And maybe you can’t know me now.
Maybe I’m just blood.
Whatever that’s for.

Alice Notley, Hemostatic

The misery of a week, now past, is rooted in pathologies of song. The sound of a piano along ridges of bone, a whistling melody, the wondrous tune of my discontent. A swift, sharp, movement of hands, left over right, an arpeggio along my skin. I knew better than to trust this–I knew better than to trust at all. And then, of course, not six hours later, a silence fell on me, spread through my half-healed lungs, until it hurt my jaws, my throat. I was nothing. Unanswered. Again. Again.

My father, my lover, all over, and over: I am never memorable enough. Not even to hate. Not now. I scarcely feel the absence; I hardly feel a loss. Instead there is a vitriol here, a kind of writhing energy, a thinly swallowed wrath. For I have worked my recompense, and then some. I have paid a thousand times for every hateful scar. My mind collapsed beneath chemicals and steel; I learned the worth of listlessness; I made these fragments whole. I spent the crackling autumn half-deafened by the screaming miracle of my health, my efforts at long last realized, if not complete. Has it all gone unnoticed then, unacknowledged–as worthless as the thing they’ve made of me?

Wake up, step through the front door. Keep your eyes down. Don’t recognize what was, if it isn’t anymore. Breathe softly. Speak less. Show them what you’ve always known. You have outlived worse.

Falling softly out of love with a girl I knew so long ago, with eyes darker than starlight and a mind that once sheltered mine, then falling back into love, and out, soft and sweet, with the static uncertainty of a detuned radio–I’m not bitter. I’m just trying. Realizing at last that I have not ever really been cared for. I saw it then, really saw it, yes, my last and greatest lapse of sanity: the city collapsing around me, the ancient cathedrals crumbling, the illusion undone, the buildings exposing blank concrete of bone.

I am alone. More alone than ever, I think. But it simply does not matter anymore. I go on. I go on. I go on.