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 forgotten calamity, the hunting call of winter. I had been cynical and listless and tired and you made me feel new, like morning. I was reckless, when I should have been wary. What I mistook for love was nothing more than the reflection of my vanity, an exercise in self-gratification. Tenderness dims into delirium. I have nothing left to give.

A caustic want breathes beneath my reason, recalls an abandonment I may never exorcise. It festers and compels my form, like richness in the soil. Can you feel darkness, when you move in me? Is it why you draw back, then closer, imitating tenderness when you wish to tear skin back and bare subtle bone?

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stele, witness your expulsion from my form. You were a long-term causality. You were an unfolding catastrophe. The body you destroy is your own. I exhaled you like a constellation, you feral thing.

I will be there when the tides roll back, to linger and recall this lost potentiality, this stillborn love that died before taking form. This, of all things, is my cardinal sin: I cannot keep life alive. I am not fertile, not whole. My empathy is not a virtue, but a willingness towards mutilation. I am deficient. I am empty. I allow things to die.

In chemical currents of wretched somnambulism, I evoke a wasteland that has yet to come into being. Every woman was born to wrest stars from their galaxies, to grapple with the voiceless language that floods the margins of sensation, when ecstasy moves through the body’s breathing core. In the still-living darkness of my sanity and soul, have been birthed for this purpose. I occupy that liminal position between the tangible and the untrue, my memory colored by the fantasies and phobias of a thousand other minds. A sentience moves through my androgyny and my desires, caves 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 candidly of that time: it is too shameful, too obscene. When the fourth morning dawned, its pale light found me upright, enduring. There was no epiphany, no rebirth, just resignation to enduring another day. It was, in some ways, unforgivable surrender. I must have too dead to die.

In London, twelve months later, I found her. I saw her before me, grinning wryly in the shadow of the city, and something awoke in me that I could not name—something fierce, like defiance, and rapturous, like joy. I knew then what I should have known all along: that no minor circumstance of my wretched world could have undone such a mind. How arrogant I had been, how misguided, to imagine that I alone would crawl back from a self-appointed grave. Denied the solace that I owed her, she had endured. I had betrayed her entirely, I had failed her unforgivably—but still, she had come back to me, and she was altered but alive.

We spent six hours in a dimly lit bar. A part of us had died with bygone days. We both felt the irrevocable absence, both mourned what we could not change, but we spoke on in spite of it. Until my mind fails me, and perhaps even then, I will remember that night. How natural it felt to be one with her again. How readily I knew her mind, and no wonder—it was, after all, mine.

The bus was silent and midnight was long past. From one sleeping city to the next, I rode with leaden eyelids and an opiated soul. The man sitting behind me took a call on his phone, and received, as I could perceive it, the news of a someone’s death. Someone he had loved, at some time and in some fashion. I could it hear it in the way his voice broke, running like a wrist across the edge of each word. I lapsed in and out of consciousness. He bled as he spoke.

There I was, on a night already torn with strange twists of circumstance, a voyeur to someone else’s tragedy. While some part of me felt deeply for him, it was more than I could communicate or understand. I thought of her, the catastrophe that almost was, flooding exhausted memory in white roses and sightless eyes. It was all so simple and so very strange—how do bodies die? And why couldn’t ours, when we wanted them to?

Sometimes I wonder at my own existence. In my emaciated, Orphean state, I can see the subtle movements of the bones beneath my skin.  After all of these years, I am nourishing myself still.

I will always remember you fondly—those nights of shared cigarettes and endless conversation, your unconscious earnestness and easy laugh, how sweet it felt when you finally kissed me on the corner of that silent street. 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 ink that moved over my skin like the waters below us, and for an instant I was exquisitely aware of my own living form. 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 limit the potential of this body and its longings. Just the other evening, I learned the language of another form that was not yours, I brought myself to life again in each rapid breath he drew, in the mouth that moved beneath my fingers, in the dampness between my thighs. I took him apart with my teeth, chose to suffer so I might heal—and how wonderful it was, to feel those muscles move again. Entwined in his limbs, I lay waiting for the morning. I watched a cold light fall across the bruises on his shoulders, over the places where my teeth 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 I understood you, so many questions I never thought to ask. Are you lonely in the winter? Are you afraid to die?

Maybe, in time, you will overcome what has happened to you, and awake some morning to find that you are whole and strong and ready to try again. It will have to be with someone else. You have suffered enough, my love, but so have I.

Allow me leave at last, to live indifferently on—and until the night comes howling, may I never write of you again.