Were you exasperated and disgusted by her, as an extreme form of yourself? Your wild talk, your turbulent moods, your ‘dark places’? Mental illness frightens you, like a contagion.

Joyce Carol Oates

To watch me love another is to gain insight into the many ways in which I may still hate myself. I am reckless. I am desperate. I am provocative. I am extreme.

I know a capacity to give myself away that transcends age, gender, circumstance. I impale myself on every detail. I feel everything. I have to. Why else would I climb each cross so willingly?

Underneath it all, in the secret cores of our cowering souls, we all crave subjugation. I dread every new morning, every glance in the mirror, my own chastising gaze. I navigate convoluted prisms of desire, performativity, and shame. What new horror have I inflicted on myself? What will I have to live with today?

This is the litany of a violent soul in stasis and a mind only slightly unhinged. With no circumstantial catastrophe to engage it, such energy devours itself. Unexpectedly, but not inexplicably, I am reckoning with a conscience I always thought I understood. My work is antithetical to my sanity. My art is in conflict with my self.

I must live within a language that is no longer my own. Something ancient and sacred was taken from me. Rhythms and rituals recall what I am—and what I am is a neurotic, in the most organic sense, never adjusted to this world, forever adjusted to myself. I want to be open. I want pleasure and tenderness and melancholic sin. I crave ecstasy, and when this life offers less of that than I can endure, I engage in relentless self-consumption. I am satisfied and insatiable, drenched in a desirous impulse.

How can anyone experience an entire existence, so vast and mercurial, through a single body? The inimitable allure of literature and of music in the streets, the sheer stimulation of these people and this place. Self-mutilation is almost a memory now—but in moments of almost unendurable ecstasy, I imagine that if I were to open my own skin once more, my inner self would be revealed not in crimson drops, but in radiant prisms of light.

I will never love anyone the way I loved my father. No one will ever love me the way my mother has. Some people are intrigued by what I present to them: they want to interrogate it, engage with it. But who would ever stay? What person could reckon, willingly, with the violence of what I am? At the extreme risk of self-debasement, I engage wholly with my own impulses. If I do not take myself seriously, who else will or can?

In this respect, I am a narcissist. It is not the person that matters to me, but the figure: its relevance, its calibration within my life. My egoism is empathetic: my love is rapid and deep, but directionless. I cannot yet (or can no longer) emulate that mature  adoration that constitutes a stable ideal. I cannot always feel this way. I will forget this sensation, but will remember experiencing it. And then I will forget that too: my present self will be explicable, but not justifiable, to whatever I become.

In the ardent haze of summer, I knew an artist who painted a piece about womanhood, about ecstasy, about me. Across the top she wrote “Always,” and being who I am, I believed it. Sometimes I still do.

But just months later, I wandered streets slick with rainwater and lamplight, with a man whose deep-set eyes were the exact color of the morning. I awoke to glass windowpanes slick with frost, and my clothes were strewn across the painting, which lay on the floor where I had left it unfurled. I look at the soft, stained fabrics that belonged to me. The delicate lace was precisely the same shade of crimson as those tenderly bleeding words. Always. Beside me, another body  was sleeping soundly, breathing softly, knowing little, caring less. Always. 

That dispersion of paint across canvas, that memory of such passionate desire, seemed strangely at odds now with the cast-off clothes of the person it had memorialized, and the young man now asleep in her bed. It was pretentious, it was absurd, but for a moment I felt older. Like I had lived and loved a lifetime’s worth. I felt tired and I felt alive. For a moment, I could not see her as clearly. I could not recall the exact color of her eyes.

It fades. It always fades. All I ever need is another figure, another body, another site of imposition for the discursive interest that colors my mind. I pace the silence at the edge of my bed until I hear my name drop softly from another’s lips. It is as beautiful as it is damning. I remember every person that I meet.

Spires dream but I am awake with the morning. The cobblestone streets of the city settle in the contours of my soul.

I am growing, changing, becoming. I feel too deeply. No body can contain me. I cannot be alone, not ever. Except that I already am. I always have been. I consume—and so doing, nourish—myself.

The sun had not yet fully risen when I locked the bathroom door behind me and looked hard at my reflection in the mirror. His breathing fell like rain against windowpanes, echoing in my skin. I stared at the girl standing before me, and there was nothing to do but wonder what the hell had happened to her, and when.