There will be time to murder and create.

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I found you in the edges of some long-forgotten calamity, in the respite of my solitude, in the hunting call of winter. I still remember the night you came into my life; you had shadows under your eyes and a voice like tinted glass. I had been cynical and listless and tired as all hell, and you made me feel new, like the morning. But I was reckless, when I should have been wary. I cared deeply, when I should have felt nothing at all. That will be the tragedy to destroy our aimless days: what I mistook for love was nothing more than the reflection of a formless vanity, an irredeemable exercise in the practice of self-gratification. Our tenderness dims now into a delirium of unfinished thoughts and half-remembered sentiments. In the mournful present of this fading exaltation, I have nothing left to give.

Are you reluctant now to live like this, to descend further into the chaos of a liminal existence at my side? I know a rapid, caustic love that breathes away beneath my reason, tasting faintly of an abandonment that I may never exorcise. It festers and compels my form, like a richness in the soil: can you feel this darkness, when you move in me? Is it why you draw back, then closer, imitating tenderness, when we both desire to tear skin back with gleaming teeth and bare our subtle bones? What madness have you kindled in the refuge of my intrigue, and why you, why now? You know I never wanted this—so forgive me, Eurydice, if I cannot meet your gaze.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stele. Witness your expulsion from my fury and form: your normalcy, your mortality, all the strange and sensual yearnings of the body you destroy, your own. You were a long-term causality, you were a slowly unwinding catastrophe. I exhale your savage radiance like a constellation; oh, you feral thing.

I will be there when the floods roll back, when celestial light rains down in landslides and sanctifies this living earth in tides of midday fire. On the shorelines of Tragedy, that Janus-faced collapsing of time, I will remain and recall this lost potentiality, the stillborn adoration that died before taking form. As it waned, it left me barren, and neither the earth nor I can now sustain what our ravaged countenances crave. This, of all inane things, is my inherent sin: I could not keep her, or my memories, or this love alive. I am not fertile, I am not whole. My empathy is not a virtue, but a willful tendency towards self-mutilation. I am deficient. I am empty. I allow things to die.

In the volatile fervor of a physical existence, allegory invariably falls short; you and I evoke a wasteland that has yet to come into being. Desecrate or find me there, in the chemical currents of that which could consume you, for we have destroyed each other as surely as we have destroyed ourselves. In what light remains, I glimpse her preternatural form: that strange, seraphic figure, lamenting and exalting as the mutilated world moves silently towards decay. I recall her from childhood, in reluctant fingers turning the pages of my mother’s Bible, Isaiah 14:12—And how you have fallen from heaven, morning star, child of the dawn! In the narcotic-dimmed haze of my first dying, I knew the violence in those eyes, the hair cropped short in locks of silver, the saturnine wings unfolding from the notches in her spine. Alone now, she unwillingly endures; and the world will suffer the torment of looking upon her, somnambulist and wretched thing, wandering that desolation in search of a better self. Even you will know then, for all your pride and carelessness, how I came to live like this.

Every woman was born to wrest stars from their galaxies, to grapple with the voiceless language that floods the ruptures of physical sensation, when ecstasy moves through the body’s breathing core, and the world speaks to itself in paradigms of music. I more than most, in the still-living darkness of my sanity and soul, have been birthed for this purpose. I occupy that liminal positionality between the tangible and the untrue, my memory colored by the fantasies and phobias of a thousand other minds. A sentient lucidity moves through my androgyny and my desires, carving the space for a nameless gender.

Two years ago, the waking spring told different stories of this same conscience. Even now, I cannot write or speak plainly of that time: it is too shameful, too obscene. When I lost her, that second self, I lost all will to suffer on. I thought that this mind, and all that it is capable of, would die there, on some shit couch, in some shit apartment, and I simply did not care. But when the fourth morning dawned, its pale light found me upright, enduring, alive. I had waited for my grief to end, and it had not. Do not mistake me: this was not an epiphany, not a rebirth. It was resignation to living another day. It was, in some ways, unforgivable surrender. I was too dead even to die.

So I turned from what was left of it, that life I used to love: I stopped striving for pleasure and learned to appreciate feeling anything at all. It was then, on the streets of London, that I found her. She stood before me, grinning wryly in the shadow of the city, and I experienced a sensation that I could never hope to name—something fierce, like defiance, and something rapturous, like joy. I knew then what I should have known all along: that no trivial circumstance of the social world, no meaningless extent of its sanctimony or its cruelty, could have undone so extraordinary a mind. How arrogant I had been, how misguided, to imagine that I alone could crawl from a self-appointed grave. Denied the tenderness and the solace that I owed her, she had nevertheless endured. I had betrayed her utterly, I had failed her unforgivably; and still she had come back to me, and she was altered, but alive.

