. Those movements that you once thought so beautiful, so coherent, were a dead language to your mind. I might never know any skill with which to articulate what uncertain misery then unfolded, what catastrophe born of Babel drank the fluency from your tongue. Your lexicon, your literacy, the longings you derived—they came undone around us, inverting like rhythms of a chiasmus, until we were only the specter of our own discontent: loving what we could not keep, and keeping what we could not love. Our intentions turned in phrases, like hands on the face of a clock: we orbited one another in nameless, effaced wants. But there were not enough moments: I needed more time. I thought that you were coming home, but you never did. The absence of your demarcation flooded me with fear, immersed me in oppressive and somatic plentitude. The idioms faded fast from my many incisions, the agonized intaglios of my need for normalcy, the calligraphy of knotted scars that you once read like braille beneath your hands. Text and body met in incomprehension, showered in shades of your disavowal. Yearnings clashed like prosody. Why did you stop choosing me?

Your gentle mouth with its barbed tongue and clauses slick with chrome, 
Now excavated and bit back the palace of my bones

You gnashed and ground and gouged your teeth all through my sob-torn chest:
The crypt-like, cracking cartilage that caged my dying breaths.

You started then my work for me, the rest I did in bed:
Crouching in the darkness, grief-raw memory rusted red

I held out that feral thing, forsaken, soaked with brine—
And ate of my own heart, for it was bitter: it was mine.

I never understood it. Why did you not wait for me? I gave you my reverence. I gave you my rhetoric. I needed you more than my memories, I showed you a longing that surpassed language. Do you remember when the sheets were soaked with my suffering: when I allowed you to rest your head against this heart as it wrenched and raced with a chemical burn? That is what it looks like when, in spite of myself, I try. I always thought that if I held fast to your form, sank my fingernails into your mind, gave you blood and bliss and fortitude, then you might remain for just a little while longer. An astrology of scar tissue; the scorched starlight of my empty soul—I offered this cosmology to you alone. Those bandages, clean and whiter than a narcissus, I only applied so that I might meet your eyes. You saw so little, but did you suspect? You were the only desire I knew in the end. Why did you not wait?

A year or so ago, when I was young and enthralled, when I still had my memories and some reason left to lose, I fell in love with a longing made manifest. Back then, my body recalled cheap hotel rooms and unlit cigarettes and the kind of nights that flow like delirium into the mornings, and I gave it to him, understanding it to be everything. I undressed to my necklace, a bare-hearted girl in a silver chain: shivering skin, narcoleptic memory, undone desires, long ragged hair. I thought I loved him. I can still feel those hands upon me. I wanted him to tear the tarnished thing from my throat. If he had meant to hurt me, then I would have known pain. That was the choice I made. I thought I loved him, I honestly did. I wanted to be pure. What an exquisitely vicious mind I had.

This world was not built to sustain the inclinations of a half-devoured heart. It is too pragmatic. It is too sane. And I, love, wear affection like pathology: I am indifferent when and where it counts. I did not mean to frighten anyone, when I clambered half-conscious and barefoot atop that roof, the wind cutting hard against my scalded arms, the concrete calling out like a promise. I simply sought to be empty: to lie back, skin stripped raw, bare hands upturned beside an expressionless face. I saw nothing wrong with this; even now, I see precious little. But they mean to send me back to those rooms all the same, with their blank walls like blindness, because my dreams are bad, and getting worse. My skin is riddled with bullet holes, a wounded, skewered thing: my body dances on splinters of glass, and treads upon rows of teeth in the earth. Blood falls fatal from your mouth, your flesh undone beneath my touch; you turn away from me. I thought I lost you once before—now I lose you every goddamn night. It is not getting any easier. Yes, the dreams are bad.

I spent a year of my existence in some purgatorial nightmare of social life. I felt unwanted. I felt ashamed. But I cannot do it anymore: I will not comply. I no longer have any use for their scathing standards. Fuck them. I am not writing for them. I am not a fucking martyr. I am not an object of their sympathies. I am not an image of tragedy, and I will not be compliant in another tragic act. I am an ego in constant opposition. I am bitter. I am angry. This world has failed me, it asked too much. I am nothing but a body now. I am this, and only this, whatever the hell “this” is—all else is Other. And how can I tell the goddamned difference? Everything, everything, antagonizes me.

This mind is an enigma, engaged in some perpetuity of motion. It knows so little. It barely even knows itself. But a lifetime ago, however briefly, however intemperately, I know that it knew you. It longs to hear your voice again: your contrapuntal promises, the staccato of your nomenclature, the evasive keys of a symphonic longing, the crescendo of your night-tinged scores. I remember, so fondly and sorrowfully, all of the times when I wanted to hold you or kiss you or fuse my heart with yours: to take whatever parts of you were tired, or hurting, or afraid, and endure it all in your stead. But I did not know how to, or if you would allow it, and so I stayed as mute as the child I no longer am. I wish that I had tried. I wish that I had silenced, with my mouth and hands, every doubt in your unquiet mind. I should have consumed all of that suffering until the only thing you felt was my skin. I should have taken care of you.

Darling, I have had my chances. I know what I am. I know that, in our ending, I lost something that I may not soon find again. But for what it is worth, I adored you. We liked to pretend that this was meaningless, but it was never, it was not. I will not accept even the suggestion of our insignificance. Nothing is without meaning, not in this life, and especially not us. We know that the world is in motion. We see how it births and dies. We feel, in our joined bodies, its constant burning. We were not thoughtless, but overcome by the brilliance of our being. I will always absolve you, by virtue of what you are. I willingly excuse the horrors you inflicted; I take them on gladly; I vindicate it all. I exonerate you of your false promises, your lost language, your perpetual absence, your notched and troubled ways. What did I ever do, in this godforsaken life, to earn such reckless affections? This is me saying that I love you. I love you; and you will never again, in all probability, be loved by a thing like me.

But I never owned you–would that I had–and when the waking spring finally drew to a close, it was I who crossed the distant sea. There is so little left to be written of us. But you do not have to worry about me. You never have to worry, for I am not the dying type. I am merely a parasite, devouring my own longings. I am sustained by the intolerable rhythm of my pulse; by the rust-tinted flood of the summer rain; by the lingering potency of a desire I mistook for God. I am a thing apart from sanity. I am an unrepentant self. It is as beautiful as it is appalling: I eat away at my own heart like some hateful, half-life Eucharist.

And what apostate, after all, has ever shied from a bloodletting?

“I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind. I leave someone
Who would adhere to me: I undo her
fingers like bandages: I go.”