Oh, my love, take me there.
Let me dwell where you are.
I am already nothing.
I am already burning. 

Sophocles, Electra

Mild December mornings find me listless and on edge, smoking and drinking weak coffee in East Village. Listening to jukebox pop songs, avoiding street cabs and strangers’ eyes, I adjust to the insincerity of the city, immersed all the while in the dim paranoia that colors an insomniac’s reintegration into the waking world.

There are always days or weeks or months, impermanent instances wherein I begin to wonder whether or not I have lost my mind. Every time, I worry that I will not recover, that this time, it is for real. There is a certain joy in the recklessness with which I navigate these temporary bouts of insanity. Cynical and strangely high-spirited, quick to laugh and slow to focus, I live like an exposed nerve.

I am always between worlds, haunted by the specter of displacement that strays through each new city at my side. I long for home, return to realize that it was never really there to begin with. I spend the holidays reliving each whiskey-dimmed wandering down silent streets in England, recalling the directionless respite where my second life lies.

Just the other day, my and friend I decided that we had witnessed enough, and we drove four hours north down a narrow highway until we reached an empty town at the edge of the Atlantic. T We quoted half-remembered lines of poetry, rewriting the margins of measurable time, and we returned home again in a haze of joyful abandon: driving too fast, shouting the lyrics to old songs as they rang from the broken-down radio. Sometimes I have nights like those, and I realize that it is not so terrible to live, to think, to feel. I remember that I have the constancy and love to form relationships that endure. I find solace within, and in spite of, a world that offers none. I live on, and on, and on.

I attribute my sexuality, my singular and self-contradictory identity, in large part to the fact that I am crawling out of my skin with fascination for the bodies of others. I do not accept the politics of compulsory heterosexuality. I am too passionate, too desirous, too curious, too undone. I refuse to limit my experiences to any one gender. I want to be young and half-mad forever.

There are times when I feel exhausted. Is it possible to reckon with the impulse of our histories without feeling older than we are? It might not be so tiresome if I could see the dimming years as inconsequential: if I could allow past lives, and loves, and losses to fade away into obscurity. But I have never known how to lie to myself.

Sometimes it just doesn’t work. Sorrows that are the most insurmountable, the most exquisitely damning, are always conflicts of positioning. Sometimes someone gives you everything they have to offer, and it still is not enough. The timing is wrong, your body is wrong, you need something that no one can give to you. And it makes you happy and sad at the same time: because you know you are as content as you can be, and you realize that maybe you will always feel this way, and you wonder why life, at its best, still feels this way.

How can I explain to those that love me, that remembering them is like catching smoke in my fingers? Nothing is sacred, not anymore. Every time I start again, another person, another place, it  ends with the same banal sentiments: I want you to know that I really did love you. That I really did try. Self-preservation becomes its own form of cannibalization. I lend my mind to intrigued strangers, and forget them all just as easily. Why have I allowed myself to become this way?

In those rare moments when I am fully present, I find comfort in feeling deeply: in eclipsing all that another has to give. How many times have I lived over that scene, enthralled by the futility of our efforts? Two uncertain strangers, afraid of our own desires, sharing nothing but that sense of fascination: intrigued by one another, by ourselves. Satiating nameless needs in rough acts of tenderness. You asked me to stay, pushed my hair out of my eyes—and what a choice I made that night. You will never really know the courage and carelessness it took.

In the weeks that followed, I dreamed vividly of a different place. There were asphodel petals and juniper branches, and mirrors imbued with light. You were there with me, your words tinged inexplicably with remorse. I understood you then, as I never have before or since; your clandestine sorrow, the hushed apologies when you took my fingers in your mouth. I felt the rhythm of your throat, the murmur of your heart beneath my hands. How lucky I am to have found, in this absurd existence, such wonderful ways of passing the unwanted time.

An absence bleeds within and throughout you, coloring your countenance like memory running through a living mind. Once, and never since, you gave that absence living form, reminding me of one who, in another time and place, did the very same. Hers was the body from which I learned my love and limitations. Is it so surprising, then, that I reacted as I did?

I will not love you, but I like to know that I can, and that I would heal you, if I could. I give this potentiality less threatening form through a detached curiosity: could I bring a person such ecstasy, evoke such adoration, that they never wanted to leave? I have been left all my life. I seek respite in these urges, but reject the thrall of fixation. I have too much to think of, too many things to create.

I turned once more, in your case, to the confines of my mind. False remembrance served as my means of forgetting: I approached the construction of your form as I might an exorcism. You bled from my hands onto the page, leaving charcoal stains on my fingertips, my wrists, the skin on my forehead where I pushed the hair back into place. Everything I touched, I marred as though with ash.

I chose the wrong person again. I always do. But then, don’t we all? And what does it matter anyways, when a thousand forms and figures pass through my periphery? Even now, another soon-to-be memory strolls through the shops and alleyways of the city, evoking all of the opportunities I never took. In the morning, her name is everywhere: it floods my mind in a thousand strains of music, running like rain through the streets.

When I write too often, it all starts to feel the same. I knew you, I loved you, and I will remember you. What a strange and terrible thought it is, that I may wake tomorrow feeling nothing at all.

But fuck that, fuck all of it—I have too much left to write about. I am alive now, and two years ago that is more than I could have hoped for. I write for myself now, because in this senseless reality, I am my own best subject. I refuse to be remorseful, to water down my existence to self-effacement and apologies. Why be selfless where you can be satisfied? Everyone is surviving something, after all. I am not even sure what it really is that I write about now. My hands shake with a thousand unnamed longings, but I am not suffering, not anymore. I do not want to die: I burn and burn and burn. This is what I am now, this is where I stand. It is precarious, it is absurd—but I love it, all the same.