We spent six hours in a dimly lit bar. Soporific elation whispered up and down my form, and in the revenant consequences of a shared history of self-destruction, we met one another once more. A part of us had died with bygone days: we both felt this irrevocable absence, both mourned for that which we could not change. But we spoke on in spite of this, exchanging admissions of pleasure and penance; we resurrected the world of our collective past, and all of the memories, sweet and unspeakable, which we had so wrongly believed would be better off forgotten. Until my mind fails me entirely, and perhaps even then, I will remember that night. She seemed to be more than human and far from divine; not angelic, of course, for she had always been too irreverent for such fragile categorization, but savage, sardonic, extraordinary. As the light threw shadows across her face, I could feel, like ink and cyanide, the chiaroscuro of this beautiful creature: and how natural it was, how fitting, to be one with her again. How easily I knew her mind—after all, it was mine.

The bus was silent and midnight had long since passed. From one sleeping city to the next, I rode with leaden eyelids and an opiate soul. The young man sitting behind me answered a ringing phone, and received, as I could perceive it, the news of a woman’s death. He had loved her, at some time and in some way: I could it hear it in the way his voice broke, running like a wrist across the edge of each shattered word. That man bled as he spoke, and I watched his life change before my clouded eyes. In my narcotized state, I felt his sobs move like ocean currents through my mind. Compelled to preserve the strangeness and sorrow of the scene, I made as though to write, but could form only a single phrase, which echoed incessantly as I lapsed in and out of consciousness—I bear witness. I bear witness.

I was a voyeur to tragedy, in that night torn mad with a thousand turns of circumstance; and although some secret part of me felt deeply for him, it was more than I could communicate or understand. So it was her that I ultimately thought of, the catastrophe that almost was, flooding my exhausted memory in the garlands of white roses that framed her sightless eyes. Foremost among my racing thoughts was the question so simple and so very strange—how can a body die? And why couldn’t ours, when we wanted them to?

Sometimes I wonder at my own inane existence. Would I be another Lazarus, incomparably versed in the art of impermanent demise? I catch my reflection in each window that I pass: lithe and emaciated in my Orphean state, I can see the subtle movement of each bone beneath my skin. Every time I lose myself in these bouts of paranoia, someone inevitably offers mundane consolation: You will survive this. But perhaps I do not want to survive. I have been surviving all my life. Perhaps I am ready for something else, anything else, something more than survival. After all of these years, I am nourishing myself still.

So if ever I was thoughtless, or distant, or withdrawn, please know that I never chose to be. I will always remember you fondly—those nights of shared cigarettes and unending conversations, your unconscious earnestness and quickness to laugh, how strange and sweet it felt to finally kiss you on the corner of that silent street. My mind retreats often to half-imagined visions of the history we have shared: I can still recall those inimitable rushes of fondness and fascination that flooded this body on clandestine evenings, as I knelt among the rattlesnakes that fell around your feet.

But in some ways you are so very like me; you are suffering, you are not whole. On a bridge above the nighttime currents of the Thames, for a handful of five-pound notes and a few quiet words, you gave me consecration in its chemical form: that folded piece of paper, so small and nondescript, that would undo us both in time. You ran your hands through my shaved hair, along the lines of dark ink that moved across my skin like the waters below us, and I became exquisitely aware of my own living form: shorn and scarred and still so beautiful. In some ways, I think I always knew you. I think you have always wanted to be known.

But I cannot remain in stasis any longer; I cannot cheapen my existence, cannot limit the potential of this body and its longings. Just the other evening, I came to learn the language of yet another form that was not yours, watching and loving the helplessness of his pleasure as I manifested quiet, coiled desires upon his skin. I made myself alive again in each rapid breath he drew, in the mouth that moved beneath the tips of my fingers, in the rose-damp parting of my thighs. Too often, we define such acts in terms of penetration, but this is the fallacy of a misinformed world. The experience is one of envelopment, of consumption: not an entering, but a taking in. With violent affection, I took him apart with my teeth, decided to suffer so that I might heal—and how wonderful it was, to feel those muscles move again. As the sun began to rise, I lay entwined in his limbs and waited for the morning. A cold light fell across the bruises on his neck, running down over the lovely shoulders, where my mouth had left impressions in the skin.

This is how it always begins. I have a beautiful, damning habit of loving many people—loving them deeply, ardently, differently, and all at once. Even now, I have not forgotten you. There are still so many ways in which I wish to know you, so many questions I never thought to ask. Are you lonely in the winter? Are you afraid to die? Perhaps, in time, you will overcome what has happened to you, and awake on some far-off morning to find that you are whole and strong and ready to try again. And if this should come to pass, then I hope you will return to me, no matter the place or time. You have suffered enough, my love, and so have I; but this existence is cyclical, and I am never hard to find. So if you ever heal, come back to me. Perhaps I will still be waiting.

Oh, indifferent soul, how I could have loved you. Maybe there is still reason to try. Maybe this doubt will fade with the winter. Maybe you have yet the time and tenderness to unearth the obscured, lovely parts of me, to make me clean again.

But it is too late, I am afraid. I am not blameless anymore. I do not have ambitions. I do not have ideals. I live for those evenings of rushing pleasure, when this body is roused like a rainstorm and I feel real again. I am moving towards a willful apathy, so that when the time comes I might look readily upon the falling world. It is better this way. So allow me to take leave of this, to live indifferently on—and until the night comes howling, may I never write of you again.