It’s okay. But even if it wasn’t okay, what am I supposed to do?

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

Tonight, I will try to write my own body apart. It is tired of waiting. It wants to belong. Perhaps, in mere pieces, it finally can.

Fingertips stained with nicotine: grown tough like cypress. Jaded lines of a knife-point along my hips. Half-healed burns in a cosmos up my arms. Hair torn out at the roots. Guitar strap slung like an albatross around my neck. Crescent scar on my upper arm. Eyes like a child’s, lashes growing in a rusted tangle. Bones that shift like a scourge beneath the skin.

Even now, like this, I am better off than I was however many weeks ago. My skin feels less bruised and fragile. My veins drip no ichor, but still thrum dimly. My form curves like music, a notation: I command more attention, demand more space. These wounds are closing off, retreating. With nothing left to dampen my pulse or thin my blood, I walk through the world like an ordinary woman. I go to work. I read the papers. I think of my friends in faraway places. I linger and exist, wishing that my heart could ring out in pieces, or echo like so many shards of light.

I have been left disappointed and resentful and, above all else, alone. Whatever was wrong with me before is fastened to the underside of my mind. Try though I might, I was unable to exorcise its presence. I can still feel it breathing inside of me. Honestly, I am beginning to think that the only thing to do now is to go back and try again. Perhaps I can find some strength this time around; recall the weird luck of my childhood; live. 

In the dim reflection of the doctors’ frightened eyes, I can see plainly what was done to me. If I forgive them all, for everything, can I mend my troubled ways? Before I try, I should focus on making it through tonight. 

It has just been too hard, remembering all of the things that I had buried so effectively, laid to rest like bones still aching with unrealized breath. When I was twelve or thirteen, scarcely more than a child, I fell down the unpolished wood of my garage stairs, trying to escape my father’s wrath. I had sought to wrench away from his horrible words, the livid vein that pulsed in his temple: but my foot caught fast on the threshold of the door, and I crashed down like a small burning star, frightened and hurting all the way.

Those were the days when there was a child left to save. But she died, you see. The girl that I was, she expired swiftly and painlessly, inspiring my present self to try for the same. But all of us know how this story ends, or doesn’t. I will not ask you to read it again.

It is so hard. I can taste the bitterness and grief rising up in me like bile. I write for the people who are not listening. Can I forgive the ones who shattered my tedious self-assurance? Can I forgive the causal figure of that scar on my arm, where it was dragged along the memory-edged stairs? Can I forgive the community that left me stranded on its periphery, driving its edges into my skin? Can I forgive the thing that fed from my mind and my chemicals and my body for half of a year, and then grew disinterested and departed wordlessly, leaving me with a catastrophe that he never cared to learn of?

These, all of these, are acts of violence. Sometimes I feel like people around me are letting me exist this way: because it is convenient, because they know that I can withstand it. Whenever they expect me to suffer quietly, and I do, it feels like proving them right. That makes me want to stop surviving. You who did this, who let me down, who disappointed me, who made me feel like shit about myself, who left me to hurt myself and recover on my own–what are you thinking now? Who among you will read this? Do you count yourself among the number?

I am trying, I am trying to forgive. Because maybe then, I can be forgiven too. I did what I thought I had to, and then ran. I am not sorry yet, but on the day my life and my habits catch up with me, I will be. And I will need forgiveness then, like a scorched forest needs the rain. I never learned to look after myself, to walk like something precarious and rare. Because some part of me will always be twelve or thirteen, and falling down that flight of stairs. Someday I will lose what little of my health remains, and that deterioration will murmur like a toxin through your veins. When such a time comes, it should bring you no surprise to find me down among the ashes. Go on, then. Let’s see just how much it takes.

But maybe not. When I was young, I used to love the autumn. It is the only season by which I can really abide. That time is coming fast, coming now. I am wringing out these hours, like bed sheets drenched with blood. And he knows what that looks like: what I gave to him. When I lay back today in the hospital bed, my thin gown and thin form all restrained, the doctors came to know what he and I had made of one another, in the days before he let me fall.

This is all that I have left to work towards now. I will try for the impossible, I will try to forgive everything. Because in spite of all my anger, my adoration, and my pride, I never belonged to you–not any of you. I will not be enthralled by your apathy any longer. I will not yield, nor accept the harm that was done to me at your hands. These costly mistakes will be repeated no longer. The cycle ends with him and me. Either I am courageous, or I am very, very weak.

I cannot forgive you yet, but know this: I am trying to. You were as clever as you were cruel. You might have anticipated all of this from the start. But for myself alone, I must do this. I must forgive it all. I must find some way to love the memory. I must find some new way to feel.

Just remember this, darling– you never owned me.

And I?

I do not kneel.